Alvin

Ailey was at the peak of his creative power when he died, on Dec. 1, at the age of 58. Yet he, more than most of his generation in dance, had accomplished what he set out to do. And those accomplishments had a resounding impact on modern dance. ''He was a friend, and he had a big heart and a tremendous love of the dance,'' Mikhail Baryshnikov said, responding to news of Mr. Ailey's death. ''His work made an important contribution to American culture.'' It is hard to separate that contribution from Mr. Ailey's personality. Initially shy and wary in conversation, Mr. Ailey would soon reveal himself as a man of extraordinary warmth, an often wildly exuberant sense of humor and a desolate loneliness not always successfully hidden beneath the surface. But his warmth and gusto were reflected in much of the dance he created and chose for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Dance was to some extent an elitist art when Mr. Ailey created his first masterworks - ''Blues Suite,'' in 1959, and ''Revelations,'' in 1960, around which his company would be built. Ballet was largely an art for aficionados. Martha Graham created ''Clytemnestra'' in 1958, and Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins and Paul Taylor were well into establishing their importance as the formalists of American modern dance. But it required a considerable leap of faith to accompany Miss Graham on her heroic, mythic voyages into the human heart or to travel with Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Hawkins and Mr. Taylor through the light and shadows of the distant landscapes of their imagination. In dances like ''Blues Suite'' and ''Revelations,'' Mr. Ailey offered audiences an immediate experience of life at its best and worst. That life might be his own, filled with the particularities observed by an impressionable child growing up near the Dew Drop Inn or the True Vine Baptist Church in Navasota, Tex. It might not be the experience of an Atlanta hospital orderly or a Wall Street broker, of a French seamstress or a Japanese industrialist, but as depicted by Mr. Ailey in simply told stories and powerfully enacted dance, it was a potent theatrical experience. It is not incidental that Mr. Ailey called his company an ''American dance theater.'' His choice of dancers was a part of that potency and theatricality. The Ailey dancer is many things. One thinks of the delicate control and fluent grace of Dudley Williams or the velvety purr of Donna Wood and the poignant sweetness of a Sylvia Waters or Consuelo Atlas. There is the formal dignity of a Kelvin Rotardier or an April Berry and the biting attack of dancers like Marilyn Banks and John Parks. Most of all, however, the Ailey dancer is personified by Judith Jamison, a powerhouse star performer whose joyous abandon seemed very much his own. Mr. Ailey believed intensely in the power of dance. He believed that dance could and should reach everyone. He stood his ground, sometimes exasperatedly, in the face of criticism of his company's theatricality. Everything in Mr. Ailey's professional training was grist for the mill of his dance. Why should it not all be valid for his audiences? His earliest involvement with modern dance as a performer, choreographer and, briefly, an administrator, came when he joined the Lester Horton company in Los Angeles in 1950 and was exposed to the vividly dramatic work Horton created not only for the concert stage but for popular forums like outdoor pageants, nightclubs and movie musicals.

Mr. Ailey became a successful Broadway performer soon after and stayed in New York to study ballet and acting as well as modern dance. For Mr. Ailey, all dance forms - and theater - were simply part of a gloriously expressive whole. That outlook is confirmed, in fact, by the repertory being performed by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in a three-week season that opened on Wednesday at City Center. It is a repertory that includes a reworking of a little-known work by Horton, the revival of a classic by a Horton colleague, Joyce Trisler, and programs devoted to the art of Katherine Dunham. Though none of the post-modernist dances in the repertory will be offered this season, important works by leading black modern-dance choreographers like Donald McKayle and Talley Beatty will be performed, as well as dances by Ulysses Dove and Barry Martin, two newly emerging black choreographers. Mr. Ailey will be represented by ''Blues Suite'' and ''Revelations,'' in addition to ''Masekela Langage'' and ''Night Creatures,'' two later Ailey signature works that deal, respectively, with the searing pain of being black in South Africa and with Mr. Ailey's love for the shimmering, wry beauty of music by Duke Ellington. The fact that Mr. Ailey was black both hurt and helped him. None of the black modern- dance choreographers of his generation have equaled his popular success. The struggle took its toll on him. Ballet and modern dance were, and to an extent still are, the province of white choreographers and performers. But the Ailey company's first notable successes, on State Departmentsponsored tours abroad starting in the mid-1960's, came about at a time of new awareness of black participation in American life. It may have been that Mr. Ailey was the right man in the right place at the right time. But he never stopped being an eloquent spokesman for the universality of the black experience in America and for the important role black performers can and must play in the American arts. Today, the Ailey company is considered a primarily black company. It was there that the first black dance stars became established. But Mr. Ailey and his dancers have welcomed us all into their world and made it our own. And the company he built today has an annual budget of $7 million, employs 28 dancers and performs an active repertory of 23 pieces. There is even a junior, touring company and a bustling school with 3,000 students that has become a major dance training institution. Still, in a world where every dance and theater company is ''family,'' Mr. Ailey's troupe has remained just that. And the fact that a number of veteran former dancers have continued to work with Mr. Ailey, chief among them Miss Jamison, suggests those institutions have a good chance of carrying on the legacy of Alvin Ailey. Copyright New York Times Company Dec 10, 1989