Hermit Songs

Alvin Ailey’s Hermit Songs, a solo he created for himself in 1961, was a response to both a song cycle by Samuel Barber and the source texts, written by anonymous Irish monks and scholars during the 8th to 13th centuries. The dance vividly depicts the figure of the medieval man—dedicated with single-minded intensity to his religious vocation.

Reviewing a 1990 revival, Jennifer Dunning in The New York Times wrote, “Hermit Songs is a celebration of robust manhood. The music and dance have a simple vigor that makes the gestures even more poignant; they are fleeting and elliptical but always transparently clear. Hermit Songs is as much an acknowledgment of frailty as of power.”