DANCE : Thirty years and still dancing with the Alvin Ailey company--Dudley Williams remains a major player and a vibrant link to modern dance’s pioneering greats.

The world lost a pianist but gained a dancer back in 1954 when Dudley Williams applied to New York City’s High School of Performing Arts. He was too late for the music department auditions, so he entered the school’s dance program instead.

Enthralled and stimulated by his colleagues and teachers, he never looked back, blossoming into a dancer of singular expressiveness, integrity--and longevity.

This season, the dancer whom Alvin Ailey affectionately called Chicken (“I wonder why, with these skinny legs,” Williams chuckles) and whom fellow company members now refer to as the Professor, is marking his 30th anniversary with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Williams’ remarkable career has taken him through a period when, thanks to expanding audiences and unionization, modern dance consolidated itself as a profession. When he joined the Ailey company in 1964, it was a pickup group numbering 10 dancers. He participated in its growth into an established year-round operation with 30 dancers.

In his quiet, unshowy way, he became a company star, making roles in Ailey’s “Blues Suite” and “Revelations” definitively his own, creating important parts in “Love Songs,” “For ‘Bird’--With Love” and “Night Creature,” while also enthusiastically working in the varied styles of the many other choreographers--from Anna Sokolow to Louis Falco--whose work Ailey included in the repertory.

For many longtime Ailey watchers, there is a hole in the center of “Revelations” if Williams is not performing the poignant solo “I Want to Be Ready” with his eloquent restraint, or leading the celebratory finale with his infectious warmth. In an era of pyrotechnic wizardry, he is a reminder that there are more subtle qualities that make a dancer memorable and unique.

Williams remains a very active and enthusiastic performer, as will be much in evidence during the upcoming Ailey season at the Wiltern Theatre (opening Friday and continuing through Feb. 26). He will be on stage at nearly every performance--in “Revelations,” of course, and in two newer works: “The Winter in Lisbon,” choreographed by the late Billy Wilson in 1992, and Judith Jamison’s “Hymn,” a 1993 collaboration with Anna Deavere Smith that is a vivid personal tribute to Ailey’s life and work.

Slender and youthful-looking (he happily owns up to being 57 but comes across as considerably younger), Williams recently settled into an available office at the bustling Ailey headquarters in Manhattan to reflect on his vast store of dance memories and insights. He had rushed in from the studio after a run-through of “Hymn,” which was being documented by a film crew, and had to interrupt the interview to coach a group of students from the Ailey School to whom he was teaching Ailey’s “Reflections in D,” one of his own signature roles.

Williams arrived at the High School of Performing Arts with some weekly classes in “interpretive dance” (“I still don’t know what that is,” he remarks) under his belt, and found a new world opening up to him. Classmates such as Eleo Pomare (in whose works he would later dance) and teachers such as May O’Donnell of the Martha Graham Company convinced the teen-ager that “this was what I wanted to do” and he never transferred into the music department as he had planned. “My mother was furious because she had bought a piano for me,” he recalls. “I’ve never touched it since!”

He moved on to the Juilliard School, where the faculty included Graham and most of the other significant modern dance figures of the day. Williams remembers being “like a sponge” there.

“At that time,” he says, “you had to choose one discipline--Graham or (Jose) Limon or ballet--but while I took Graham, I was also sneaking into Limon classes and peeking through the door to watch the ballet combinations. I wanted to learn as much as possible.”

Graham offered him a work scholarship at her own school--washing windows and vacuuming floors in exchange for classes. Soon, he was spending more time there than at Juilliard, and by 1960 he was a member of her company. He created roles in most of the dances Graham choreographed during the 1960s, including “Secular Games” and “Plain of Prayer.”

In those days, however, the company worked only sporadically, and during one hiatus in 1964 Williams--for the first and only time--decided to stop dancing.

“It was cold turkey. Don’t ask me why. A friend of mine was working in Germany at the time, and encouraged me to go there.”

Fortunately, fate intervened. “The day before I was leaving, Alvin called and said, ‘Hi, Dudley, we need a dancer who knows Talley Beatty’s repertory.’ ” Williams slows down his speech and lowers his voice to a basso profundo as he recalls Ailey’s momentous invitation. He and the choreographer had crossed paths within the small world of modern dancers, and Williams had been deeply affected when he saw Ailey’s dancers performing in Central Park in the early 1960s. “I saw this company--with Carmen de Lavallade, Jimmy Truitte, Thelma Hill--of all sizes and colors and shapes and thought, ‘This is definitely what I want to do.’ Little did I know that I would get the opportunity.”

As it turned out, the Ailey company was preparing for a tour to London and Paris. Putting aside all his earlier thoughts of leaving dance, Williams signed on and soon found himself performing in the same works that had so inspired him when he first saw the company.

When the Ailey tour ended he went back to working with Martha Graham, and when that company went to Europe critics were puzzled to find the same dancer in such a different repertory. He continued to shuttle between the two companies throughout the 1960s until the moment of truth arrived: Ailey and Graham both had tours at the same time.

