When the company toured Maurice Béjart's version of The Firebird this year, the choreographer was very much alive. It was poignant that less than a week after he died, his Firebird should head the opening of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater winter season, unavoidably turning it into a kind of requiem.

The ballet is in some ways a testament to how the company has developed from a small troupe founded 49 years ago to the great big dance machine it is today. Although Béjart choreographed for ballet dancers, mixing in modern dance and acrobatics, Ailey dancers today seem proficient in ballet technique to the point of dashing off pirouettes, parabolic jetés and extendedly held arabesques in addition to their familiar jazz and Ailey-Horton techniques. Béjart's theatricality also suits the company. The opening of Firebird with its tight group of wary fighters moving as one, led by the quicksilver Linda Celeste Sims, is particularly arresting.