The Brooklyn Rail

Adrienne Edwards curated the Whitney Museum’s exhibition, Edges of Ailey, an immersive installation of ephemera, video, and visual art occupying the museum’s entire fifth floor. In honor of the choreographer’s legacy, the exhibition also features periodic live performances by contemporary dance artists, such as Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Ralph Lemon. The Rail’s Susan Yung spoke to Edwards after the exhibition opened.

Susan Yung (Rail): Can you talk about the title, Edges of Ailey?

Adrienne Edwards: The title is both a nod to Alvin Ailey’s professional life and his private life, which we can see so well through the gift of his notebooks. Across two pages, on one side he’d write character studies or sketches for dances, taxonomies of things he’s looking at; you can see the real creative process unfold. On the other side, there’d be to-do lists: “send mom flowers for her birthday,” “write the dancers a note wishing them well on the performance.” Comparisons of his different lovers. It was just incredible how those two things were not separated. To me, it seemed very much like life itself.

The title is also a nod to the sacred and profane, the way we think about the dances that Ailey made. There’s Revelations (1960), and there are lots of other dances that are concerned with spirituality. On the other hand, you’d have references to juke joints and blues places where you’d hear music; he choreographed the opening night for Studio 54.

Also, because I wanted to focus on Ailey himself, as opposed to a show about what he did for the company, he becomes this multifaceted figure. In a way, he’s a true modernist because he goes and takes from all these different artistic traditions and creates something completely his own. But in order to understand that, you have to backtrack a little bit, so one of the “edges” is looking at the different people and scenes that influenced him, from Folkways, to Hollywood, Broadway, modern concert dance, and social dance—the way people dance when they’re going out and having a great time. And for him it’s not ever just about dance. He made watercolors, he wrote poetry and short stories—all these things that we found and published for the first time. There’s a love of literature, of visual art; he’s this profoundly curious person. You begin to see all these different sides to him.

Rail: The phrase “blood memories” recurs throughout. What’s behind it?

Edwards: Blood memories is Ailey’s way of talking about a kind of soulfulness that he situated in Black Southern life and culture. And when I say Southern, when he talked about it, he situated it specifically in Texas, his memories of growing up there. As he became exposed to folks like Katherine Dunham, and as he began to be interested in Brazilian culture, he expanded his idea of what blood memories are, and that became constellated. He’s beginning to think about a kind of diasporic Blackness that is multivalent, and he’s pulling all these different things in.

Rail: What was the process behind the artworks commissioned for the show—identifying the artists and also the choreographers?

Edwards: With the choreographers, it was an incredibly beautiful process. We created a dance advisory committee, myself and eight people from the Ailey organization We met over the course of eight months, and came up with lists of choreographers that we were interested in, narrowing it to the eleven selected. We held Ailey in mind, and the way he innovatively used the company. At that time, modern dance choreographers were not using their companies to feature the work of other artists, so he was unique that way. He was so curious; he’d go see dance, write peoples’ names down, and he had a broad kind of sensibility that we took as a guiding idea in shaping the overall program.

It was more organic with the visual artists. When I was thinking about what artworks could be alongside him, I wanted a kind of greatest hits. There were works I’d seen in art history books, but I’d never seen in person. I knew that they could be singularly useful, particularly in amplifying themes in Ailey’s dances. So I had these conversations with these four artists whose work I was particularly interested in. I actually had other works in mind that they had already made, but in those conversations, they immediately said, “I’d like to make something for this show.” It was incredibly generous on their part, but also acknowledged the importance of Ailey. With Mickalene Thomas, she had done a group of photographic paintings looking at the color purple, and that was so bluesy, and also the time period made me think about Blues Suite (1958), Ailey’s dance. I got into this long conversation with her about Dunham, and she said, “I’d love to do a portrait of Katherine Dunham.” I said, “Let’s do it!”

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has made over the years a whole series of works imagining these different characters who are Black dancers. Lynette said immediately, “I want to make something.” When I went to her studio, we had agreed on a diptych, and she ended up making another work because she was so in the space of it. And so we chose both of them; they were just delightful. Karon Davis—I knew of her deep interest in dance, that she comes from a family of dancers. She was particularly thoughtful and knowledgeable about Ailey, and jumped at the opportunity because she’d made this series of sculptures about ballet figures in particular, and wanted to do a tribute to Judith Jamison, which is really beautiful. I called Jennifer Packer because she is one of my favorite figurative painters. I just love her facture, and her hand, and we were talking and she said, “Did you see that I actually used Ailey’s head for one of my paintings?” It turned out she was really interested in Ailey, knew the dances, and wanted to make a portrait of him. In fact, she wound up making a couple, including the one in the show.

Rail: What was the concept behind the overall exhibition design and layout?

Edwards: Once I have an idea for a show, I very quickly know what I want it to look like, how it should feel. This one is a hodgepodge of different architectural design elements that I’d been thinking about for a long time. I looked at very early exhibition designs by Lina Bo Bardi, different structures she had used. My incredible colleague, Jared Huggins, is in some ways my eye because he can take these ideas that I have and make them a reality. I knew that I wanted it to be red as a nod to blood memories, but also to the fact that we typically see Ailey on a proscenium stage, most of which have red velvet curtains and seats. That’s where we, the public, know the work from. The third design inspiration was the idea of islands; Ailey made a dance called Archipelago (1971), and water was a big theme for him, so I was thinking about the show in terms of geographic and body-like landscapes, wanting the viewer to feel immersed.

