The choreography of moving on

BRIAN SEIBERT

NYT SYNDICATE

ON December 9 at City Centre, Renee Robinson will do something she has done more times – in front of more people, in more cities of the world – than she can easily calculate.

This time, though, will be the last: the last time as a member of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre that she holds the white parasol above the baptism scene in Revelations, the last time she and her yellow dress help turn the whole Theatre into a rocking church. Robinson is retiring.

Her tenure, which began in 1981, is the longest of any female dancer in Ailey company history. She is the last dancer still performing with the troupe to have been chosen by the founder Alvin Ailey (who died in 1989). She is the only Ailey dancer to have performed under all three of the company’s artistic directors: Ailey, Judith Jamison and, starting last year, Robert Battle.

But none of these facts explains entirely why Robinson will be missed. In the Ailey building recently Matthew Rushing – the company’s rehearsal director, who has shared stages with Robinson for 20 years – recalled the first time he saw her perform: “She transcended technique. It was more than just stage presence. And it wasn’t just talent.

It opened my eyes to another realm, how she could command a stage but also make people feel comfortable to let their guards down.” “From then on,” Rushing continued, “I looked for that thing. And Renee always delivered. She did it in rehearsal. And over the years she got better and better.

That was another lesson: that it doesn’t have to go downhill after a certain point.” Robinson does not disclose her age, and in a conversation at the Ailey studios she would speak only reluctantly about her decision to stop dancing with the company. “Oh man,” she said, “it was super hard.” But she recently returned to school, earning a master’s degree in dance from Hollins University in Virginia. Going back to school also closed a loop that Robinson’s three decades with Ailey had interrupted.

Her early training was in classical ballet. She began at the Jones- Haywood School, a Washington institution founded to offer ballet instruction to African- Americans who were not always welcome elsewhere. Her dancing won her a scholarship to New York University, where she majored in dance but minored in economics, thinking she would become a lawyer.

“Back then,” Robinson recalled, “the thought was, if you went to college, by the time you graduated you would be too old to start a dance career.” After her first year in New York though, friends persuaded her to audition for a scholarship at the Ailey school.

Despite her minimal background in modern dance she was accepted. She dropped out of NYU, joined an Ailey workshop troupe, and, after twice auditioning unsuccessfully, entered the main company.

Asked which Ailey dancers she emulated, Robinson said, “All of them.” Asked which Ailey role was her favourite, she answered the same. What she remembers about working with the choreographer Ulysses Dove is that he didn’t mind that she fell. (“I fell a lot my first year,” she remembers.) What she appreciates about rehearsing Judith Jamison works is that she “wants you to come into the studio already sparkling, and I have a tendency to be a little clunky a t first, and those ballets pushed me right out of the starting gate.” Over the years Robinson has danced in dozens of works, from Ailey’s tour-deforce solo Cry to Rennie Harris’s hiphop workout Home. But she may be best known for her roles in Revelations, Ailey’s evocation of the black church of his childhood, set to spirituals, that the company performs to unfailing ovations hundreds of times each year.

The first time Robinson saw her name on the callboard for the next day’s rehearsal of Revelations, she couldn’t sleep, she said. She wanted to be perfect.

She picked out a special outfit. She recalled eagerly scanning the casting sheet at the beginning of each subsequent season and saving the sheet – and the programmes too – each time she was entrusted with a new Revelations role.

Robinson also remembers when she and few friends decided to put $5 into an envelope each time they performed Revelations, but she can’t remember what happened to the envelope.

“Audiences know that dance,” she said. “They know it as well as you know it. It makes me feel good to take care of something that people like so much. The electricity that comes from the audience and that we give back to them, that happens every time. Who could get tired of that kind of vibration?” In 1999, when the choreographer Ronald K Brown cast Robinson as a mother goddess in his dance Grace (Robinson will perform the role when she receives a Dance Magazine Award on December 3), he came in as a fan. “But she had the humility of a great artist,” Brown recalled. “She told me she wanted to do a good job. She wanted to do the role the way I imagined it.” In The New York Times, Gia Kourlas wrote that Brown had “reinvented Robinson as a tough beauty, unfurling her wisdom,” adding that “her steps are fiercely calculated, but it’s as if she’s walking on air.” More recently, when Brown was rehearsing the company in Grace, which returns to the active repertory this season, he admired how Robinson sat on the sidelines, not asserting her rank.

“But she wasn’t just waiting her turn,” he said. “She was collecting information and digesting it. She watches like a hawk, and then she implements, always with a sense of discovery. That’s how dancing lives in the moment.” To younger dancers in the company Robinson has been a connection to the past and, as Alicia Graf Mack put it, “the quintessential Ailey woman.” But she’s also been mother, coach, resource, rock and refuge. She has served as the company’s unofficial nutritionist and fixer, convening “body sessions” in her hotel room on tour.

“She can see imbalances in your body,” Rushing explained, just before eating a chicken lunch Robinson had cooked him. “She works those out and the injuries just trickle away.” Jamison, whose own dancing career with the company lasted 15 years, said: “Renee could continue dancing forever.

And I don’t mean come out onstage and hold a pose. I’ve seen her go through ballets where she’s been sick as a dog, but the audience didn’t know. That’s Renee.

Renee does.” Robinson’s unquenchable curiosity, her work ethic: these are the qualities that her colleagues say have remained constant. And in her own view what has changed in the company are the costumes.

“You used have more fabric flowing around you,” she said.

In the immediate future, she said, “those costumes are small, and they are tight, and I’m getting ready for the performances I have” – 11 Revelations before her final one. And after that? “They don’t know,” she said. “But I’m a sneak back in.”

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