Ailey Saddles Up

Just the sight of 10 members of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater dressed in colorful costumes (designed by Ann Hould Ward) for the world premiere of Fredrick Earl Mosley's "Saddle Up!" Friday night was improbable enough to instantly spark the audience's funny bone. Mr. Mosley takes it from there, in a succession of short takes and sketches that trot out all the Wild West riffs imaginable, but succeeds in circling them with some gracefully executed new passes of his own. If sometimes it seems Mr. Mosley isn't entirely sure what chord he wants to sound and is making it up as he goes along, it's usually to the audience's benefit that he lets his imagination run where it pleases.

The curtain rose on Clifton Brown, alone onstage, wielding a toy hobbyhorse: frontier mythology thus reduced to nursery-room scale. Mr. Brown danced a solo — he is, the program tells us, the "New Sheriff in Town!" — before galloping offstage. A placard announced that we were now at "The Dusky Sky Saloon," and the 10-member ensemble, including Renee Robinson as a dizzy dame who might be considered a frontier Blanche Du Bois, wandered on. "We're all friends here," the dancers told us, waving at the audience with a vaudeville-style affectation of neighborliness. Mr. Brown and Matthew Rushing went mano a mano, fighting over Gwynenn Taylor Jones, eventually arm wrestling and stepping on each other's toes, while Ms. Taylor Jones meekly watched from a discreet distance until their rivalry broke up and they both left. She then danced a lamentation for Mr. Brown, wielding the Stetson he'd left behind. She left the stage with his hat perched on her head. But when he returned, she gave him back his hat, and they grasped hands.

Dance hall girls came reeling on, greeted by men all wielding their own toy horses, just like the one Mr. Brown carried in the beginning. Ms. Robinson came back looking for some attention, and the guys were ready to give it to her; they waved their sticks in her direction. She and all the rest of the good-sport dancers seemed to have discovered their groove when they congregated in chorus line formation at the front of the stage as the piece bid us a fond adieu.

The music for "Saddle Up!" consists of selections from Yo-Yo Ma's "Appalachian Journey" CD. Mr. Mosley's movement traffics in all the requisite flouncing, skirt rustling, and equine ground-pawing that are the coins of the cowpoke realm, liberally and seamlessly mixed with ballet in an homage to de Mille, Loring, and Balanchine. But he also succeeds in putting his own spin on the mix. Sometimes, as in the solos for Mr. Brown and Ms. Taylor Jones, he takes time to show his ability at extended composition. All the Ailey dancers jangle their spurs amiably — in "Saddle Up!" their clowning and dancing are polished to a high gloss.