“I had to make a decision; I couldn’t continue doing both any longer. I chose Alvin, simply because a Greek god I’m not. I didn’t have the muscles, and while there were one or two Graham pieces in which I could show what I could do, mostly I was in the background. With Alvin, I was on every night, and I was myself. I didn’t have to be a Greek god. It was more down-to-earth; it was more me. Alvin had a wonderful here-and-now company.”

But before he could commit himself fully to that here-and-now, he had to inform the formidable Graham of his decision.

“I had injured the cartilage in my knee during an Ailey tour in Africa, and Miss Graham had paid for my rehabilitation out of her own pocket, because she needed me for a Broadway season. Soon after that was when I made my choice. I said, ‘Miss Graham, I’m sorry, but I’m leaving the company.’ She said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. What are you going to do?’ When I told her I would be dancing with Alvin, I felt a crack across my face--backhand! It was a betrayal and I deserved it. So that’s how I left Graham--with a slap in the face!

“The Ailey company in the mid-’60s was small and very tight. Alvin used to call it a family, and he was the daddy--and also the mommy. We were all very close in age and hung out together as friends,” Williams recalls.

He soon found out that for all his warmth and generosity, Ailey was also a hard taskmaster. “He let us know he was going to do things his way--like it or leave it. He kept making us dance things over and over again full out. You really learned a role fully; you knew what each one was about, what he had intended when he made it. . . .

“(But) he was always very flexible; that was the wonderful thing about working with him. You could ask him about adapting a movement in a role, show him what you were doing, and he would either say ‘good’ or ‘not good.’ The one thing he always stressed about ‘Revelations’ was that he wanted the yellow section (the dance’s finale) to be very elegant. He wanted us to have a regal self-assurance--an inner smile, rather than necessarily grinning.”

The solo Williams performs in “Revelations,” “I Want to Be Ready,” was taught to him early in his Ailey tenure by James Truitte, who originated the part.

“I told Jimmy, ‘It looks so easy, but it isn’t.’ Coccyx balances and hinges are not easy! You have to make it look easy. Jimmy helped me and gave me lots of images to work with, which I still pass on when I teach the solo to younger dancers in the company. Most of them are concerned with beautiful feet, high extensions and how many turns they can do within a phrase. I try to tell them that this solo is not about those things. It’s about something else that I cannot teach; it has to be inside you.

“Near the end, you do a half-turn, like a perch, before you fall to the floor and finish. They are trying to do three attitude turns, and I ask why. One sustained half a turn is far superior to all those pirouettes. To me, it’s a blur. Such a serene piece doesn’t call for that trick.”

Jamison’s “Hymn” incorporates the dancers’ own recollections about Ailey, as transcribed and interpreted by Anna Deavere Smith (who will perform in the piece Saturday night in her first local appearance since her powerful “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992”), and during Williams’ section he enacts a poignant ritual of memory and loss while Smith speaks Williams’ recollection of a conversation with Ailey about death. The dancers were never fully aware of the severity of their director’s illness until just before he died, of a rare blood disorder, in 1989.

“He didn’t want anybody to know he was ill,” Williams recalls. “We were on tour and at the final stop in Copenhagen they called a company meeting and said, ‘If you want to see Alvin alive, go immediately to the hospital when you get back to New York.’ We were stunned. When I visited him in the hospital, he woke up and said, ‘Hi, Chicken, you made it.’ I told him how successful the tour had been and he fell asleep while we were talking. I never spoke with him again.”

These days, in his own modest and untrumpeted way, Williams helps keep Ailey’s legacy alive both through his performances and his coaching of fellow dancers and students. Over the years, he resisted Ailey’s offers of administrative positions, with both the main and the second company.

“I always said, ‘No, I just want to dance,’ and I still wouldn’t want it. It’s a very difficult job, and Judy (Jamison) was the best person for it. She’s doing wonderfully. We have 30 dancers, and each of them knows he or she is special.”

Asked if he thought, 15 or 20 years ago, that he would still be dancing at 57, Williams replies, “I never thought about what would happen to me. You have to go day by day. I didn’t even realize 30 years had gone by. I try to find something new in everything I do. When you stop finding anything new, it’s time to stop. Right now, I’d like to be dancing every day. I hope new choreographers come in and want to work with me. It’s hard to say what propels me. I’m a dancer.”

When, in 1984, Williams reached his 20th anniversary with Ailey--already a rare milestone for any dancer to achieve--the company held a festive evening in his honor. This past December, during the company’s New York season, there was another special Dudley Williams program to mark his 30th. Williams performed in four pieces that night and received loving tributes from many former colleagues. And if Williams has his way, he will be around for another celebration to mark his 40th.

* Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performs Friday through Feb. 26 at the Wiltern Theatre, 3780 Wilshire Blvd. Tickets are $16-$40. For program information, call (310) 825-2101.