Honorary Chair Mo'Nique. Photo by Dario Calmese

With the holidays fast approaching, nothing brings us pirouetting into the snowflake season quite like the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT). At Wednesday’s Opening Night Gala, the limbs were flying around the stage with unfettered aplomb, flitting from grace to gusto whilst set to solos from the company’s A-List pals Anika Noni Rose, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Jessye Norman.

Now in its 54th year, the group’s rich cultural history was made evident throughout the selection of pieces performed throughout the evening, in particular Revelations, which was initially choreographed by Mr. Ailey himself. The piece had a special significance for Ms. Noni Rose, who told The Observer: “The AAADT was the first ballet that I saw, and Revelations was the piece that stuck in my mind so strongly. So it was a huge honor to be asked to perform here tonight - it was like the circle closed for me.”

The opening was also something of a landmark for dancer Renee Robinson, who was hand-picked by the company’s namesake some 32 years ago. Ms. Robinson is hanging up her dancing shoes this Christmas – for the AAADT at least. Speaking of her three decades with the company, she said, “What feels great is not only that I was chosen by Mr. Ailey, but that I had the opportunity to work under him and hear him speak about his vision and his legacy.”

“Over the years, the changes that have happened within the company have stemmed from the wonderful seed Ailey planted, and that’s what keeps it alive, current and important to society all over the world,” she continued. The only dancer to work under all three of the AAADT’s artistic directors (Mr. Ailey, Judith Jamison and Robert Battle, who currently holds the post), there is no denying that Ms. Robinson knows what the job entails better than anyone. So has she become a mother hen-type figure to the dancers finding their feet in the company? “Oh no,” she laughed, “I’m more like the fun aunt!”

Fun was certainly had by all throughout the evening, from the standing ovation at the performance’s close to hundreds of guests hitting the Hilton’s dance floor for some Beyoncé-esque booty-shaking before the meal began. Academy Award winner and stand-up comic Mo’Nique had the crowd eating out of the palm of her hand during a speech mid-show, and continued to bolster the party atmosphere as the event went on. A long-time AAADT supporter, she told us, “Whenever the group would come to whatever city I was living in at the time, me and my family would go out and see them, and you just felt every movement and every step, every lyric, you felt everything they put into their performances. So when they called and asked me to be involved tonight, it was like – ‘For real? Of course!,’” she enthused.

Widespread involvement in the event was key, with a sublime number in the first half of the show causing quite the stir. As the stern looking company made their way into the audience, apparently selecting ball-gown toting spectators at random, things appeared to be far slicker by the time they reached the stage. Seamlessly moving from the roles of confused audience members to pro-shakers, this additional cast proved that age and physique don’t stand in front of a real dancer’s ability to move, and the piece was precisely the effervescent exhibition of skill that the AAADT has become renowned for.

The dancing continued well into the night, with gala guests evidently inspired by what they had seen earlier on stage. With a jazz band on hand to bust out everybody’s favorite Motown tunes, and the hotel's ballroom decorated like a sparkly winter wonderland, the AAADT brought a slice of Christmassy cheer to New York in a celebration of which Mr. Ailey himself would’ve undoubtedly been proud.

The dancers’ energy, dedication and ability are beyond question. Their highly recognizable style is an appealingly energized mix of Ailey’s mentor, Lester Horton; African or neo-African vocabulary; Broadway and jazz—with a bow to Martha Graham here and a nod to ballet there. In other words, there’s something from everyone and something for everyone. Which may be why everyone likes it so much.

The first premiere of the season, the one that got the ballyhoo, was Go in Grace, made by Hope Boykin, a company member. She gives us a righteous American family—father and mother, innocent young girl and rebellious adolescent boy—plus a couple of street kids whose street smarts tempt the boy. The father dies, the girl grieves, the boy assumes responsibility, the mother endures. What’s interesting is the way the action weaves around the six-woman a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, who not only sing beguilingly but take the stage with charm and authority, providing advice and comfort—often, alas, in staggeringly clichéd lyrics. The dance content is minimal.

More impressive was Mauro Bigonzetti’s Festa Barocca. Nothing we’ve seen of his work for New York City Ballet and Aterballetto, the Italian company he ran for years, has been on the level of this 44-minute celebration of Handel and the Baroque—and of Alvin Ailey, who encouraged and inspired him when he was a young man.

