DANCE REVIEW : ALVIN AILEY COMPANY IN LOCAL PREMIERES

Since the 1960s, the process of assimilation has increasingly dominated modern dance and performance in America. Distinctive styles, idioms, techniques and traditions have met and merged in multifaceted, multidisciplinary movement-theater forms.

Both as a choreographer and a company director, Alvin Ailey has embraced and popularized assimilation. Indeed, the four-part program danced by his company Thursday at the Wiltern Theatre offered examples of the major satisfactions and hazards of this mode of melting-pot choreography.

Ailey’s familiar “Night Creature” (1975) represented assimilation in excelsis : ballet, modern, jazz and ballroom dance--plus character comedy and social commentary--brilliantly cross-cut or superimposed to music by Duke Ellington. There were shifts of emphasis so spectacularly engineered that they seemed to annihilate all sense of human limits, suggesting an unprecedented level of dancer versatility.

Unfortunately, the Thursday cast looked too rigid in balletic challenges for “Night Creature” to succeed completely in these awesome terms, though Sharell Mesh made a sleek, chic celebrant and the work as a whole certainly outclassed the three local premieres on the program.

Subtitled “Ruminations on Dudley,” Loris Anthony Beckles’ “Anjour” used music by Keith Jarrett to accompany an anthology of skills that Dudley Williams developed and displayed in his 20 years with the Ailey company. However these bits of formal movement, colloquial gesture and intense emoting failed to produce any coherent impression--and Williams found no central pulse or image to pull this splintered tribute together.

In contrast, Judith Jamison’s ritualistic “Divining” and Donald McKayle’s pictorial “Collage” each delivered a juicy, show-stopping star solo for Donna Wood.

Jamison’s first work for the company in which she used to be the uncontested prima exploited extreme contrasts--between galvanic drumming and airy jazz riffs (music by Kimati Dinizulu and Monti Ellison), between propulsive torso motion and taut, linear limb extensions. Only Wood, nearly unrecognizable in a lion mane hair style, brought the opposites into focus and even she began to look awfully silly in the relentless leap-and-flail vocabulary.

Sillier still, “Collage” (to jazzy, repetitious music by L. Subramaniam) represented a throwback to early modern dance: a nature study/drapery dance with dancers as flowers, tree foliage, birds, etc. The adapted-Graham movement style, costumes and slide projections all reinforced the premise.

Wearing a blue dress with one enormous green sleeve and an underskirt of white, Wood gloried in liquid swirls and shimmies: the spirit of the surf.

Unlike Jamison, McKayle is no novice, but the jazz and mime elements he deftly incorporated here merely decorated an overextended, tired exercise with only its vibrant execution to recommend it.