Turn on the Victrola and They’ll All Dance

Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes. The giants of the Harlem Renaissance loom large in “Uptown,” Matthew Rushing’s new work for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. But until last year, Mr. Rushing, a veteran dancer who created the piece, wasn’t aware of the extent of their influence on today’s culture. “I remember going on YouTube, just researching the Charleston, and there was a clip where they compared the Charleston to styles of break dance,” he said. “There’s a connection,” he continued, adding later, “We are because these people lived and struggled and gave their all as performers, people, intellects.” That connection is what Mr. Rushing hopes to communicate with “Uptown,” his first solo creation for the company, which has its premiere Wednesday night at City Center. Structured as an episodic tour through Harlem in the 1920s, “Uptown” uses 28 dancers — the entire company except for Mr. Rushing and Renee Robinson, who helped him in the staging — and tries to bring to life through dance the rich artistic activity of that era. Along the way, the audience, led by a narrator, encounters characters both real and fictional, and scenes — a busy street, a rent party, a night at the Savoy ballroom— that help introduce major developments in music, literature, the visual arts and, of course, dance. He initially came up with the idea while surfing for jazz music online. “I learned so much that I did not know, to the point that I was almost ashamed,” Mr. Rushing said. “And then I started to talk to people and they didn’t know either, and that’s when I realized I needed to do this piece.”

Mr. Rushing, 36, has choreographed for Ailey before — in 2005 he worked with two other company dancers, Hope Boykin and Abdur-Rahim Jackson, to create “Acceptance in Surrender” — but “Uptown” represents a major step for him in its scale and complex production. It also represents the company’s continuing efforts to cultivate artists from within, especially coming as it does in a season of many revivals and just a few new works by outside choreographers. At the start of 2008 Judith Jamison, the company’s artistic director, approached Mr. Rushing about choreographing a piece for this season, planned as a tribute to her 20 years as leader of the company. “I wanted to give him the opportunity for his singular voice to shine,” Ms. Jamison said in a phone interview. “Matthew has a sense of theater to me and his piece is like a review — you get a chance to go on this journey.”

In a spacious rehearsal studio at the Ailey headquarters on West 55th Street, three female dancers move in a row to a big band sound. Their hips sway as they trace half circles sensually with their toes on the floor; their arms hang heavily above their heads — clinking glasses and moody nightclub lighting are easy to picture. The studio is crowded with dancers and an audience of Ailey administrators and supporters, including Ms. Jamison, who watch attentively as Mr. Rushing, in a gray hoodie, black sweat pants and bedroom booties, coaches the dancers: “There are no counts. You have to feel it.”

Mr. Rushing, who has been called “a fine classicist” and a “virtuoso dancer” by The New York Times in his 18 years performing with the company, has a sweet, almost angelic air in person. Sitting, appropriately, in the company’s library after the rehearsal, he talked about the lengths he went to to represent the era authentically. SOURCE: NYTIMES.COM