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The beauty and zeal of Flojo
The late Olympian is celebrated in dance by the Alvin Ailey company
By Diane Urbani
Deseret News staff writer
Six dancers will touch down in Salt Lake City this week, to immediately become Olympic athletes. They'll fly across a stage rather than a mountainside, seeking a particular kind of summit and an expanded definition of "heaven."
The Alvin Ailey Dance Theater will celebrate the life of Florence Griffith Joyner — the Olympic track sensation affectionately known as Flojo — in "Here . . . Now," a ballet commissioned for the 2002 Olympic Arts Festival. Flojo died during a seizure in 1998; she had served on the President's Council on Fitness and won three gold medals in the 1988 Olympics.
"I would like people to come away with the feeling of a woman who was decisively in this world as a supreme athlete and a woman who left this world too quickly," said Ailey choreographer Judith Jamison. "We keep replaying her in our heads. Here and now, she is still with us."
The dancers don't tell the story of Flojo's life. Instead, they evoke her beauty and zeal — and reflect her pursuit of excellence. "Here . . . Now" aims to soften the lines between dancers and athletes, to offer the audience insight into their struggles and their rewards. "We all suffer the same kinds
of pains and the same kinds of joy," said Jamison.
The dance has five events: "Strength," "Speed," "Style," "Pain" and "Heaven," the stages through which athletes and dancers move.
"Flojo probably ascended to heaven," Jamison mused, both when she left this world and when she crossed the finish line on the Olympic track. Dancers know that place just as well. "You give a sigh of release. Not relief; release. Those are the wonderful times when you have accomplished something, shared something. A performer hopes they've given you something. That generosity of spirit is the essence of what an artist does."
"Here . . . Now" took shape first in Jamison's mind, and then evolved as the Ailey company rehearsed. The six artists, she said, are "my first inspiration. When you look at them, you see why. Just standing there, they're incredible. Once they start moving . . . I sit down in the audience, and I smile. I get to watch them every night.
"Alvin used to call us 'creatures . . . living in a sacred place,' when we're on stage. It's a place where you're entrusting your innermost thoughts to another human being — choreographer to dancer, dancer to audience. All of that is this wonderful spiritual exchange. The better they are, the more transformed they feel, and the more transformed you feel."
Matthew Rushing, a dancer with Jamison's company for nearly a decade, said "Here . . . Now" is "one of the most athletic pieces we've ever done, of course. We're jumping, we're hurdling, we're partnering, we're moving amazingly fast, we're lifting, we're doing all these things that are very athletic — but we have to present them in a formal way, with dance technique."
There are transcendent times, Rushing added. When the dancers move together, lifted by a musical wind, "it feels absolutely incredible. Those moments are not that common. But when it happens, it's magical. I don't believe in magic," but in this case, "the word is appropriate."
The dance "feels out of your personal control, like you're just going along for the ride."
In Salt Lake City, the company will perform "Here . . . Now" with Wynton Marsalis' jazz score, composed especially for the Olympic Arts Festival. Also on the program are an Alonzo King ballet, "Following the Subtle Current Upstream," and three of Alvin Ailey's best-loved ballets — his gospel-and-blues-driven signature piece "Revelations," "Night Creature" and "Cry," which Ailey dedicated to "all black women everywhere, especially our mothers."
Ray Grant, director of the 2002 Cultural Olympiad, said the mission of the Olympic Arts Festival is to bring local people and international visitors together and to celebrate this country's "greatest contributions to the arts and humanities." Marsalis' jazz and the New York-based Ailey company are "ambassadors for black cultural heritage," he added. They have exalted modern dance and jazz to fine arts, while making them accessible to new and varied audiences.
"Alvin Ailey was one of the geniuses who left us a legacy of light," said Jamison. who became the company's artistic director after Ailey's death in 1989. "We are very flattered and proud" to be part of the Salt Lake Olympics, she said."This is part of our culture — part of your culture."
But, she added, don't think of her ballets as high culture only for highbrow audiences. Ailey dancers transport all comers, she said. "They are about to go on a journey," Jamison said of the Utah audience. "You come to be moved. . . . Forget about interpreting. Come to have your spirit lifted."
E-mail: durbani@desnews.com
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February 8, 2002
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