Roberts and Neenan debut new works at Alvin Ailey

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater premiered new works by Jamar Roberts and Matthew Neenan at New York City Center on Dec. 12, 2025. Neenan’s first piece for the company, Difference Between, uses tracks by theater composer Heather Christian — whose recent naming as a MacArthur Fellow, two months earlier, brought extra buzz to the premiere.

The music, drawn from Christian’s Four:Four series and performed by the Arbornauts, ranges from carillon melodies to 1960s-style psychedelia and includes lines about “valves and atriums.” Neenan arranges the songs in his own order and often sets the seven dancers in relay or domino motion; a duet foregrounded against one in the background and a solo for Jacquelin Harris register as interesting moments, but the review found the choreography largely familiar and not fully matched to the music’s eccentricity.

Roberts’s Song of the Anchorite, a short homage to Ailey’s 1961 solo Hermit Songs, was judged more successful in its modest aims. Roberts replaces Samuel Barber’s score with the slow movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major in a spare arrangement by Avishai Cohen and uses a projected image of branches where Ailey once held branches.

Donnie Duncan Jr., the soloist, moves through continuous, prayer-flecked gestures and dons a robe near the end, giving the piece a meditative humility that resonates beyond the homage. The program also included Medhi Walerski’s Blink of an Eye and concluded with Ronald K.

Key Topics

Culture, Alvin Ailey, Jamar Roberts, Matthew Neenan, Heather Christian, Donnie Duncan Jr