Tour de Force.(Brief Article)

It was from his new home in 1950s New York that Alvin Ailey dared look back on his childhood in southern Texas. The African-American dancer had grown up impoverished, in a town where lynchings made frequent headlines, the Ku Klux Klan roamed and his mother was raped by a white man. He transformed those memories into "Revelations," one of the best loved and most performed ballets of our time, a dramatic vision of the ability of the human spirit to triumph over suffering.

In 1958 Ailey established a dance company, aiming to create a space for artists shunned by the white troupes that dominated the dance scene at the time, six years before the Civil Rights Act outlawed segregation. His intent, Ailey said, was to open a window where a door had been shut. Thirteen years after his death, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has developed into one of the most popular dance companies in the world. It has performed "Revelations," now its signature piece, in more than 70 countries. The work closes each of the programs the company is performing on its current European tour, which began last month in London and continues to Austria, Germany, Italy and Spain through August.

"Revelations" was the cornerstone of Ailey's success and will endure along with a small elite of experimental choreography created in New York. But the tour repertory is weighted in favor of some exciting new works, commissioned by artistic director Judith Jamison. Though Ailey classics like "Cry" and "Blues Suite" are missing, the quality of this recently added repertoire, which includes "Grace," a mesmerizing 1999 commission from choreographer Ron Brown, should silence skeptics who wondered throughout the 1990s whether the company would find enough fresh talent to survive. Other critics warned that technical virtuosity was being emphasized to the detriment of the company's tradition of strong, individual expression. The Ailey dancers' mastery of classical techniques has visibly improved, but not at the expense of one of the delights of the Ailey approach: the distinct, quirky ...