“So many of us have a story about Ailey, the dance company,” points out Adrienne Edwards, curator of the Whitney’s massive retrospective “Edges of Ailey.” But this exhibition is about Ailey the man—queer, Black, manic-depressive, AIDS-afflicted, Texas-born (1931–1989). Like the man, the show (through February 9) is “constellatory,” as the press release beautifully puts it. The themes by which it proceeds—Black spirituality, migration, liberation, women, collaborators, music, and the Southern imaginary—may have figured in many a midcentury Black American’s life, but the mix of artists both inside and outside of Ailey’s time (Jacob Lawrence, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Rashid Johnson, and on and on ) with the archival and autobiographical (snapshots, diary entries, company posters, portraits) accounts for the show’s galactic breadth. The spirit of distant kinship marks the performance lineup, too. Of course the Ailey companies (junior and senior) are performing, but so too are the Black postmodernists freed by “the grandeur and the burden of [Ailey’s] accomplishment” to do something else. Those include Trajal Harrell (October 4 to 6, quoted above), Bill T. Jones (November 16), Will Rawls (December 15), Okwui Okpokwasili (February 6 to 8), and Ralph Lemon (February 7). —Apollinaire Scherr