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Battle’s 2005 Unfold starts and stars great material: dancers Alicia Graf and Jamar Roberts. Much has been made of Graf’s sylph physicality, her classical technique and her not-a-diva-diva stage presence. In Battle’s pas de deux, Graf bends to Roberts, like a willow, but she also crumples into a two-dimensional figure, flat against the floor with legs akimbo, as though she has been railroaded. It’s scary to see a goddess like Graf looking broken. But as with great dancers, her body instantly reshapes. Extending her leg into the air like a fern unfolding, Graf grows in one luscious moment into her formidable height as the voice of Leontyne Price—one of the first African-American opera singers to become a star at the once-segregated Metropolitan Opera—soars in Gustave Charpentier’s opera Louise. Knowledge of Louise, about a love-struck seamstress, or of Pryce’s history isn’t pertinent to enjoying Battle’s succinct dance. In less than ten minutes he conveys the tragedy and triumph of the human condition through Graf’s expressive body, which one second soars joyfully and the next flattens like a closed coffin.

Camille A. Brown’s world premiere The Groove to Nobody’s Business is about the city, the subway and a street-smart strut needed to survive above and below ground. Giving veteran Ailey dancers Matthew Rushing, Renee Robinson, and Olivia Bowman, and seven others, the room to sass, sashay and buck their individualized way across the stage to Ray Charles’ belting of Lonely Avenue, the three-part ballet starts out with a bang. By the third act, though, Brown’s point—how New York City’s fast, hard and breathless pace makes people fast, hard and breathless—runs out of steam. A good editor should have taken Brown by the hand and told her to start slow and build up to the beautiful frenzy she created or to mix up her all-out energetic street dance style with some softer moments, because we older folk in the audience need our breathers. That said Brown, age 28, is a talent. A ballet that starts on the streets, continues on a subway platform and finishes in a subway car (thanks to J Wiese’s painted cyclorama, which rises up a hitch to reveal a new scene) and that includes a chorus of hand-rapping, head-rocking, leg-kicking seated dancers reveals a woman who has her pulse on the city and an ability to shape a dance into an identifiable journey.

Until I looked at my program notes, I could have sworn that Fredrick Earl Mosley’s Saddle Up! was a bad restaging of Agnes de Mille’s 1942 Rodeo. I couldn’t believe that the choreographic material—male dancers skipping on pony sticks, tipping their cowboy hats and brawling for the local, corseted beauty—was a new work, let alone a world premiere. I couldn’t understand why the company would pony up the exorbitant fee to use Yo-Yo Ma’s recording of Appalachian Journey. Then I looked at the program notes more closely. Mosley is a teacher at the Ailey School. Artistic Director Jamison is interested in developing her brood. It’s called home schooling, and sometimes it’s a disaster.

The late Maurice Bejart didn’t stay home much or closet his homosexuality. He celebrated his id on the world’s stages with lots of male skin. In his Firebird to Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite the fire lives in two costumes (blazing red unitards), and in the final tableau, where Antonio Douthit presses his pelvis into the back of Clifton Brown and sends his limbs to the stage’s four corners. If this isn’t an image of orgiastic ecstasy I don’t know what is. The rest of the ballet, unfortunately, is a muddy-headed preamble to the final deed. Bejart positions eight corps dancers in car mechanic outfits around Douthit, the first firebird, who has a remarkable physical precision and a remarkable lack of expression. Douthit doesn’t try to escape, as is the case with the creature in Michel Fokine’s 1905 Firebird, but he eventually exhausts himself. That’s when the poetically limbed Clifton Brown, as the second firebird, enters and makes life interesting. Brown has the ability to play different melodies in his body simultaneously: While his legs blare like a trumpet hitting high C, his arms and chest sound out low, staggered bass chords that speak of melancholy depths.

The melancholy, drug-induced depths of Janis Joplin’s life is the subject of Ailey’s Flowers. When Gwynenn Taylor Jones, as Joplin, gets her heroin fix, Ailey sends her into a world akin to Bejart’s testosterone-centered world. In the ballet’s hallucination scene, seven male dancers whiz around Taylor in attitude turns and multiple pirouettes while wearing silver lame Go-Go outfits. This cannot be a female fantasy, though it’s supposed to be Joplin’s. More likely it's Ailey’s dream world danced to music of Joplin, Blind Faith and Pink Floyd. The affect is both dreadful and fabulous in a kitschy, groovy, gay cabaret sort of way. Flowers, restaged by associate artistic director Masazumi Chaya—who was just beginning his career-long association with the Ailey company when this work premiered—demonstrates that dance making is a deeply personal art. It takes us into the world of its creator. The intimate journey may not always be a good ride, but to me it’s always worth the risk.