American touring dance groups: Nothing comes close to this

Two of America's finest dance troupes are heading our way. Jenny Gilbert met them

On a blowy New York street a few blocks from the Lincoln Center, a passer-by shoots me a pitying look when I ask for directions to the headquarters of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. He tilts his head towards a street sign: Alvin Ailey Place. Ah. When the company moves to its new Manhattan premises – 70,000sqft of dedicated dance space, the biggest in America – they're taking the street name with them. That's how much clout the Alvin Ailey company has. In British dance there's nothing to compare.

Practically every American knows Ailey, from the woman I sit next to on the plane ("Sure, we had them visit when I was in high school"), to the man at the hotel kiosk. And if any American kid escaped the Ailey influence in the course of four decades of cross-state Arts-in-Education, they are unlikely to have missed the Ailey TV commercial for American Express – a full 30 seconds complete with clips of individual dancers – seen by tens of millions during the Academy Awards and the Superbowl.

After 11 September, the company's signature work, Revelations (which, after a forced cancellation in September, it brings to Sadler's Wells this month), was seized on by American audiences as an anthem of solidarity. The piece – made by Ailey a full four years before the 1964 Civil Rights Act – is a soul-stirring, high-energy evocation of spirituals, blues and gospel, drawn from Ailey's childhood memories of religious fear and ecstasy in small-town Texas. The fact that this story of oppressed southern blacks is danced by a predominantly black company has not prevented it being seen as an expression of American-ness in general.

Judith Jamison – once Ailey's star dancer and muse, now the company's Amazonian artistic director – responds to journalists' questions about the company's racial identity with remarkably good grace, considering the number of times they ask. She points out that the company has never, in fact, been an all-black ensemble. "Look at my dancers. I've got Puerto Ricans, Bolivians, Chinese, Japanese, the lot. Yes, the African-American experience is celebrated in some of our repertory, but that isn't the whole story. What was important to Alvin [who died in 1989] and what's important to me is excellence, not race. And now that everyone can do 15 pirouettes and lift their leg up to their ear, technique by itself is no big deal. What Ailey dancers have on stage is that extra oomph, a kind of passion as citizens of the world.

"People come to our auditions thinking they're going to do jazz dance," she continues. "They get a ballet barre, and that eliminates a whole lot of them. Then on top they have to know Graham [contemporary dance] technique, tap, south Indian, West African, and recently we've added Horton technique. That was built on a man's body, so it's very angular and powerful and hard to do. And we've added club." Club? "You know, vernacular dancing, what they dance in clubs."

Another uniquely American experience is currently on offer at London's Peacock Theatre in the form of a hip-hop gangster version of Romeo and Juliet. In Rennie Harris's Rome & Jewels, the cultural reference points are so specific you could almost plot them on a map, as long as it was a map of north Philadelphia's tower-block 'burbs, the so-called Badlands. Harris, 39, grew up there, and might have gone to the bad himself had he not been plucked from the walkways aged 14 to pass on his body-popping skills to a community dance project. "In black culture there's no such thing as learning to dance, there's none of that linear thinking," he says. "Dance and song and music – you just grow up doing it. The first time we heard the term hip-hop we said 'What's that?' Then we realised that's what we'd been doing all along."

I went to see Rome & Jewels in downtown Brooklyn, among a packed, noisy, largely black audience who collapsed in fits of laughter over the dirty jokes the show contains – many of which I must admit go right over my head, either because of the performers' rich Philadelphia accents, or because the references are too local or oblique. (These routines will be tempered for London). But I am far from oblivious to the parallel the show finds between the original tricksy, foul-mouthed wordplay of Tybalt and Mercutio and the creative thrust of rap. Harris's coup was in spotting that urban American gang culture – with its dance battles, its machismo, and issues of turf, attitude and hierarchy – would mesh so neatly with the street culture of Shakespeare's Verona.

Harris's initial idea was to make a hip-hop drama based on West Side Story and the 1977 turf wars movie The Warriors. It was only when his leading dancer, pint-sized toughie Rodney Mason, who happens to be an Elizabethan drama buff, started mucking around in rehearsal spouting Shakespeare hip-hop fashion, that he saw the way the show could go.

Thus the warring families of the "two star-cross'd homeys" go head to head as The Caps (who dance in the stomping, back-flipping, hip-hop style) and the Monster Qs (who do b-boy: floor-based, gravity-defying breakdance) in a gruesomely mesmerising, and technically spectacular fight finale. "It's true, we were like families, our dance groups in Philadelphia," recalls Harris. "The media used to say we danced because we were trying not to fight. The truth was that dance often started a fight, because people would circle round so close to watch. That's how the style evolved. You'd wind up spinning on the spot so you didn't kick anybody."

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: Sadler's Wells, London EC1 (020 7863 8000), 24-29 June; 'Rome & Jewels': Peacock Theatre, London WC2 (020 7863 8222), to 22 June