Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Each year, as the winter holiday season infiltrates New York City, the Alvin Ailey company takes up its monthlong residence at City Center. You can count on two things: dancers who will blow your mind and choreography that, in large part, won't. Dedicated by artistic director Judith Jamison to the women of the company and to female choreographers, this season confirmed such expectations.

"Hi, y'all," Jamison calls to us from the stage on opening night, extending her arms wide, a peacock's wing-spread, to model her glittering golden cloak. "Are you ready to go?" The sight is awesome, the warmth infectious - Jamison is still the quintessential Ailey dancer. Just behold her in Hymn (1993), her own tribute to Ailey, engaged in "spiritual walking." The tread is long, the carriage is erect, the arms swing with grace and assurance and aplomb. She steams forward, the figurehead at the prow of a ship, causing us to swoon in her marvelous wake.

This is the kinetic legacy Jamison continues. Moving, her dancers describe pride, elegance, effort's ecstasy. Yet the allure of the dancing is about much more than presence. Right now, the Ailey troupe represents one of the most technically proficient companies to ply its trade in New York City. Lines are clean, precise; explosive jumps find a sure-tooted descent; high extensions pierce the void; contractions shudder percussively; falls make a pact with gravity. And the whole is bound by a burning focus and a fierce commitment to the moment.

Despite exacting such across-the-company achievement, Jamison has managed to preserve and encourage the dancers' individuality (perhaps another lesson learned at the feet of her mentor). The total number of examples of personal valor displayed this season are too numerous to mention. Here's the short list: Karine Plantadit-Bageot, who wields her body of liquid steel with an authority not undercut by flashes of humor; romantic, luxuriant Toni Pierce; Nasha Thomas, sharp and precise in Vespers; Leonard Meek, whose fibrous, angular frame barely contains a streak of wildness; exacting Michael Thomas; the ineffable Dudley Williams, celebrating thirty years with the company. And in a performance of Revelations that might serve to sum up the Alley difference, Duane Cyrus strutted and clapped, he swayed and he stamped. Eyes alight, face tight with joy, chest burstingly upright, he seemed to be saying, Come dance with me, come into the light.

Given all this divine material, you'd think the choreography would rise to the occasion. Yet this wellspring of talent apparently feeds a paradox. At work with this company, all a dance-maker need do to look relatively professional and to show an audience a good time is exploit the dancers' technical and dramatic prowess. The two premieres of the season basically followed this unadventurous route. They each provided the dancers with a pleasant enough vehicle in which to show off.

Brenda Way's work, mysteriously entitled Scissors Paper Stone (I could detect no distinct reference to the hand game), operates on attitude. Two women and a man romp together, playful and aggressive. Interactions contain all the intimacy and irritation aroused by a hot summer night. The loose sassy body language has a contemporary edge that makes a statement and then goes nowhere. Mnemonic Verses, created by Elisa Monte, is similarly one-dimensional, albeit with a very different flavor. Here we enter an ancient, perhaps Eastern world in which the women, in baggy pants, move by way of sinuous gyrations of the torso, pleasurable writhings. Their community invaded by men, they seem to become slaves. The women are slung over the men's backs; they dangle between their partners' legs; they slide their backs down the front of the men's torsos; they struggle at the top of lifts, as if trying to escape. Though the movement has a slinky, erotic frisson, the subtext of capitulation quickly casts its pall.

Nor did the season's three revivals provide the company with much greater breadth. Though Carmina Burana (1959) was invigorated on opening night by a live choral rendition of Carl Orff's epic score, John Butler's choreography stymied the dancers, forcing them into difficult, cramping postures - a dated mixture of ballet and Graham that obscured the music's emotional thrust. Even the lush, virtuosic Don Bellamy could inject little life into his technically tangled solo.

At the other end of the choreographic spectrum, Ailey's 1974 Night Creature, a jazzy gloss, is held together largely on the strength of Lydia Roberts's magnetic flirtatiousness. Vespers, made in 1986 by Ulysses Dove for six women, fared best. The spare, driving, emphatic phrases of movement complement and challenge these magnificent performers. They are revealed as Amazons, striding, plunging, spinning, soaring, hurtling through space.