In the cavernous main room, on an 18-screen, wraparound installation, visitors to the Whitney can see for themselves how Ailey incorporated the influences of modern dance, theater, and Broadway musicals into his choreography. The video collage features clips from Ailey’s signature dances: Blues Suite (1958), his first evening-length piece, which staged people drinking, dancing, and flirting to blues music over the course of a night; Revelations (1960), which depicted Ailey’s “blood memories” of Black life in the rural South; and Cry (1971), an exhausting solo that traversed drudgery, anguish, and joy, dedicated to “all black women everywhere—especially our mothers.”
Revelations is Ailey’s most famous work, seen more than any other piece of American modern dance, and has become metonymy for Black dance as a genre. In the opening vignette, a band of dancers stand in a tight cluster, legs wide and arms reaching downward, hands open. Their sternums and faces arch skyward, bathing in the warm light above. Quivering voices begin the first lyrics of “I’ve Been Buked,” the Negro spiritual that Ailey first encountered as a child at his Baptist church in Southeast Texas in the 1930s, and the dancers bend at the knees, extending their right arm toward the ground while their left caresses the side of their ribs. Next, they stretch their arms into the air, palms forward, and swoop their torsos in a circle, embodying the singers’ drawn-out delivery. They fall into a layered formation and raise their arms into winglike shapes: a hopeful augury.
Though less than a minute long, the first scene of the “I’ve Been Buked” section captures something essential about Revelations and Ailey’s legacy more broadly. It is a modernist depiction of African American history that eloquently demonstrates how Black art is the spine of American culture. Those first few gestures are somber yet full of possibility, showing, as Black artists have done for centuries, that ecstasy can emerge out of the depths of pain and oppression.
Rightly, Revelations is seen as a masterpiece by audiences around the world, who purchase tickets to see the AAADT perform the work year after year. As a financial vehicle, the dance has kept the AAADT alive. Yet its dominance has also eclipsed the rest of Ailey’s oeuvre, which transcends “Black” subjects and explores the formal, sculptural qualities of the human body. Ailey wanted to use dance to convey universal emotions and ideas; “We talk too much of black art,” he said, “when we should be talking about art, just art.” Revelations, he argued, “speaks to everyone,” because “its roots are in American Negro culture, which is part of the whole country’s heritage.”4