I find Alvin Ailey’s dance shows perfectly combine elements of ballet and hip-hop. His dance company defies both genres: it’s a contradiction, in a way. If you see the video below, you’ll find that the dancers are acknowledging gravity, by sticking low towards the ground, thus defying ballet, and vice versa with hip-hop. It creates a nice mixture of smooth, elegant dance with fluid, energetic hip-hop!

When discovering more about Alvin Ailey’s dance company, I stumbled across this dance piece called “Revelations” (video below). If you look at the 0:32 seconds mark, you’ll see the dancers rigidly moving their arms like the arms of a clock. Even at 1:11 the woman dancer moves her whole entire body like a clock ticking. This shows that time is constantly passing on for the dancers, and it may play a critical role in discovering the overall piece’s “revelation”. Additionally, at 1:32 I really like how the dancers mix in ballet and soulful music into the piece. The background of the sheets moving across act like a river for the dancers to move across the stage with. I guess what the choreographer is trying to tell us is that no matter what drags us along the way, perhaps like time, we keep moving on.

Additionally, at around the 2:00 time mark, I like how the male dancer is doing traditional ballet twirls across the stage, yet is staying relatively low to the ground. This is sort-of the motto of Alvin Ailey’s dance theory of the defiance/rebellion of traditional ballet.