Sacred Ground: Ailey II in St. Catharines

Photo credit: Ailey II in Alvin Ailey's Revelations. Photos by Nir Arieli.

Sacred Ground: Ailey II in St. Catharines

By Deirdre Kelly

When Alvin Ailey founded his dance company in 1958 because America’s concert stages remained closed to Black artists, he grasped a hard truth about change: it must be renewed by each generation. Now, 67 years later, 12 young dancers from Ailey II will carry that vision into St. Catharines’ FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre on October 23.

The evening carries added meaning, marking both the company’s first performance at the venue and their return to the Niagara region since 2014, coinciding with dual milestone anniversaries – 10 years for both Bravo Niagara’s Voices of Freedom Festival, dedicated to elevating underrepresented voices through the arts, and the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre itself.

But this show represents more than a celebratory homecoming. The St. Catharines performance will showcase one of just two Canadian stops on a grueling 39-city world tour stretching from the Caribbean across North America. Unlike the 32-member flagship company with its annual New York City Center residency and global stages, this 12-member ensemble moves with the agility of a boutique operation – nimble enough to reach intimate venues and connect directly with audiences the main company’s scale cannot accommodate.

Yet for all their grace and precision, these dancers face the stark reality of an art form that exists only in the moment. Dance is ephemeral – here one moment, gone the next – and so are most dance careers. These 12 artists, fresh from The Ailey School in New York and other elite training programs, face brutal odds. Only two or three will advance to Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater each year. The rest scatter to Broadway, regional companies or abandon dance entirely.

This process would seem cruel if it weren’t also essential. Half the main company’s current roster earned their credentials through this crucible, learning not just technique but the tenacity required to sustain transformative art.

Francesca Harper knows this reality intimately. When she became Ailey II’s artistic director in 2021, she brought the perspective of someone who had navigated her own path from Ailey training to international success. The daughter of longtime Ailey School director Denise Jefferson, Harper grew up inside the institution, watching Ailey himself encourage young dancers with a simple promise: “You always have a home waiting for you.” Now she shepherds others through their most demanding passage.

The company itself emerged from desperate creativity. In 1974, CBS offered Ailey a television special but his main company was touring. Ailey gathered students from his school, thinking he could pass them off as the company. The gambit worked brilliantly. The success of that television special helped establish Ailey II as a permanent company.

Under Sylvia Waters’ leadership for 38 seasons, it grew to become essential to Ailey’s broader mission: performing in prisons, hospitals and senior homes for audiences who could never reach major urban theatres. In the 1980s, as mounting debt threatened the main company’s survival, board members suggested eliminating Ailey II entirely as a cost-saving measure. But Ailey refused. He understood that his 1958 act of artistic insurgency meant nothing unless it created pathways for others.

Ailey II with Artistic Director Francesca Harper and Rehearsal Director Shay Bland

Harper now opens those pathways for her dancers, crafting a St. Catharines program that showcases their range across three distinct works that range from pure movement to contemporary inquiry to communal catharsis.

The program opens with Streams, Ailey’s groundbreaking 1970 work that marked his first full-length dance without a plot. A pure exploration of bodies in space and emotion responding to music, it invokes the majesty and mystery of water as dancers surge, eddy and bubble in response to composer Miloslav Kabelac’s driving rhythmic score. Bodies flow through diagonal pathways and structured groupings, sometimes rushing together like a river in flood, other times breaking apart into separate currents that pool in quiet corners before spilling back into the main flow. This is dance stripped to its essence: the way human joints bend and extend, the pull of weight through space, the simple fact that when percussion pounds, bodies move.

My’Kal Stromile’s Third Person Point of View, debuting as part of this tour, takes audiences inside a three-way relationship at its peak, then works backward to show how it all began. The 28-year-old choreographer, who has created works for Boston Ballet, uses this reverse timeline to explore how three people navigate love, jealousy, and intimacy when traditional relationship rules don’t apply. What emerges is a detective story told through movement: audiences watch the passionate highs first, then discover the awkward early moments, stolen glances, and difficult conversations that led three people to choose each other. For audiences still wrapping their heads around non-traditional partnerships, Stromile offers empathy rather than judgment, showing the very human emotions that drive people to seek connection beyond conventional boundaries.

The evening culminates in Revelations, Ailey’s 1960 masterpiece and one of the most beloved works in the modern dance repertoire. Born from what Ailey called his ‘blood memories’ of growing up in rural Texas during the Depression, this universally celebrated work finds sacred ground in St. Catharines. The city served as the final destination for hundreds of enslaved Black people fleeing the United States who risked everything to reach freedom in Canada through the Underground Railroad – a secret network of safe houses and brave guides that led them north to safety. Among the most famous of these guides was Harriet Tubman, who made St. Catharines her home from 1851 to 1862. The work’s dramatic arc, from suffering to liberation, resonates deeply in a community that has always been defined by arrival and new beginnings. This is American dance at its most transcendent.

The opening section, “I Been ’Buked,” finds the dancers in earth-toned robes, moving with the weight of sorrow and the slow burn of hope. Their arms press skyward not in supplication but in defiant reach toward redemption, each gesture carrying the accumulated pain and resilience that Ailey distilled from his Baptist upbringing. The duet “Fix Me Jesus” follows with a woman seeking spiritual repair through movement that pleads and surrenders, while the explosive “Sinner Man” sends three men bounding and crashing across the stage in frantic flight from the law, God and their own guilty conscience.

Such is the power of the work these 12 young dancers must master. At FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre, they will carry forward what Ailey built – not just steps and technique, but the fierce conviction that dance can break down barriers and speak truths that words cannot. The revolution continues, one performance at a time.

Deirdre Kelly is an award-winning dance critic and author of Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection and, most recently, Fashioning the Beatles: The Looks That Shook The World. A longtime admirer of Ailey’s work, she has written extensively about the company for various publications, including The Globe and Mail.