DANCE REVIEW : Alvin Ailey Dancers on Target : Spirit: The troupe’s performance in San Diego was vivid and spirited without resorting to swagger or braggadocio.

When braggadocio’s too bold or a swagger’s too sassy, psychology says it’s a cover for weakness. Need to compensate? Exaggerate to the opposite extreme.

Or get some therapy.

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater probably hasn’t had therapy, but the company’s performance Saturday at the Spreckels Theater certainly had the look of “centeredness,” of acting from one’s true self, with all its strengths and weaknesses.

For those wary of psychobabble, “to be centered” is an apt expression for dance. The art of dance, even when abstract, is not based on physical mastery alone. Technique is imbued with “spirit,” or the psyche. When both are in balance, neither needs exaggeration.

Judith Jamison, artistic director for the Ailey company since founder Alvin Ailey died in 1989, has polished off the company’s tawdry tarnish without rubbing out its spirit. Confidence has replaced show-biz overstatement; subtlety has a chance to shine.

These changes were immediately apparent during the opening dance of Saturday’s program--the second performance of a three-day San Diego engagement presented over the weekend by the San Diego Foundation for the Performing Arts.

In “Night Creature,” three movements choreographed by Ailey in 1975 to Duke Ellington’s jazz suite of the same name, 10 couples strut and sashay with feline perfection. They spin undulate, kick high, and throw themselves into the moment, until the final splash that soaks the audience with upbeat intensity.

No overcompensation using superficial theatrics or cornball facial expressions in Saturday’s rendition--the dance said it all.

With virtuosity, Deborah Manning and Don Bellamy executed “Treading,” Elisa Monte’s 1979 duet, set to the musical “treadling” of composer Steven Reich. In this seamless work, the bodies are perpetually flexed and in flux. Pilobolus-style contortions characterize the sculptural partnering without being buoyant or cute. The dance is organic, muscular, rhythmic, and unrelenting--it treads water symbolically, and refers, metaphorically, to the professional lives of dancers. To relax, to stop moving, would be to sink and drown.

The program’s most contemporary work, Ulysses Dove’s 1989 “Episodes,” commissioned for the company, gave the “battle of the sexes” genre another feverish dance. This one, however, is more an “intersection” of the sexes, with both sides bursting with dynamism on equal terms. No one wins, or dominates. No one is defeated either.

Dancers--men and women--are taken up and tossed off. They fight, they assist, they go at it hard, fast, and fierce to the sonic booms of Robert Ruggieri’s electronic score and under the clean design of John B. Read’s lighting.

Repetitive moves in the final segment flaw the choreography, which is gripping otherwise for its athleticism and emotional punch. The performance itself was diminished when the waist-length hair of one dancer was slung around for effect.

Nevertheless, “Episodes” showed off the Ailey company’s muscle and moxie, liberally endowed among female and male dancers.

For “Revelations,” Ailey’s 1960 signature piece performed to a series of spirituals, the dancers need different sensibilities. In this pleasing, familiar finale, they delivered. Woeful without becoming lugubrious, tender but not sentimental, they danced with spiffy vigor, with elan, and left exaggeration out.