Ailey II at CARIFESTA: A Masterclass in Feeling and Form

Two sold out shows. One company at full throttle. Last night, Ailey II turned CARIFESTA into a sanctum for movement, an evening where technique, theatre and music fused so completely, that time seemed to contract and release with each breath of the dancers.

From the opening bars, those who were lucky enough to snag tickets to the Frank Collymore Hall realised this was not spectacle for its own sake but storytelling through the body. You felt it in the first phrases. Their musicality was precise yet generous, riding the score’s undercurrents rather than merely counting it. Lines carved the air with kinetic clarity. Port de bras unfurled like calligraphy. The ensemble’s epaulement shifted intention with a single tilt of the sternum. The choreography played boldly with dynamics, long, suspended adagio passages giving way to bright allegro bursts, tight unisons dissolving into rippling canon, weight sharing and counterbalance blooming into catches that drew audible gasps.

When the lights dimmed to start the show, you could feel breaths being held as the hush that accompanies the unknown  filled  the hall. The work felt both modern and ancestral, its language steeped in release based floorwork, spirals travelling through the spine, and phrases that toggled between sinew and silk. At its heart was a meditation on belonging: bodies folding into and away from each other, solos that read like private letters, then sudden convergences where the full cast surged forward as if answering a drum from the back of memory. In the transitions you heard it: a soft intake of breath across the hall, mid-section applause when a sequence landed on a daring off axis catch, the low murmur that follows a truth recognised.

Among the evening’s works, Jamaican choreographer Renee I. McDonald contributed a piece that traced history and present day life in a series of vivid tableaux. Her craft favoured grounded phrases that released through the torso, clean musical structures, and partnering that asked dancers to listen with the whole body. The result was both lucid and layered, a dance that met the audience where they were and then carried them somewhere deeper.

What gave the night its charge was not only the dancers’ formidable technique — the buoyant ballon, the exacting footwork, the fearless attack — but the way lighting and score locked in with their phrasing. Pools of light narrowed to chamber like confessionals; then a full wash revealed a chorus that felt like a congregation. Percussive accents in the music became punctuation for contractions and releases through torso and pelvis; strings laid a velvet path for port de bras that travelled on the breath. The design never shouted; it listened, then amplified.

If the evening mapped a terrain of emotion, it did so with the cartography of culture and memory. There were passages that read like altars to the past, gestures that suggested work, worship, and the everyday tenderness that keeps people stitched together. Elsewhere, humour slipped in on syncopated feet: a sly rhythmic tease, a shared glance that broke the fourth wall for a heartbeat, the audience responding with warm laughter before being carried, without warning, into the ache of a minor key. This was dance as human text, fear, joy, intimacy, rupture — rendered legible by bodies trained to speak many languages at once.

The solo passages were especially potent. A single dancer would hold the stage with nothing but breath, intention and pristine craft. In one such moment the house was so quiet you could hear costume whisper against skin, the phrasing calibrated to the tiniest margin of time, suspensions held to the edge of gravity and then surrendered like a truth finally told. When the ensemble re entered, it felt like community arriving, shoulders catching shoulders, a carousel of counterpoint and shared momentum that swelled into a coda bright with purpose.

Throughout, Ailey’s legacy — the belief that dance can dignify the full breadth of human experience — was present without becoming museum piece reverence. This company made it contemporary, made it urgent. The dancers moved with that distinctly Ailey blend of earth and uplift: feet rooted, hearts aloft. Even in stillness, they carried a voltage that asked the audience not simply to watch but to witness.

By show’s end, the theatre was alive with it. Applause broke out mid phrase, then again at the final blackout, first a wave, then a storm. For the first performance especially, the ovation was rousing and sustained, the hall on its feet and calling for more. It felt earned — not because the steps were hard (though they were, relentlessly), but because the artistry made the difficulty disappear. That is the highest compliment: when rigour reads as inevitability, when virtuosity becomes transparency and what remains is the truth of what was danced.

CARIFESTA was treated to something truly special: a masterclass in how movement, music and light can conspire to tell stories that words struggle to hold. It was theatre of a very high order, expertly staged, impeccably performed, and emotionally articulate. If you were there, you left with shoulders a little looser, chest a little wider, the night’s phrasing still echoing in your bones. If you were not, you have now heard the buzz: two shows, sold out for a magnificent reason.

In a festival built to honour who we are and who we are becoming, Ailey II did not just perform. They testified.