In “Lazarus,” Resurrection and Remembrance
The final installment of Rennie Harris’ trilogy for the company, and the first evening length ballet in Ailey’s repertoire, “Lazarus” is inspired by “the life and times of Alvin Ailey.” While the piece clearly shows the influence of the renowned founder of the troupe, Harris manages to document not only Ailey’s life, but his work’s mission—the piece reads not just a story of Ailey’s personal history, but of the African American experience.
Rennie Harris’ “Lazarus” © Paul Kolnik
The first act is hellish in its depiction of the African American experience. Dancers stand with the necks ajar as if victims of hanging. Corpse-like figures—first Daniel Harder—are pulled across stage by their underarms until their forms spring back to life like the biblical Lazarus himself. Women hold their skirts extended as they push through cotton fields, constructed by the undulating arms of other cast members lying in a muted pool of light, their work interrupted by song, dance, and prayer. A heartbeat, fragmented breath, dog barks, and sirens all punctuate Darrin Ross’ score, creating more of a setting than a cohesive composition. Is Harder meant to represent Ailey, Lazarus, or a melange of both? Is he rising from the dead, or trapped in a nightmare of equal terror to purgatory? As the curtain falls for intermission, to excerpts of Terence Trent D’Arby’s “As Yet Untitled” (“this land is still my home”), the audience is left to grapple with the weight of these questions.
Rennie Harris’ “Lazarus” © Paul Kolnik
Aligning with Ailey convention, salvation is collective, and transmitted through dance. The score picks up, a determined beat underneath Michael Kiwanuka’s “Black Man in a White World” and Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good,” and the dancing does, too. Harris’ particular style stems from his North Philadelphia upbringing: rhythm house influenced by the Philadelphia-specific GQ, which emerged from the city’s black social clubs in the 60s. It’s marked by intricate and percussive footwork, loose hips, and a composed upper body, and its original practitioners wore suits, giving the style its name. The movement is infectious, infusing State Theater with a spiritual ebullience so absent from the first act.
But Harris resists such a simple finale: after much-deserved bows, the audio picks up with fragments of interviews with Mr. Ailey, creating a conversation that touches on the “blood memories” behind his most memorable choreography, hip-hop culture and the power of respect, and the progress that still needs to be made. “Lazarus” reveals the communion behind the company’s sixty years, but begs the question of the complicated truth it lays bare. Thirty years since Ailey’s death, the fight for racial equality is far from finished.
