The Heart of a Dancer

We don’t choose our passions.  In many ways, they choose us.  The call to dance may be considered enigmatic; but it’s certainly powerful.  As one writer noted, once a person’s been introduced to dance, the likelihood that they’ll go all in is virtually guaranteed.

Some are brought to dance early and quickly become infatuated.  Some get a chance glimpse of a great artist and the spark is lit.  Some have dance thrust upon them, like Cuban born Carlos Acosta, whose father forced him into ballet to keep him off corrosive streets.  For Acosta, antipathy morphed into love and ended in a brilliant dance career. 

Once the flame takes hold, it never really dies.  Dance companies understand the pull of dance’s siren call.  A few of the great ones encourage and nurture it by exporting the experience of dance to as many people as possible through workshops and classes in locations other than their home cities.

Since 2016, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) has been offering Chicagoans an immersive taste of a dancer’s life.  Through Ailey Extension, a body within the dance company that develops and offers workshops and classes for the public, everyday members of the community are given the chance to do what dancers do; to “be what you see on stage”. Considering the stature of the 62-year-old dance company, those are thrilling prospects for many people.  One of the charges of a component of Ailey Extension, Ailey Experience, is to extend the workshops beyond the company’s NYC home and make them available in select touring cities like Chicago. Often, they are conducted as preludes to AAADT’s annual tour performances.

In early February, a month prior to AAADT’s annual performance at the Auditorium, City Pleasures was granted the opportunity to sit to down and talk to the people who direct and teach the classes and later observe two of workshops.  

Perhaps it’s dance itself that engenders such a high level of intellectual and emotional connectedness to craft.  Lisa Johnson-Willingham oversees and directs the Ailey Extension nationally.  Her primary capacity on the day we met was that of teacher.  She was joined by Martell Ruffin, a native Chicagoan, graduate of the Chicago High School for the Arts and recipient of dance scholarships to the Ailey Company, Joffrey Ballet’s intensives and the Dance Theatre of Harlem. They are both Ailey dance veterans.

In Ms. Johnson-Willingham’s eyes, the purpose of the weekend workshops is multi-pronged and extend well beyond the benefits to the body.  She spoke of how dance can be a balm; something that can help a person navigate the transitional parts of one’s life. How it can be a refuge from difficulties.   She also told of how the workshops not only take dance to the community, they expand the legacy of Alvin Ailey and the company he created a lifetime ago.  As much as AAADT’s current dancers might like to be their own ambassadors and lead the charge in communities themselves, their first obligation is to prepare for performances when on tour.  Workshops fill the gap in performing that role. 

Martell Ruffin was around 13 when he first saw a video recording of Alvin Ailey dancing.  “I saw a masculine black man doing what I knew I wanted to do”.  It was something few around him could understand.   “I lost some friends along the way”, he confided. And befuddled family members wanted to make sure everything was “all right”.  As he elaborated, it became more and more apparent that Mr. Ruffin couldn’t be more satisfied with the choice to commit himself to dance.  It was during his audition at Chi Arts that Ms. Johnson-Willingham, who has spent twelve highly distinguished years of her career here in Chicago, saw his talent and that tell-tale spark of someone with something special.  “Lisa gave me chance…  took me out of Englewood.”  Rather than following through with thoughts of joining the Air Force during a difficult episode in his life, he saw opportunities materialize because of his involvement with AAADT.  “I was able to train, be a part of Ailey II, travel, teach and do what I love”. 

That dedication to fan the spark in others was clear as soon as the workshops began.  There were four that Sunday afternoon.  Two made up of pre-teens 8-12 and two exclusively made up of a broad spectrum of adults.  From youngsters with previous dance training to middle aged and older attendees who had never taken a dance class of any kind, the knowledge disparity between the participants proved completely immaterial.

AAADT charges $50 a session for all students.  The emphasis may not be on training in the strictest meaning of the term, but from an outsider’s perspective the classes are intense because both Ms. Johnson-Willingham and Mr. Ruffin approach them seriously; and always with a desire to address the gratification component.  “We want people to leave feeling the same way they feel when they leave one of our performances”.  

For younger students now engaged in dance classes and adults with past or current backgrounds in dance, the workshops are an opportunity receive the expertise of top flight instructors who bring an elite perspective to the sessions. In that sense alone, they could be considered invaluable.   For those who have never taken a dance class in their life, whether it be an 11-year-old boy joining in on one of his Mom’s dreams, a teenage girl who agreed to participate in a workshop if and only if her grandmother took the class with her, or a 40-year-old guy who thought, mistakenly, the class would teach him to dance one of the routines from The Wiz, the workshops became passports to an exhilarating encounter. 

As Ms. Johnson-Willingham repeatedly stated, the classes are a way to give back to the community as well as uncover and nurture talent that may be in its most embryonic stage.  It was thrilling to see it first hand and watch a nine-year-old mentally process and physically interpret his translation of a movement.  His gestures, timing and execution; the way he filled his space, all reflected the motions of someone with a gift.  Whether he would develop the passion required to become a great dancer is anyone’s guess.  But it’s in environments like these workshops that the drive needed to excel is encouraged.

With an interest in learning and an openness to exploring one’s physical capabilities as its sole pre-requisites, the adult session proved just as absorbing. All body types were welcome and the only limitations on age were those one placed on one’s self.    That receptivity resulted in an array of enlistees with an expansive range of ages and sizes.  The look in their eyes was the single thing they all had in common.  There was a seriousness, hopefulness and controlled excitement evident in the gaze of all forty of them as Ms. Johnson-Willingham skillfully wore the dual hat of demanding but benevolent general and Socratic dance muse.           

Judging from the same faces following the workshop, radiating with satisfied exhilaration, the afternoon’s enrollees got as much as they gave from the experience and bore an uncanny resemblance to those of audiences leaving an Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater show.

Ailey Revealed, the company’s 2020 performance at the Auditorium Theater runs March 4 -8.