DANCE REVIEW : Ailey Troupe Shows Vitality in Irvine

After Thursday night’s fervent yet elegant performance of Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations” at the Irvine Barclay Theatre in Irvine, it’s tempting to picture the choreographer--who died a scant 15 months ago--smiling down on the company he founded, relieved that all is well.

On a program devoted to works by Ailey and Broadway choreographer Donald McKayle (who is on the UC Irvine faculty), “Revelations” was the most satisfying.

Made in 1960, the piece contains an extraordinarily vital blend of recorded African-American spirituals, deft stagecraft and dancing that makes beautiful lines in space at the same time that it speaks emotionally of public and private spirituality.

The present company, directed by Judith Jamison, preserves the long, liquid reaches, the weighted squats, slow backbends, pumping torsos and flirty hips. The urgency of the movements is tempered by brief moments of stillness that imbue long-limbed poses with a noble gravity.

Nasha Thomas and Daniel Clark gave the “Fix Me, Jesus” section a glorious clarity, and Andre Tyson’s lingering back falls and stressful balances in “I Want to Be Ready” seemed not only virtuosic but heartfelt.

New to Southern California in the Ailey company production, McKayle’s “Games” from 1950--a dance created around a series of children’s street games, accompanied by kiddie rhymes sung a cappella--was revived here more plausibly two years ago by Lula Washington’s Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Theater.

The exaggeratedly babyish stances and gestures that looked genuinely sassy and unpredictable on LACDT dancers seemed more like cute parlor tricks or campy sashaying in the Ailey version. If memory serves, the LACDT production also had a more artful set and more believably old-fashioned kids clothing (though Remy Charlip is credited for both versions).

Still, in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating, the curious end of the piece--in which a little girl falls into the clutches of an unseen policeman (“He’s gonna catch you and beat your hide, beat all your bones”)--seemed unusually ominous.

The evening opened with Ailey’s “Hidden Rites” of 1973, a turgid and ultimately enigmatic work featuring a shaman (a muscularly energetic but psychically uninvolved Jonathan Riseling), two passionate couples and a colony of men and women capable of being ecstatic or downcast on cue.

The trademark Ailey movements--this time with a slightly exotic stress on flexible wrists, right-angled arms and flexed feet--are underlined by Patrice Sciortino’s shimmering drum-and-bell music from “Les Cyclopes.” If it is hard to find the center of this would-be mythologizing piece, the dancers--nearly all of whom gave their all--surely aren’t to blame.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, which bypassed Los Angeles this year, won’t return to the West Coast until 1993.