TV Reviews : ‘Alvin Ailey Remembered’ on Channel 28

“Going Home: Alvin Ailey Remembered” (tonight at 9 on KCET Channel 28) breaks all the rules for entertainment programming. Not merely another tribute to the choreographer who died Dec. 1, this hour-long telecast is essentially a transcription of the memorial service held for him at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.

Like Ailey’s grieving family, friends and colleagues, we look past his coffin at a ceremony intended (dancer Donna Wood explains) to send him on. “Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us,” poet Maya Angelou reminds us from the pulpit. This is no ordinary performance.

Ailey himself speaks to us from archival videotape. “I’m a choreographer,” he says. “I’m a black man whose roots are in the sun and dirt of the South. . . .”

An even younger, dancing Ailey appears in black-and-white 1962 footage, and these sequences--along with brief, intimate interview segments with former Ailey dancers--help broaden the Cathedral experience. Sometimes the words don’t add up, but the ravaged faces are eloquent enough and director Andrew Clark Wilk captures them in haunting close-ups.

Edited with great tact, the eulogies by New York City Mayor David Dinkins and others pass quickly, shifting the emphasis onto dancing by past and present members of the Ailey company. Dudley Williams takes “A Song for You” (from “Love Songs”) into a new dimension, Wood is back in the exultant final section of “Cry,” Mari Kajiwara returns to lend her radiance to “Revelations.”

The Ailey company has been accused in recent years of growing lackadaisical, mannered, hyperathletic--but nearly everyone on this occasion is dancing out of deep emotion, connected to a sense of purpose often latent in these choreographies but here devastatingly intense.

Unfortunately, only singers and speakers are identified. In what seems to be a recent PBS mandate, dancer names are relegated to a mass listing in the final credits--even when the dancers perform solos or duets. A program by the American Indian Dance Theatre recently suffered from this same policy and it will be instructive to see if PBS keeps the dancers of American Ballet Theatre equally anonymous.