http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/27/arts/dance/alvin-ailey-dance-performs-episodes-and-four-corners.html 2014-12-26 22:54:01 Alvin Ailey Dance Performs ‘Episodes’ and ‘Four Corners' On Tuesday at City Center, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater presented a program including Ulysses Dove’s “Episodes” and Ronald K. Brown’s “Four Corners.” === For some, life is a series of chapters. Ulysses Dove, who died of AIDS in 1996 at 49, choreographed “ On Tuesday at City Center, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater presented that 1987 work, first performed by the company in 1989. Set to Robert Ruggieri’s percussive score, “Episodes” has all the trademarks of a Dove piece: speed, explosive jumps and whiplash spins. Dancers shoot across the stage like waves hitting rocks. When, at the start, Kirven Douthit-Boyd and Sean Aaron Carmon rush onto the stage — they are the work’s spry, guiding forces — their mercurial volatility packs a punch. But as more episodes unfurl, the scenes dissolve like movie trailers, with a dose of action here and some melodrama there. Monotonous in structure, the choreography is performed on paths of light: two diagonals and then an X. The tension behind the movement is fraught with predictability even in its sculptural, quieter moments, as when a dancer sinks slowly into a backbend. Mr. Dove’s compulsion behind the action carries more of an impact: The idea of moving without thinking, as if in a feverish trance, makes sense within the destructive context of AIDS. In “Episodes,” velocity is driven by panic, by horror. At the end of “Episodes,” the dancers exit, using each corner of the stage. That pattern takes on greater significance in Ronald K. Brown’s “ Matthew Rushing and Linda Celeste Sims wind their way through Mr. Brown’s undulations as if their bodies were made of water. Belen Pereyra and Glenn Allen Sims, the other two winds, discover and rediscover the loose elasticity that comes in finding a weighted connection to the floor. Set to music by Carl Hancock Rux and others, “Four Corners” is a rarity, somehow even more fresh than it was at its premiere. While the dancers, by now, know how to tap into Mr. Brown’s spiritual center, they aren’t knowing about it. The program’s remaining works kept the night on an upswing: David Parsons’s “ Still, both productions, though mainly “Caught,” had the effect of frosting on a cake. “Four Corners,” like a whispered secret of which you strain to remember every last detail, kept swirling through the mind. The Ailey company doesn’t have a resident choreographer, but it should, and it’s easy to say who should get the job.