Jazz Island isn’t a real place, but if it were, its sunrise would stir the air with warm breezes and the sweet scent of blossoms.
Maija García’s “Jazz Island,” which premiered at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater on Friday, has that kind of mood board going for it too. But as a dance, it’s more of a day trip than a dream destination that invites revisiting. More than its look, its score, by the Trinidadian-born jazz trumpeter and composer Etienne Charles, is its backbone, lending characters and scenes more texture than the storytelling and choreography do. Sometimes Charles’s melodies even hint at dialogue — the notes embody inflection, cadence and shifts in emotional tone, from gentle to forceful.
“Jazz Island” is based on an Afro-Caribbean folk tale Geoffrey Holder recounted in a book, in which Erzulie, the goddess of love (Coral Dolphin), rises from the sea — in this case, carried aloft by dancers hiding under her billowing skirt like a water-loving Mother Ginger.
Erzulie — an imposing presence here, but with a more comically bored air in Holder’s story — comes upon the young Bashiba (Jessica Amber Pinkett) whose striving grandmother (Samantha Figgins) is desperate to marry her off to the wealthy Monsieur Dufresne (Donnie Duncan Jr.). Does she love him? Certainly not. Gliding across the floor like a snake, he’s cartoonishly sinister; it comes as little surprise that he’s also a philanderer.
Selling flowers at the marketplace, Bashiba falls for a traveling man, Claude Jean-Louis, played by Solomon Dumas. Who wouldn’t? Dumas, with his understated yet rapturous dancing, fills the space like a rippling wave. But there is a problem that only Erzulie can solve: Baron Samedi (Leonardo Brito), the flamboyant master of the dead with a top hat and cane, is on the scene to wreak havoc.
The most convincing dancing passages happen with peripheral characters as Afro-Caribbean rhythms melt torsos into undulating silk, and deft feet, buoyed by deep pliés, float across the stage in sinuous curves. As the young lovers, Dumas and Pinkett embrace and part with an ever-quickening pulse, their sweeping crossover steps and supple jumps dashed off with feverish, dewy amplitude.
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