Ailey in the Age of Overkill

American popular culture is so addicted to overkill it would be unreasonable to assume that the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has stayed untainted. Unreasonable and inaccurate.

Certainly overkill reigned at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Wednesday -- opening night of a six-performance Ailey engagement -- as if the sublime simplicity of Ailey’s classic “Revelations” at the end of the evening provided a license for the rest of the program to go for broke.

Co-choreographed by Judith Jamison, Robert Battle and Rennie Harris, “Love Stories” (2005) used taped and projected Ailey quotes to make a statement about the company he founded -- though a different kind of statement emerged in the dancing.

The piece began with a solo establishing Clifton Brown as a millennial virtuoso with limitless technical prowess but no sense of purpose, no real use for all that hard-won excellence other than to be arbitrarily slow/fast, smooth/sharp, airborne/grounded, offhand/focused in a kind of test drive.

A series of group dances -- some playful, some incorporating contemporary street style -- suggested that the impulse to dance displayed in Brown’s solo might be rewarded by a sense of community within the company: the happiness of belonging to a brotherhood /sisterhood of like-minded paragons. However, so much of what followed became a blur of lighting and costume changes, as well as hard-sell dance riffs galore, that no concept or theme survived to the final curtain.

In contrast, Ronald K. Brown’s “Ife/My Heart” (2005) pushed the word “love” at the audience so relentlessly in speech and song that the piece became the dance equivalent of an infomercial.

This choreographer is a master of complex, deep-in-the-torso movement expression, but his pieces have grown so obnoxiously preachy that you don’t know whether you should applaud or look for the collection plate.

This time around, changes of costume and accompaniment divided the cast into African, Afro-Cuban and African American contingents, but the hyperactive choreography spent little time making national distinctions or conveying a feeling of loving and being loved.

Instead it became an aggressive fusillade of technique, often right in the audience’s teeth, Broadway style. And all that love stuff coming out of the loudspeakers soon seemed a self-righteous, manipulative pretext for hot but empty showpiece dancing.

Split into segments for Clifton Brown, Glenn Allen Sims and Matthew Rushing, the high-velocity, intricate choreography of Hans van Manen’s “Solo” (1997) had a welcome clarity after the pileup of effects in “Love Stories” and “Ife/My Heart.” But dance drama might have been more welcome Wednesday than one more ostentatious flash act.

Still, “Solo” helped you see that the satisfactions of an Ailey program usually have nothing to do with statements about company solidarity or the need for love in your life. No, the smile on your face comes from watching Rushing spinning dizzily. Or Dwana Adiaha Smallwood shaking joyously. Or Linda Celeste Sims balancing serenely. Or Brown bringing nobility to each step. Or Antonio Douthit deciding that everything he’s ever learned about dancing will be on view.

Even if the choreography has nothing else, it has them. It’s not their fault that they live in the Age of Overkill, and that whatever they might feel about the steps, characters and themes they embody, they’re always primed for greatness.

“Revelations” was the proof. It allowed Amos J. Machanic Jr. to make the tiniest muscular contractions in “I Want to Be Ready” into an eloquent personal expression and released the “Sinner Man” trio of Brown, Jamar Roberts and Kirven J. Boyd into unhinged, off-balance bravura perfectly tuned to a feeling of hopeless terror.

Gone was dismay that the earlier pieces on the program had rushed by so quickly that only woozy afterimages remained. Instead we saw, as if spotlighted and in slow motion, the posteriors of 11 women in long yellow dresses inexorably descend onto wooden stools for the finale. And every swing of those women’s fans seemed to project at least to the end of the galaxy.

So the Wednesday performance proved anew that choreography matters, that excess can be self-defeating and that even a great company, sadly, can’t nullify the zeitgeist -- though it can offer some potent compensations.

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Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A.

When: 7:30 tonight, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday. Check listings for repertory.

Price: $25 to $95

Contact: (213) 365-3500 or www.ticketmaster.com