Ailey 'roller coaster ride' in NYC.

NEW YORK CITY--If performing in the sterling setting of the New York State Theater last summer allowed the dancers of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater to be seen in their full richness, the company's City Center season, December 4 to 31, will showcase the depth and luster of Ailey's repertoire. It offers twenty-one ballets by eleven choreographers, making it clear that Ailey has become the premiere repository of modern dance.

Hans van Manen's 1995 Polish Pieces gets its United States premiere, Lar Lubovitch's 1981 Cavalcade has its first reading by a company other than its creator's, and two gems from the Ailey repertoire return: George Faison's Suite Otis and Ailey's For Bird-With Love. Being reprised is Sweet Release, artistic director Judith Jamison's collaboration with Wynton Marsalis, which premiered at last summer's Lincoln Center Festival. The season offers works by Donald McKayle, Ulysses Dove, Elisa Monte, and others.

"It's my fantasy of the roller coaster that I want you to go through when you're sitting in the audience," says Jamison, explaining how she programs a season. "I want you to experience different sounds, sights--if I could have smells it would be great." Some works on an evening's program are "juxtaposed oddly," she acknowledges, "but I think that it should be a real adventure, that you should be able to turn corners and go around places where you haven't been before."

Last summer Ailey returned to a place where it hadn't been for twenty years: the New York State Theater. "It was wonderful to be back there," Jamison says, noting that the company sold 96 percent of the seats for the August engagement. "That's where we need to be when we're performing in New York. We need to be in as many venues as possible--City Center, Lincoln Center, anywhere else."

Discussing the City Center season, Jamison calls van Manen a "master of choreography," emphasizing that "it's very important that dancers of this generation experience those choreographers. Hans van Manen's way of moving expresses a subtlety that is sometimes not in view in this generation." The piece, to excerpts from Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki's Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings and Three Pieces in the Old Style, is languorous--a clear departure from the breakneck dancing and speedy choreography that has lately been the company's forte.

Lubovitch's Cavalcade, Jamison says, provides "another fascinating way for the company to move. There's a perspective that he has, rather like that of a falcon." With Lubovitch's company performing less, Ailey's role in presenting his work is especially vital.

The staple of the company's repertoire remains the work of its founder. For Bird--With Love, one of the most expensive productions in the company's history, makes "an important statement about Mr. Ailey's production values," says Jamison. Ailey's 1984 tribute to Charlie Parker is a reminder, she says, that the company can perform "ballets with a stool on the stage, or a ballet with an entire set on the stage. It's important to be reminded of that every now and then. Especially when times are so hard financially for everyone, you still see that, in Mr. Ailey's time, a production was put on that was lush and colorful and layered, and today we can still do that kind of production."