Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ailey’ on Hulu, a Reverent Documentary About Dance Icon Alvin Ailey

Now streaming on Hulu, Ailey is a biographical documentary about Alvin Ailey, the widely heralded dancer and choreographer who pioneered the art of dance for Black Americans in the mid-20th century. It’s a production of PBS’ long-running American Masters series, which chronicles the lives of major cultural figures, and is directed by Jamila Wignot, the multi-award-winning filmmaker behind The African-Americans: Many Rivers to Cross. The question here is whether Wignot can create a full portrait of a famously private individual like Ailey.

AILEY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The film opens on the 1988 Kennedy Center honors, with presenter Cicely Tyson honoring Ailey, who appears physically fragile as he’s showered with applause. In the present day, choreographers and dancers at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater work on a piece in tribute to the man, for the company’s 60th anniversary. Instructors at the school discuss how Ailey believed dancers to be “physical historians,” working out the “blood memories,” the experiences of their forebears, through dance – and perhaps that helps contextualize the distinctive verbal cues, the intuitive exhortations, the ha-ha-has and YAHs, that instructors use to work out movements to dancers.

It’s perhaps hard to believe that all this is the product of a man born in rural Texas during the Great Depression, who was homeless for a stretch while his mother – he never knew his father – went from job to job. When he was 12, they landed in Los Angeles, and by 14, he was frequenting the ballet, where he’d watch, entranced. Fearing he’d be teased for wanting to be a dancer, he tried football, which, no surprise, didn’t stick, but he soon found his footing in gymnastics. We hear Ailey’s voice from an archival interview as he shares a few details about his experiences and upbringing over generic era-specific footage; there clearly isn’t much visual documentation of his early life, until he moved to New York City, where he founded the AAADT in 1958.

In-between Ailey’s commentary, former members of his company share stories of his work – including signature piece Revelations and social-protest work Masakela Langage – and the growth of the AAADT from a hard-touring, low-pay endeavor to one of international renown. They also share what little they know of Ailey himself, who rarely let anyone into his private life, and appeared to be close with no one save for his mother. He speaks vaguely about the gay relationships he kept secret, and his stint in a mental hospital, which occurred after a bout of erratic behavior; he eventually had a couch moved into the dance school so he could simply be near the dancers and choreographers as he suffered with the AIDS-related illness that would eventually take his life. But, this documentary asserts, the legacy of his work speaks for itself.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The American Masters series is uniformly good – its episodes on Sam Cooke and Peanuts creator Charles Schulz are standouts, and its two-parter on Woody Allen was once considered definitive (although we may feel differently about it now).

Performance Worth Watching: When dancer and former AAADT director Judith Jamison describes how the solo work he composed for her, Cry, unconsciously took over the lower half of her body when she performed it, it’s an amazing testimonial to the emotional power of Ailey’s work.

Memorable Dialogue: Dancer George Faison, on Ailey’s relationship with dance: “He was possessed, and he had to serve that god.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Ailey’s work gets heavier representation in this documentary than the man himself, as if Wignot is searching the powerful, hypnotic performances – both Ailey’s and the dancers he choreographed – for clues to his inner life. He was an enigma, and who can blame him? He carried the burden of being not just a Black cultural innovator, but also that of a gay man; notably, he expressed the emotions of the Black experience and ’60s protest movement in his work, but chose not to participate in the gay community that surely would have embraced his cultural cache.

So yes, he was a complicated man, and Wignot chooses to explore those complexities in an impressionistic fashion. Perhaps too impressionistic, as Ailey doesn’t find the balance between being a dry Wikipedia entry in film form, and, well, not being a dry Wikipedia entry in film form. It definitively tilts toward the latter: Timelines are smudged, the themes of his work are implied more often than they’re clearly stated and the details of his pre-AAADT career are excised entirely from the movie (the same goes for many compelling facts, ranging from his professional associations with Maya Angelou and Harry Belafonte to his bipolar disorder diagnosis). It tends to let us figure out Ailey’s influences, which is a way of saying we’re tempted to hit pause and fire up the internet to help us – and by “us” I mean outsiders who aren’t well-versed in the art of dance – break down how he fused jazz, Black spirituals, classical ballet and other forms into an identifiable style and body of work.

Ailey is at its best when his dancers speak of Ailey in terms that are both reverent and humanizing, when they describe the transcendent experience of performing such powerful work. Wignot also lets the politics of his art mostly bubble subtextually, so this biodoc doesn’t derail into a polemic; its boldest moment is when Wignot places images of Ronald and Nancy Reagan at the Kennedy Center gala overtop the discussion of Ailey’s struggles with AIDS, quietly but searingly indicting the former President for his cruel indifference to the epidemic while he was in office. The documentary is a deeply respectful, frequently solemn canonization of Ailey, and while it’s sometimes too understated, it’s unfailingly persuasive in asserting that its subject is worthy of veneration.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Ailey isn’t the perfect Alvin Ailey bio, but it’s nevertheless a worthy tribute to a great American.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.