Alvin Ailey’s Vision, Sharpened

From a high, narrow portal at the back of the stage, Renee Robinson strolls toward the audience in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and dances the opening solo of Ronald K. Brown’s “Grace,” a solo set to Duke Ellington’s ballad “Come Sunday.”

Robinson is a senior member of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Ellington was the composer Ailey chose most frequently for his choreographies (14 dances), and Brown’s solo updates Ailey’s characteristic blend of jazz, modern, balletic and African idioms with devastating sharpness and complexity.

If any suspicion lingered Wednesday that the multicultural Ailey aesthetic had run its course, Robinson’s spectacular shifts from smooth, linear classical extensions to galvanic, angular African torso- and arm-pumping immediately put it to rest and kept it at bay with every startling juxtaposition in Brown’s arsenal.

On this opening night of a six-performance Ailey company engagement, the style that Ailey forged out of the popular, classical and contemporary theater-dance forms of his time gained renewed vigor not only from Brown’s incorporation of hip-hop rhythms and other post-Ailey influences, but the daring experiments in ballet partnering and balance issues found in Alonzo King’s “Following the Subtle Current Upstream.”

Also seen Wednesday, Ailey’s 1960 “Revelations” carried the seeds of many Brown and King innovations on view, so their flowering, more than a decade after his death, provided the strongest possible affirmation of his vision.

A cyclical suite that tells no story but traces a transition from red costumes to white for the 12-member cast, “Grace” (1999) keeps its array of movement choices tightly anchored, with much of the dancing performed in place or in a very limited radius.

Each dancer thus becomes a kind of force field, and Brown is careful to control the audience’s tendency to applaud every feat through sequencing ploys (overlaps, for instance) and lineups that face upstage or into the wings instead of straight front. No in-your-teeth bravura here, but rather a sophisticated layering of techniques and musical sources (mostly ‘90s rock and jazz) that gently subsides at the end in another “Come Sunday” prayer.

A chain of disarmingly intimate and supremely fluid dances for five men and eight women, “Following the Subtle Current Upstream” (2000) evolves from lyrical ballet style to more propulsive modern dance even as the taped accompaniment incorporates drumming from India, vocals from Africa, and the thunder claps and mechanical whine of contemporary urban sound painting.

The dancers prove just as phenomenal as in “Grace,” but the women labor at a disadvantage: King’s pulled-up, hyper-classical extensions are executed on half-toe here, while a ballet company such as King’s own Bay Area ensemble would achieve maximum stretch by performing them on full pointe.

And maximum stretch is very much the issue in a brilliant pas de deux for Linda Caceres-Sims and Matthew Rushing as radically stylized as Sims’ neo-Bauhaus tutu. Unorthodox supported balances, radical collaborative traveling gambits: The duet takes the ballerina-cavalier relationship way beyond 19th century conventions without losing classical elegance or Romantic mystery.

Of course, the same creative risk and physical surety shape Ailey’s “Fix Me, Jesus” duet in “Revelations” into a spirit-in-the-flesh classic that still seems wondrous after 41 years, even when danced rather blankly, as it was Wednesday, and accompanied by a tape that often sacrifices the purity of traditional spirituals for attenuated, mannered showcasing.

The finest moments in this first millennial Los Angeles “Revelations” come in the ensembles: “I Been ‘Buked” and “Rocka My Soul,” of course, but also the whole “Take Me to the Water” sequence, which has frequently lost its shape in previous tour seasons.

Among the soloists, nobody surpasses the airy sunniness of Robinson, the compulsive shivering of Dwana Adiaha Smallwood and the state-of-the-art pliancy of Amos J. Machanic Jr. in “Wade in the Water,” not even the predictably sizzling “Sinner Man” virtuosos: Clifton Brown, Matthew Rushing and Troy O’Neil Powell.”

*

* The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater repeats this program on Sunday at 3 p.m. in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A. Other programs tonight at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. $15 to $75. (213) 972-0711.