Something about the way the dancers’ bodies moved made me feel weak. Not in a “coming down with the flu” way, but instead as if I was suddenly softening like candle wax. I looked around at faces similarly entranced. There was something so vulnerable about how the dancers moved to the music, with an intuition that gently chipped away at the world sitting on our collective shoulders.
During a December performance in New York, I watched Alvin Ailey dancers perform a piece called “Difference Between,” which was all at once energizing and melancholic. I had no idea what the choreography meant to convey — I’m, after all, not a “dance person” — but I was somehow seeing and hearing moments of longing and fear, and later in the piece, a reckoning with a beautiful new beginning.
“We have our ups and our downs as dancers, and we are so lucky and blessed to have work that we can pour ourselves into — that we can use our personal experience to enrich the movement and the story that has already been given to us,” says Samantha Figgins, of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and one of the dancers I was watching on stage. “What a gift it is, for us.”
Months later, when I got to sit down and chat with Figgins, she agreed that the piece I watched, choreographed by Matthew Neenan, was profoundly emotional. “I think it’s a piece about longing, traveling and migration as well — those journeys that we all go through,” she says. “There can be a lot of grief there. You might be leaving behind family, relationships, or even a version of yourself.”
