New Works at Ailey

Dec 12, 2025

Tonight was a night of new works at Alvin Ailey: Medhi Walerski’s “Blink of an Eye,” Matthew Neenan’s “Difference Between,” Jamar Roberts’s “Song of the Anchorite.” Plus a new production of Judith Jamison’s “A Case of You.” With Ronald K Brown’s “Grace” as the closer. I loved Roberts’s “Anchorite,” a return to the intensity, grace, and inwardness of earlier works like “Members Don’t Get Weary.” According to the advance copy, it is a response to Alvin Ailey’s 1961 solo “Hermit Songs,” inspired in turn by medieval religious texts. (I haven’t seen the Ailey.) Roberts has set it to Avishai Cohen’s gorgeous jazz rendition of the adagio from Ravel’s Concerto in G Major. An Anchorite is a kind religious man who lives in total seclusion, and Roberts’s dance depicts a lone man in a state of contemplation, gathering his thoughts, praying, battling demons. Above him hangs a bare branch. The movement is deeply rooted, round, full. It’s a quiet piece, beautifully danced by Donnie Duncan Jr., who recently joined Ailey after dancing for NDT. Neenan’s “Difference Between,” set to songs by the singer-songwriter Heather Christian, is touching and quirky, punctuated with funny gestures like a hand held to the ear and dancers pulling at their shirts. The phrases are full of little surprises, and the different sections suggest relationships between the dancers, tensions, tenderness, awkwardness. It could do with one less song, but it’s a sweet piece. In contrast, “Blink of an Eye” feels like generic contemporary ballet, with all the clichés: bare chests, sliding around on socks, high extensions, hyper-stretched movement and buckling bodies, a lighting structure that rises and falls. Set to Bach, naturally, in order to gesture at seriousness. Its one virtue is that the Ailey dancers seem to enjoy performing it. The company is looking particularly strong— my eye keeps returning to Jacquelin Harris, of course, but also to Mason Evans (a new dancer), Isaiah Day, Jesse Obremski, and Miranda Quinn, among others. As well as to Yannick Lebrun, the noblest of dancers, so touching today in Jamison’s “A Case of You.”