There are also all the constraints that come from building a show, like the fact that many of the paintings I chose are large-scale and heavy. I had wanted suspension systems for them to float in space, but you can’t float paintings that are that heavy and large. So Jared and I immediately came up with the pyramid structures to support those and we had a second system of display. It also became clear that even the pyramids couldn’t hold everything, so we decided on half-walls. There were some core ideas, and then we just started working with what the art could allow.

The video surround is also something I wanted to do. What makes exhibitions about performance so different is that I can never meet dance on its own terms. You can never replace what it means to be in a room with a body moving and being able to sense their energy, to see them sweat or breathe the same air. That whole dynamism and sensuality is not available in an exhibition context. So the next best thing is the recorded image. And I started there, actually, in the research for the show. I had asked the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation for all the videos they had during his lifetime, and they sent over almost two hundred different videos that we digitized.

Once I saw we had that much material, I knew that we would be able to take the audience on a journey. Where he came from—that felt really important—to his two most important influences, Katherine Dunham and Lester Horton, then to look at key dances. Not only from the performance footage, but Ailey loved recording rehearsals, and he started doing so as early as 1962. We could interweave some of this more unexpected, looser rehearsal footage with the performances made especially for the camera, for television or other types of recordings. We had so much footage of him talking in interviews as well. We had this trove, and Kya Lou and Josh Begley, wonderful filmmakers, put it all together across eighteen screens. And we interwove it with different documentary footage so that people had a social, cultural, and political context to understand what the dances referred to. That idea came about because there was a WPA video from the 1940s that had looked at life in the rural south, that had somehow ended up in this repository of recordings, I think by accident. We found more footage related to Haiti, and Brazil, and Dunham.

Rail: That’s a lot of work.

Edwards: It was clarifying. I was holding all the videos in my head as I made the selection of visual artworks, but I had not yet worked with the filmmakers to put it all together. In fact, the video came last. We finished it Sunday night at 1 a.m. before the show opened Tuesday. But I’m used to that! I’ve done over fifty commissions with artists. You learn the rhythm and what you need. And working up to the eleventh hour can be exactly what you need to get it right.

Rail: Can you discuss the impetus to mount a major museum exhibition around a choreographer who was not a performance or visual artist?

Edwards: I did my doctoral work at the intersection of Blackness, abstract painting, and Conceptual art. So when I thought, “Someone must do an Ailey show!”, I wasn’t sure I was the one to do it, even though I danced for many years of my life and studied a bit of dance history, mostly Katherine Dunham, when I was in graduate school.

Edges of Ailey really came about because there had been so many dance exhibitions in recent years. I was surprised that Ailey hadn’t received one. Initially I thought, “Well there’s not enough material.” Then I found out there’s tons of it! What stories can we tell about dance beyond ballet and beyond the Judson Dance Theater? Those are incredibly worthy, but there are so many other stories that need to be told. And Ailey being one of the most important figures in modern dance of the twentieth century, and I would say one of the most important cultural figures in the world, certainly deserves attention.

Rail: I wonder if the art world hesitated, as he is commercially viable and popular. That shouldn’t exclude him from being treated, but it’s not as “arty” and difficult to understand as postmodern dance, for example.

Edwards: Certainly the company has been very successful and has received a lot of well-deserved attention, but, I would say, not the man. He was part of that generation of queer elders whom we lost. There are so many whose stories have not been told. There are folks from that generation you hear about all the time who passed away in the early part of the AIDS crisis. But there are many we never hear about. I really wanted to look at who he was and how he came to do what he did. It’s such an unlikely story, and such a unique life, done at great sacrifice.

In context, when we talk about commercial viability, or what it means to be in an art museum as a choreographer, I wanted to get back to the fact that what he did is truly exceptional. The driving force of what makes an artist an artist—he really was filled with unending, boundless curiosity. And the incredible sacrifice that comes with carrying something so huge. He imagined this institution out of thin air and figured out how to support it at a time of intense segregation. We think about it only relegated to the southern United States, but even in New York City, when he came here, the only integrated place where you could take dance classes was the New Dance Group. This is the history that people don’t know! You have that, and you have this Black gay man saying “I’m gonna start this company,” and actually does it, and it’s still here. It’s kind of incredible. We have lauded people for much less.

Rail: Bringing into the museum ephemeral arts, such as dance and music… will this continue or expand in coming years?

Edwards: The Whitney has had a good trajectory since Adam Weinberg came on as director in 2003 and made performance a very important thread of the museum’s programming. It’s featured in our Biennials, through commissions, any number of ways, in a show around Cecil Taylor… but the Whitney was showing dance at Altria in the 1980s and ’90s. Not just dance, but performance. Trisha Brown walked those walls in the 1970s. So there’s a long, rich history of performance, and it’s hiding in plain sight in our collection, even if it’s characterized as a drawing, film, painting, or sculpture. I think that commitment will certainly continue. It can shift shape and take the form of supporting a living artist to make a new commission or a multi-year deep research project that takes up the whole fifth floor.