TV DANCE : Ailey American Dance Theater on PBS

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater returns to the PBS “Dance in America” series tonight with two intense group pieces influenced by trends in European dance-theater and the style of American choreographer-in-exile William Forsythe.

Titled “Steps Ahead,” the hour-long telecast can be seen at 9 p.m. on Channels 15 and 24; at 9:30 on Channel 28, and Saturday at 10 p.m. on Channel 50.

Choreographed by Ailey protege Ulysses Dove, “Episodes” (1989) reflects Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet aesthetic in its stark, black-on-black spatial isolation and harsh lighting, its propulsive wheeze-and-thump score and, especially, its random yet uniformly assaultive couplings between dancers.

Dove’s originality asserts itself primarily in the weight and stretch of the movement vocabulary and in his use of contrasting patterns of floor lighting to define the different sections of the piece. We see the Ailey dancers hurtling towards one another down narrow avenues of light and across intersections--or whirling from one brightly defined circle to the next. It’s literally life on the run and Dove makes us feel the brutalizing force.

Ailey’s own “For Bird--With Love” (1984) depicts the career of jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker in a neo-Expressionist collage of images, with linear storytelling ignored in favor of startling juxtapositions: Parker in church, in Birdland, in a straitjacket. . . .

Gary DeLoatch makes a sympathetic protagonist, but Ailey tells us so little about the character that the work misfires as a bitter look at the price of fame. We simply don’t know Parker well enough here to share his confusion and estrangement--much less understand his relationship to that ominous, hovering figure played by Dudley Williams.

However, the jam-session dances provide the company men with spectacular opportunities for display, and the work, obviously, has gained new significance since Ailey’s death as an index to his demons.

Even with the discontinuities imposed by television director Thomas Grimm, we can glimpse Ailey borrowing methodologies from Pina Bausch, Forsythe and others to express in the most personal terms a predicament he shared with his subject. We may not see Charlie Parker clearly in “For Bird--With Love,” but Ailey himself seems closer than ever.