Celebrating a Heritage in Motion

Maybe it’s just that the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts creates a special intimacy between dancers and audience, but the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater looked exceptionally relaxed, sophisticated and purposeful there Wednesday in the opening performance of its weeklong engagement.

Gone were the energy-circus excesses and display-oriented attitude of the past. Instead, the company focused on artistic essentials, using its spectacular technical and expressive resources to reveal facets of the repertory that used to get lost in all the flash and clamor.

The new refinement may have been most dramatically evident in the revival of George Faison’s “Suite Otis,” a 1971 showpiece that wasn’t even supposed to be on the program but ended up replacing Lar Lubovitch’s “Cavalcade” because of illness in the company ranks. Set to recordings by the late Otis Redding, this collage of expertly recycled jazz-dance cliches and cutesy-poo playacting used to look awfully vulgar at times--but no longer.

The hard-sell gender stereotypes are now undercut with great tact and even a quasi-nostalgic half-smile--as if to say, “I remember sexism.” Dwana Smallwood and Matthew Rushing deliver the character jokes in “My Lover’s Prayer” unstintingly, but make their pure-dance passages into the thrilling main event. And, of course, everyone looks fabulous in pink.

After 37 years, you’d think that Ailey’s inspired “Revelations” had no secrets left to uncover, but the current performances are so scrupulous that all sorts of structural concepts and expressive details emerge in high relief.

Formerly a singular achievement, the gestural delicacy of Elizabeth Roxas in “Fix Me Jesus” is now matched by Roger Bellamy in the “I Want to Be Ready” solo and even by some of the high-voltage virtuosos: Uri Sands, Jeffrey Gerodias and Troy Powell in “Sinner Man,” for instance. Ironically, only the sure-fire “Wade in the Water” section misfires--the central duet simply goes nowhere and seems endless.

Completing the program and giving it a thematic unity that “Cavalcade” wouldn’t have permitted: artistic director Judith Jamison’s 1995 “Riverside” in its first local performance. If “Revelations” looks at African American identity through the gospel tradition, and “Suite Otis” shows how pop music reinforces social values within black culture, “Riverside” takes a panoramic view of the same heritage, exploring it from multiple angles.

Garnished with environmental sounds, the score by Kimati Dinizulu sometimes evokes African drumming, elsewhere the vintage instrumental and vocal lore of the American South. Similarly, Tim Hunter’s backdrop of ropes keeps changing its alignment to suggest everything from deep rain forest to crowded cityscape--and the dance vocabulary proves similarly varied.

This plotless seven-part suite develops from a tight, rhythmically pulsing social cluster into powerful phalanxes of men and women surging forward. A section titled “Homage” (repeated in the finale) shows Renee Robinson kneeling to bathe her face in a pool or stream--making nature a key component of the worldview being depicted.

Throughout, the style is loose, often even throwaway--yet just when you think the dancers are making it up as they go along, everyone freezes in a superbly designed, perfectly executed tableau.

In constructing her complex yet accessible company vehicle, Jamison consulted specialists in American folklore but also incorporated those flamboyant kick-yourself-in-the-head backbend jumps that come directly from the Bolshoi Ballet rather than rural Georgia or Louisiana.

Her point: that American culture has become an incredibly rich mix of influences at the end of this century--and that African Americans have shaped that culture and taken from it along with everyone else. But Jamison shows rather than tells, so what you take away are images of dancers perfectly centered in their art and time.

* The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater presents different mixed bills tonight at 8 p.m. through Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m., Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive. $20-$45. (800) 300-4345. From Tuesday-Feb. 23, the company moves to the Wiltern Theatre, 3790 Wilshire Blvd. $13-$40. (310) 825-2101.