At the rise of the curtain, the entire company is massed upstage in stunningly vibrant costumes—both men and women in bright sateen skirts to the ground, the men bare from the waist up. The group sections are rousing in Ailey-appropriate ways, but the heart of the piece lies in three diverse and innovative duets, the first of which—for the company’s Apollonian star, Clifton Brown, and the cool, blond Gwynenn Taylor Jones—owes more to Agon than to Ailey. Hope Boykin, always a powerhouse presence, presides over the entire work as a gleeful mistress of ceremonies and chorus, knitting it all together. Bigonzetti has created the most engaging new work Ailey has produced in years.

This season saw a return to the repertory of Masekela Langage, to the blaring music of the South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela. At first you think it’s just another nightclub ballet, but it turns out to be an eruption of rage against apartheid and the corresponding violence of racist mid-century America—at the end a man crashes in, covered with blood, to die of his gunshot wounds. It’s colorful, it’s worthy, it’s watchable—it’s a terrific dancer op. But it’s not particularly interesting dance.

Far more welcome was the new production of Ailey’s first success, Blues Suite, also set in a club, with a spirited group of jazz/blues musicians onstage. Like so much of Ailey’s best work, it’s episodic—he can’t really structure anything extended. But he clearly poured into it everything he knew back in 1958, and it’s exploding with invention and excitement. He must have known that he was on his way.

I suspect that all the strutting and sassing were originally less underlined and stylized than they are today, and the costumes less relentlessly flashy; the whole thing sometimes seems more like a pastiche of the period than out of the period itself. But this is a substantial piece, to my mind Ailey’s finest apart from Revelations, which came along two years later. How disquieting that over the next three decades he never surpassed these two early triumphs.

Another happy return to the rep was George Faison’s 1971 Suite Otis, to six numbers sung by Otis Redding. Redding was the greatest of male soul singers, and the Aileys certainly have soul—it’s a perfect match. The costumes are bright pink and cerise; the swirly dance invention is easy and fun; the singing is sublime. Suite Otis is one of the best ballets-set-to-pop-songs I know, this side of Twyla Tharp.

THE José Limón company reveals another (and radically different) universe. Limón was a dancer and choreographer of challenging dramatic power, and his most famous piece, The Moor’s Pavane—a compressed re-imagining of Othello—is to him what Revelations is to Ailey: a signature work that inevitably thrills audiences. Its glorious Purcell score, its sumptuous costumes (by Limón’s wife, Pauline Lawrence) and the conviction and impeccably organized structure of the choreography for its four tormented characters come together to form a minor masterwork.

This kind of carefully constructed, deeply felt drama is about as far as you can get from the postmodernism and Euro-trash that were to come. The sincerity—the earnestness, even—seems almost antediluvian; we’ve slipped through a crack in time back to the ’40s, the world of Graham at her peak and of Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, Limón’s mentors. But the phrase “old-fashioned” isn’t pejorative when applied to such honest and strong work, performed with such honesty and strength.

The Traitor, from 1954, is another tightly built drama based on one of our culture’s pivotal stories: the betrayal of Jesus by Judas. The dance components are once again modest—six male dancers plus “The Leader” and “The Traitor,” as Jesus and Judas are named here. There’s a de Chirico–like set, handsome costumes by Lawrence and insistent music by Gunther Schuller. The main prop, ingeniously deployed, is a white cloth that serves as a tablecloth for the Last Supper and as a constraining garment for Jesus as he’s led off to his death.

Limón himself danced Iago and Judas, the anguished roles. This season, a young, blond, very tall Jonathan Fredrickson danced Iago and Jesus, and with equal success: Talk about a tour de force.

The third Limón piece on view was Suite From a Choreographic Offering, an abstract company work made as a tribute to Doris Humphrey. It too displays a remarkable sense of organization as well as an intense, personal response to Bach, and its dozen dancers moved through it seamlessly. They’re a remarkably cohesive group who seem selflessly steeped in the Limón aesthetic. All credit to Carla Maxwell, who heads the company!

TO GO FROM the rigors of Limón to the popularism of Ailey to the shock waves of Pina Bausch is a dizzying ride. Her latest large-scale work, Bamboo Blues, still on view at BAM, is an outburst of images and encounters that add up to an incomprehensible but ravishing dance work. It’s incomprehensible because it has no apparent order: Any episode could go more or less anywhere. Ravishing because the billowing curtains, the rippling film projections on the scrim, the loveliness of the Indian-inflected dance style, the thrilling controlled energy of the company and the level of invention that Bausch has brought to this piece are irresistible. Yes, she falls back on her old kind of provocative gesture—a girl plunges her head into a red bucket filled with water; a guy lathers up (face, torso and legs)—but these devices seem pro forma: Her rebel heart is on hold. Inspired by India, Bausch has substituted fluency and feeling, proving conclusively that she’s far more than Germany’s bad girl of the dance.

rgottlieb@observer.com