At Last, Ailey at the Pavilion

“Forty years it took to get here,” said artistic director Judith Jamison, accepting official city and county commendations for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater on the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion just before the company’s Thursday performance. The question is why. With a local audience so devoted that it whoops and yelps virtually every time an Ailey dancer lifts a foot anywhere above the knee, why did it take until 1998 to program even four days of rep in our glittering downtown culture mall?

The company’s Music Center debut comes in a year when it is likely to be the only dance attraction at the Pavilion--and in a month when a tougher, more contemporary vision of African American dance can be found just across the plaza at the Ahmanson. Indeed, “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk” leaves the new Ailey production of George Faison’s 1971 dance drama “Slaves” looking crude and unimaginative in scenes where they overlap. Sometimes even downright inept.

Using jazz recordings, including three by Yusef Lateef, “Slaves” follows the people of an African village from their homeland to forced exile, brutalization and growing solidarity in America. The theme is, of course, overwhelmingly powerful, but a major problem emerges very quickly: Faison can create pantomime-based storytelling passages and he can create flashy showpiece routines--but he can’t combine the two to make virtuosity expressive. So his 10-part suite lurches between intense gesticulation and empty-headed display, with his showy lifts and other crowd-pleasing bravura functioning as artificial sweeteners.

Along the way, he achieves a few moments of genuine inspiration--the solo for the always spectacular Uri Sands at the end of a long rope, for example. And the company looks fabulous throughout, especially perhaps in the early sequence showing the hunting of a gazelle--the technically prodigious Linda Caceres--in choreography largely appropriated from the classic Yaqui deer dance of northern Mexico. Twenty-seven years ago, all the cutting, pasting, borrowing and sweetening might have passed muster, but in the here and now, “Slaves” looks like a dance-history stopgap: worth reviving chiefly to show how far we’ve come.

Happily, the program provides more satisfying revivals. Starting with a magnificently furious solo for Matthew Rushing full of surprising shifts of position and impetus, the new production of Ulysses Dove’s 1984 “Bad Blood” revels in the integration of emotion and virtuosity that “Slaves” lacks. This is the newest work in the company’s Music Center engagement and it gets at societal tensions obliquely through dramatic, unresolved encounters between couples--all set to recordings by Laurie Anderson and Peter Gabriel replete with coded messages of their own.

Sex war turns out to be its focus, with Nasha Thomas-Schmitt and Bernard Gaddis locked in fiery combat in the first duet and offering an object lesson in how to generate movement and feeling from deep within the body. Like “Slaves,” it was choreographed for another company, but the Ailey dancers own it by right of conquest.

As nearly everyone who’s ever seen it might wish, Ailey’s 1960 “Revelations” closes the program with a joyous affirmation of both African American spirituality and the company’s unique place in the dance world. For the occasion, and the whole engagement, live music accompanies the dancing, with the drums sounding just terrible (dull thumping that could be coming from jackhammers under Grand Avenue), but the Bam Crawford’s Purpose choir compensating with singing of great purity and fervor. Among the soloists, Harolyn Blackwell floats gorgeous lyric tones in “Fix Me, Jesus,” Billy Porter ventures dynamic improvisational flourishes in “Sinner Man” and Ella Mitchell radiates soul in the finale. Tania Leon conducts expertly.

As usual, the dancing leaves the audience deliriously happy. Linda-Denise Evans and Don Bellamy go for a gutsier attack than normal in “Fix Me, Jesus,” Amos J. Machanic Jr. finds an unexpected vulnerability in “I Wanna Be Ready” and Sands looks simultaneously tormented and technically astounding in “Sinner Man,” a combination that even Rushing can’t match. Finally, in the baptism scene, Gaddis turns what has become known as the coffee-grinder walk into a major event like nobody since Clive Thompson.

* Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave. Tonight at 8; Sunday, 2 p.m. “The Stack Up” (Beatty); “Night Creature,” “Cry” and “Revelations” (Ailey). $15-$55. (213) 365-3500.