This Troupe Shows Saving Graces

Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations” is one of the great, soul-filling joys of world dance. And on Thursday, it needed to be, because otherwise the four-part program by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion subjected the audience to the grim rigors of the condition known as CDS: Choreography Deprivation Syndrome.

These are the symptoms: scattered and essentially rootless movement ideas that stubbornly refuse to connect or flow, crude technical flash and a desperate overreliance on lighting effects to camouflage the emptiness.

Add a droning, scraping, thumping, wheezing sound score and you have Dwight Rhoden’s “Chocolate Sessions” (2000), an exercise in dead-end discontinuity that may not be as arid as his “Twist” (performed by Dance Theatre of Harlem in Cerritos two months ago) but misuses the ballet vocabulary just as flagrantly.

All honor, then, to an Ailey cast that makes every dull facet of it gleam with spirit and prowess. Clifton Brown turns a pointlessly eccentric, rubber-bodied solo into a major diversion and, as the cavalier in the recurring duets that give the work an illusion of structure, Benoit-Swan Pouffer not only partners Bahiyah Sayyed adroitly, but also unifies his task-driven assignment with a compelling inner reality.

Unfortunately, the technically superb Matthew Rushing lacks this ability to motivate problematic choreography in “Double Exposure” (2000), Judith Jamison’s muddled attempt to make a fancy-dress techno-divertissement from the implosion of anguished alter egos played by Rushing and Glenn A. Sims.

Projected on screens at the back of the stage, hand-held video images of the dancing occur here and there, a few seconds at a time, but are most often swallowed up by canned, generalized effects (sun flares, grids, etc.) that never become an integral component of the choreography. And although one could watch Sayyed, Asha Thomas and Dwana Adiaha Smallwood arch their backs for hours, sometimes that’s all Jamison seems to have in mind.

The best of the new Ailey offerings on Thursday: “Sweet Bitter Love” (2000), an uneven but forceful lost-love duet to pop ballads, choreographed by Carmen de Lavallade in a fluid, emotion-driven and resolutely old-fashioned modern dance style.

You could argue that De Lavallade leaves Sims inexplicably clenched for far too long, and that nothing in Renee Robinson’s relationship with him prepares you for her florid burst of feeling once he’s gone, gone, gone. But you can’t really blame Ailey dancers for taking such opportunities to extremes; so little work made for them these days asks them to be more than virtuosic pawns.

In the recast “Revelations,” a number of principals seemed to mine the movement for all the power it could yield. These paragons included Anthony Burrell in “Didn’t My Lord,” Linda Caceres-Sims (opposite Amos J. Machanic Jr.) in “Fix Me, Jesus,” and Richard Whitter in “Sinner Man,” with Kristofer Storey and Samuel Deshauteurs (Whitter’s colleagues in sin) no slouches either.

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