Celebrating the democracy of dance

By Alexandra Marshall  |  April 6, 2009

I'M ON my way to Guadeloupe, a French Caribbean island whose active volcano is tame compared with last month's eruption of rioting after a 44-day general strike. Protests were initiated by a coalition of union groups demanding for low-wage workers a $250 monthly raise to compensate for the high cost of fuel and food, but with an unemployment rate of 60 percent for people under 25, bands of armed youth in hooded sweatshirts manned the barricades.

Ignoring the demonstrations for a full month, President Nicolas Sarkozy and Prime Minister François Fillon of France are accused by the coalition of "treating the troubles as a distant colonial flare-up." And though a settlement was negotiated and the violence has now reportedly subsided, once those initial demands came to be defined in terms of race and class, tensions simmering since slave days boiled over in a society where the traditional landowning families still control up to 90 percent of the estimated wealth.

My reason for going there is the Académie de Danse Deshauteurs, where the descendants of Europeans and Africans - the daughter of the island's police chief paired in dance with a street kid - are defined only by their talent and ambition. For nearly 20 years, the academy has attracted dancers from around the Caribbean Basin to a festival culminating in an international competition, and though this year the crisis has forced cancellation of classes, the show will go on.

The competition's jury is headed every year by Denise Jefferson, director of the Ailey School, where most of the dancers of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater have been trained. She and I go way back, and so does her relationship with the academy's director, Lydia Deshauteurs, whose students have been recruited as part of Ailey outreach in this country and abroad. Deshauteurs's son Samuel has danced with the company along with his wife, Rosalyn Deshauteurs, a current member.

This is the Ailey company's 50th anniversary year, and to celebrate his legacy 75 Ailey School students were in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. They danced down Broadway in the "Wade in the Water" section from "Revelations," the 1960 signature Ailey ballet masterpiece estimated by former New York Times dance critic Jennifer Dunning as having been performed in its first 20 years more often than the century-old "Swan Lake."

In her biography of Ailey, Dunning writes that he "re-created onstage the gestures and ceremony he remembered from his own baptism, exaltation rising up from the stirred waters of the snake-ridden pond behind the church in Rogers, Texas." The piece prompts audiences around the world to dance in their seats, and by popular demand, almost all performances on tour end with that primal "Revelations" experience of sin and salvation.

The Celebrity Series first presented the company here in Boston for two performances on a Saturday in January 1968, and Walter Pierce, later the executive director of the series, was in that audience. The company's return to Boston this month for the 41st consecutive year is testimony to why he calls it "the most successful modern dance company in history." He still vividly recalls the moment when legendary dancer Judith Jamison appeared onstage in "Wade in the Water," her towering height made theatrical - this is Ailey's genius - by the still higher thrust of a ruffled umbrella.

Before his death in 1989, Ailey named Judith Jamison the guardian of his company, and having already entrusted the school to Denise Jefferson and the repertory ensemble Ailey II to another of his early dancers, Sylvia Waters, he ensured that the future would remain true to his original vision. Housed today in a state-of-the-art glass tower on West 55th Street in New York, the promise lives on in the legs of the next generation, whose capacities are being stretched to meet Ailey's exacting expectations, and whose devotion to dance is a reciprocal means of fulfilling his faith in them.

Belief in the power of dance to express the full range of human experience is what also inspires the young dancers of Guadeloupe to realize their dreams, and during this week such faith might have the power to help heal an island community whose ancient cruelties have been revisited. A bottom-line correction must be provided for from abroad, but the democracy of dance can make possible the freer expression of an even deeper universal need.

Alexandra Marshall, a guest columnist, is the author of "The Court of Common Pleas" and four other novels.