Wednesday, July 27 – “Story/Time” by Bill T. Jones
Monday, August 1 and Tuesday, August 2 – “Revelations” by Alvin Ailey
On Wednesday, I helped out with Striding Lion in the morning and spent the afternoon at Bourgeois Pig in Lincoln Park (I love the atmosphere, but the coffee is just eh). On Monday and Tuesday, I just stayed in Evanston/at home; I had a lot of miscellaneous things to do so I figured it would be easiest not to travel.
I’m combining these two books into one post because I honestly don’t have a lot to say about “Story/Time.” It was really beautiful, but a super quick read and nothing mind-blowing. It had a lot of little vignettes that were super poignant, but a lot of them had appeared in Jones’s autobiography already.
“Revelations,” on the other hand, was incredible. Ailey writes really candidly about race and sexuality, and it opened up a lot of ideas I’d seen with Bill T. Jones and other choreographers more fully and completely. Ailey also talks very explicitly about his cocaine use, which caught me a little off-guard but was really intriguing.
The biggest thing in “Revelations” that came as a shock to me wasn’t even about Ailey, though–it was a small note he made about Robert Joffrey. As it turns out, Joffrey’s real name was Abdullah Jaffa Bey Khan, and he was half Pashtun and half Italian. In the incredibly white world of dance–especially ballet–this is super, super important. And it’s something I feel that no one really knows or talks about, which is intriguing to me. I honestly feel like I could write my entire thesis on this. It also opens up a lot of questions about the false black vs. white dichotomy in dance (something that Jones and Ailey both talk about a lot is struggling as black dancers), and where other races fit into that equation. There is already such little Pashtun representation in America; the fact that the founder of one of the biggest ballet companies that’s still around today was half Pashtun is so important.
A couple other notable things: Ailey is super self-aware. He repeatedly says things like, “This stayed with me for the rest of my life,” or “This is where X in X dance came from.” The ability to make those connections in one’s own life is super impressive; often it takes an outside look in.
The criminal versus the artistic. This is part of the racial element, but Ailey talks about making a conscious choice to forgo the criminal in favor of the artistic, which is really interesting because it seems that often people don’t feel as though they have a choice.
I like Ailey a lot, but honestly the Joffrey revelation (heh, see what I did there?) sort of overshadowed the rest of the book, unfortunately for Ailey. I’m definitely going to have to take a deeper look at Joffrey and maybe tack a few more books/readings onto the end of these eight weeks.