The Alvin Ailey company’s New Works programme might be seen in some circles as dated, and it’s true that it is neither cutting edge nor modishly contemporary. Yet it rests on more perennial qualities that underpin the company’s enduring appeal: skill, craft, beauty and humanity, and beneath them an artistic aim that can reach up towards the sublime, out towards the world, or in towards the heart.
Medhi Walerski’s Blink of an Eye, new to the company but created in 2011 for Nederlands Dans Theater, tilts towards transcendence, being as spare, composed and unbound as the Bach music for solo violin it inhabits. The eight dancers repeatedly form a kind of visual chord – first a line, later a circle – which dissolves to let solos, duets and trios unspool. The counterpointed lines of movement remind you of the music: limbs stretch like strings, torsos curve and coil like the body of a violin, and the inflections of phrasing are somehow exact yet unfettered. It is a rare, spacious and beautiful composition.
