Trajal Harrell Pays Homage to Alvin Ailey and Katherine Dunham

Photo: Dina Litovsky

Trajal Harrell is a New York– and Zurich-based dancer and choreographer who infuses his work with rich dance history; most recently, this has included the Japanese modern dance form butoh. On October 4 through 6, he and his company will perform his piece Deathbed as part of “Edges of Ailey,” a major retrospective on dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey. The work was inspired both by butoh and by one of Ailey’s own predecessors: Katherine Dunham, a dancer and choreographer who is herself an icon of Black dance history.

My company premiered this piece in 2022 and worked very intensely on it, so now we’re capable of bringing it back together in two days. I’ll install it in situ at the Whitney and we’ll just go into it. I don’t work from video — well, not unless we get in a very tough position, and then we may consult one — because video doesn’t tell you the essence of the piece. It’s just the shape, and that is not the dance. We work from collective memory. I don’t know how it happens — really, I could not do it on my own. We really depend on and need each other.

This piece, Deathbed, has 11 dancers including myself, and it requires all of us coming into the room. There are rehearsal directors who help. There are dramaturges. There are different objects and many different looks — don’t ask me how many, but fashion is primary for me — so there are many layers to the fabric of the piece. They are constantly changing clothes and putting on things, and this produces a lot of different images, a lot of different movements, a lot of different behaviors. We’ll start from the beginning and try to make it to the end. I’ll give notes, or someone else will stop and say, “That wasn’t right.” There will always be little differences; I might notice someone incorporating something and say, “Ah yeah, that’s great to bring in.” There’s ongoing development of the work.

I spent over a decade researching voguing and the postmoderns and making work inspired by that before beginning my research into butoh and its founder, Tatsumi Hijikata, in 2013. I’ve never taken a butoh class. I never took a voguing class either. My work always has to be my own aesthetic because I respect these art forms too much to represent them in a shallow way. That was a big thing with my voguing work: People thought I was mixing it with other styles. No, no, no. I was looking at the theoretical underpinnings, the structures underneath, and asking questions about them. Do you know what I mean? For me, voguing is the same as ballet. You can’t just be like, “Okay, I took some voguing classes, and now I’m a voguer.”

But I do think I dance with butoh mind, and it changed me completely as a dancer. Butoh has evolved a lot since its founding in the ’50s, but one of the main aspects is you have to free yourself from standards of beauty. Because you spend time working in front of the mirror, a lot of dance is about producing images which you think are ideal. Butoh gets away from this idealization. Now I dance from a place of being able to reveal my weaknesses. This requires a different mental place than, let’s say, the muscle strength that we normally associate with dance — to be able to be on your toes or hold your leg up. For me, I think that’s what we see in the work: incredible vulnerability.

Deathbed is about not knowing. In 2006, a friend brought me to Katherine Dunham’s deathbed in New York. She was living in an apartment on the Upper West Side — she didn’t have much funding, but I think Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, and some other famous, wealthy people in the African American community got together to make sure she had a place. I was a young artist and I knew who she was; if Alvin Ailey opened up a space for me, she opened up a space for him. My friend and I went and sat there for a couple of hours with her. She was sick but she was very regal. I actually forgot that I had been there until I began my research into butoh. It seems that Dunham and Hijikata had shared a studio together in Japan after she disbanded her company; she even wrote her autobiography in Japan. But no one ever asked her about her relationship with him — and there I was, and I didn’t ask her either. I didn’t have the maturity. I didn’t even have the question. So this piece is a bit about how to deal with these missed opportunities.

I’m not trying to fuse Katherine Dunham’s aesthetic and butoh aesthetic in Deathbed. It’s about the question I have about this meeting and about my own relationship to dance history. It’s about my own experience of sitting there with this figure and being completely stupid because I didn’t even recognize what was happening. The question was waiting for me later — and that’s why I had to make this piece about it.

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