He’s not a newcomer, but dancer Clifton Brown will receive a trial by fire of sorts when the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater begins its month-long season at City Center on Wednesday. Mr. Brown, 27, will perform in nearly every work on the company’s schedule, and will be featured in the season’s three major premieres, including Maurice Béjart’s “Firebird” and Camille A. Brown’s raucous “The Groove to Nobody’s Business.”

“You just have to realize that it’s not going to be easy,” Mr. Brown said of the upcoming season. “And there’s no use in thinking about how difficult it’s going to be — it’s strenuous. There’s a lot to do.” Mr. Brown, though, has had his fair share of help from an illustrious source: company artistic director Judith Jamison, who has guided Mr. Brown’s career nearly since its very start.

A native of Goodyear, Ariz., who now resides in Brooklyn, Mr. Brown began tumbling at the age of four, but an encounter with the work of the Ailey company at age 12 set his course in motion. “I got a video of the Ailey company from the Phoenix public library, and everything kind of clicked,” Mr. Brown recalled. “I was dancing and training but I didn’t really know about concert dance, or what my dancing was really leading to.” He even recalls which dances and cast members were on the video.

Mr. Brown eventually moved to New York, enrolling in the joint Ailey/Fordham Bachelor of Fine Arts program. But his studies didn’t last very long. One year later, Mr. Brown auditioned for the company. Though he was initially rejected, Ms. Jamison quickly went back on her decision. “He had left the audition,” she recalled. “Then I had this gut feeling that made me go and get this young man, and have him think on it and make a decision, because I was going to offer it to him this one time. And in his very gentle, soft voice, he said yes.”

Mr. Brown’s ubiquity in the repertory testifies to his range in roles both romantic and edgy. “He’s poetic,” Ms. Jamison said of his manner. “That’s what I loved about him when I first saw him. From his face, to his integrity with movement and his musicality — he understands what happens between the steps so that the flash is not there. It’s about the understanding of the movement and being so deep in it.”

That movement has been shaped under the close watch of Ms. Jamison. “You take care of being technically right — your body, being on your leg,” Mr. Brown said of working under his mentor. “Ms. Jamison expects it to be so,” he explained. “She has helped me to be a person onstage. She never wants to see anything that looks contrived, or movement that is static without a person behind it.”

Indeed, with his large eyes and thoughtful bearing, Mr. Brown seems as much a scholar as a supremely versatile and athletic dancer. Onstage, his willowy limbs, musculature, and proportions make him seem bigger than his 5 feet 10 inches. In the company premiere of Béjart’s “Firebird,” Mr. Brown electrifies the stage, combining extreme flexibility with honed technique and a riveting, larger-than-life presence.

Other new works show Mr. Brown’s range. He plays an uptight businessman trying futilely to read his newspaper in “The Groove to Nobody’s Business.” Both humorous works give Mr. Brown the chance to show his lighter demeanor.

Even in light of the two-and-a-half-month international tour just completed, the Ailey company’s City Center season is a crowning achievement, showing the troupe’s breadth and depth in 26 dances. “You cannot drop below a certain bar,” Ms. Jamison explained. “Approaching the aesthetic, the thought process, the stamina of the dance — you have to go higher each time. When you reach that point of tiredness, that’s where you have to dig for those kinds of riches. Clifton does,” she said. “At times he gets tired, but when he gets tired, sometimes he’s his most beautiful.”