http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/09/arts/dance/alvin-ailey-troupe-offers-a-wayne-mcgregor-work.html 2014-12-09 01:18:22 Alvin Ailey Troupe Offers a Wayne McGregor Work The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater began its City Center season with works by Wayne McGregor and Bill T. Jones, along with its 1960 masterpiece, “Revelations.” === For the second night of its City Center season, the But before we could settle into “Pilgrim of Sorrow,” the opening sequence of that 1960 Ailey masterpiece, we saw productions by Wayne McGregor and Bill T. Jones — still new for the company though not so for the greater dance world. In “Chroma,” created for the Royal Ballet in 2006, Mr. McGregor sets a series of pas de deux to Joby Talbot’s original music and orchestrations of songs by Jack White. Mr. McGregor has said that he defines the title as “ What doesn’t have as much to say is Mr. McGregor’s piece and, a year after the Ailey company first performed it, the dancers’ approach. The choreographer’s proclivity for extreme movement, which incorporates a pliant spine, quick-on-the trigger flexibility and hyperextension, should have an odd chewiness about it. Here, performed with more aggression than nuance, it’s just tough. One pas de deux, by Vernard J. Gilmore and Sarah Daley, whose arms floated from her lissome torso like drifting silk, offered a rare glimpse of the choreography’s eerie capriciousness. But as other duets came and went, it became apparent that what’s missing in “Chroma” is an overarching structure. Mr. Jones’s “D-Man in the Waters (Part 1),” the other non-Ailey work on the program, dates to 1989 and is set to Mendelssohn’s invigorating Octet in E flat for Strings (Op. 20). It explores the notion of buoyancy — keeping your head above water even in the darkest of times. (There’s even a swimming motif.) Mr. Jones choreographed the piece for his own company during the AIDS crisis; it is dedicated to Robert Battle, the Ailey company’s artistic director, selects new works to keep his dancers fresh, to give them range. His task is ever more difficult when so many programs end with the still-riveting “Revelations.” In the “Fix Me, Jesus” section, Ghrai DeVore, opposite Marcus Jarrell Willis, explored the idea of faith: what it’s like to believe in something you can’t physically see. The wingspan of her arms, the stillness of her arabesque verged on spookiness. And Yannick Lebrun, in “I Wanna Be Ready,” imbued his robust, long-limbed body with pathos. One of the many pleasures of “Revelations” is how its dancers keep finding new things to say. Mr. Battle needs to start doing that too.