Ailey troupe fulfills promise

At its best, a group such as the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater inspires promises. I promise to know faults. I promise to be joyful. I promise to be aware of my American heritage in all its shameful and glorious forms.

As the season-closer Saturday at the Maine Center for the Arts, the Ailey troupe accomplished delivering both this kind of self-awareness and an evening of fun and expertly performed dance.

Ailey, who died in 1989, built a company that celebrated African-American dance and history. A populist vision at its heart, the company has had the high-kicking energy of street dance, the finesse of Broadway and the natural-born rhythm of human emotion as captured by both Ailey and other contemporary choreographers whose work would be premiered under Ailey’s aegis. For the past five years, former Ailey dancer, Judith Jamison, has been artistic director for the company, and has deftly preserved Ailey’s idea with sharpness, sureness and playful poignancy.

Saturday’s show included four pieces, two by Ailey and two by other American choreographers. In the opening performance of Ailey’s “Night Creature,” a tribute to jazz great Duke Ellington, the dancers were awash in nocturnal blue light and clothed in costumes dyed blue with sudden streaks of electric color. Their hips rolled in dizzying revolutions. Their hands rose in flocks of testament to the magical pulse of night. Dancers trucked across stage as the jazz tunes blared. They cakewalked and strutted with what could only rightfully be called butt-shaking beauty. Classical ballet framed this expressionistic dance, but it did contain it.

The second performance of an Ailey choreography was his signature piece “Revelations,” about the motivations and emotions of African-American spirituals and gospel tunes. Created in 1960, the year Ailey founded the group, “Revelations” has come to represent the themes of struggle and deliverance. In the alluring opening sequence of “I Been ‘Buked,” a triangle of dancers pulsed, crouched deeply, and stretched out in long, graceful, impassioned extentions. Again, the hands reached skyward in praise but also in the form of wings flying toward freedom.

At the close of the 30-minute piece, which came at the end of the evening, the audience rose in a jubliant frenzy of reverence and enchantment. After 35 years, “Revelation” still had a freshness, a realness and pertinence that can universally grab hearts and squeeze them tight with sorrow and exultation.

The middle pieces for the show were Brenda Way’s “Scissors Paper Stone,” a postmodern menage a trois of yanks, knots and tosses between limber dancers Toni Pierce, Renee Robinson and Michael Thomas, and Billy Wilson’s “The Winter in Lisbon,” a sizzling, ’50s-style romp of hot colors and hot sensuality.

The latter was done so ably and cheerfully, that it paradoxically seemed as if this were the first time these dancers were performing something they had been doing all their lives. It had both gleeful spontaniety and exquisite control. Especially breathtaking were Linda-Denise Evans and Leonard Meek in an elegant and voluptuous pas de deux. Meek appeared also in a funky segment of yahoo-look-what-my-body-can-do expositions with Thomas, Matthew Rushing, Desiree Vlad and Elizabeth Roxas.

Director Jamison has described Ailey’s dances as a form of “spiritual walking,” that when the works come to life, his spirit moves them. Saturday’s performance certainly seemed to bear this out. His work is the stuff of promises: clear-vision, hope, joy and sincerity. And that has not been lost or compromised in his absence.