Alvin Ailey’s 1971 solo “Cry” is dedicated to “all Black women everywhere – especially our mothers.”Ailey originally created it for Judith Jamison,and it instantly became a signature statement for her. I haven’t seen “Cry” in years, and it had settled in my mind as a vehicle for Ms. Jamison’s personal magnificence.But when Dwana Adiaha Smallwood danced it on Saturday afternoon at City Center, it was clear that this magical piece succeeds on its own choreographic merits. Our appreciation of the solo is enhanced by, but not dependent upon, its talismanic association with Ms. Jamison and with a particular era in American history.

“Cry” is a three-part soliloquy in which the dancer often seems rooted to the spot, though she is not addressing the audience from a rostrum but instead is angled obliquely away from a direct interface. The circumference of her movement is contained and constrained, making all the more dramatic her intermittent circuits around the stage, particularly in the final section when she bursts into space-devouring exaltation.

Ailey makes it clear that his heroine is Everywoman; she represents all black women, and perhaps all women in all eras. “Cry” is evidently influenced by Martha Graham’s manipulation of fabric and her use of costumes as props. With a witty mince, the heroine hikes up the front of her long, white ruffled skirt and gathers it in back so that she is wearing both a miniskirt and a bustle at once. She wields a long bolt of white fabric that becomes a turban, a scrub cloth, and a tablecloth for a ceremonial banquet.

In the piece’s first section, the dancer is often on her knees, a convict, slave, or penitent.Though she is relating a narrative, a personal history, and a cultural timeline, she seems to have no ulterior motive other than to indulge the imperative of her reverie to the improvisatory sounds of Alice Coltrane’s “Something About John Coltrane.”

The second section is performed to Laura Nyro’s “Been on a Train.” It’s particularly interesting that Ailey used a Nyro track here and, also in 1971, made “Flowers,” a dance about Janis Joplin performed to a selection of Joplin’s music. I think Ailey was deliberately acknowledging and embracing the way white performers had adopted the blues idiom and contributed to its expansion. “I saw a man take a needle-full of hard drug and die … ” Nyro sings. “Been on a train and I’m never going to be the same.” The song is both surreal and rooted in almost reportorial observance, and Ailey’s movement inhabits a similar nether zone. At times, the dancer slips right into sync with the lyrics, but her movement doesn’t seem programmatic. She is clearly mournful in this haunting interlude.

“Cry” concludes with a series of spine-rippling, skirt-frothing victory laps, in which the dancer celebrates resurgence, resolution, and survival – her own and her culture’s.The Voices of East Harlem sing “Right On, Be Free,” an exhortatory and exultant chorus, but with lyrics that also allude to instability and poignancy. As she concludes her testament, the dancer is jubilant but scarred.

In “Cry,” as in all her appearances, Ms. Smallwood danced with wiry, looselimbed, riveting intensity. She didn’t operate in the shadow of Ms. Jamison or anyone else.She has a different body and physical articulation than Ms. Jamison, and so cannot help but create a different image in the part.

Saturday’s matinee opened with Ailey’s 1974 “Night Creature,” set to characteristic orchestral jazz pieces of Duke Ellington. In its own way, this dance also contains a pointed cultural and political statement: Its jive mannerisms and snake-hips gyrations fit the style of the music, but were not in fashion when “Night Creature” was created – nor perhaps were they held in the highest political regard, redolent as they were of the bad old days of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. At the same time, “Night Creature” contains a lot of balletic vocabulary, and when the dancers perform little balletic jumps and beats, Ailey seems to be proudly asserting the stylistic options that existed in the 1970s but did not in Ellington’s heyday.

The Ailey dancers took to “Night Creature” with their own uniquely glittering bravura. Right now, the Ailey company is very young: One-third of the dancers have joined in the last two years. But on Saturday, Renee Robinson, who joined Ailey in 1981, was mistress of the revels. Ms Robinson’s technique exhibits very few scuff marks, and it is rewarding to watch her evident insight into the conservation and deployment of energy. Both here and in last weekend’s performance of Billy Wilson’s “The Winter in Lisbon,” Ms. Robinson’s sultry maturity was all the more welcome in light of her colleagues’ youth.

Also on Saturday’s program was Ailey’s 1973 “Hidden Rites,” one of his strongest and most tightly choreographed works. Under cover of darkness, the ensemble enacts fertility and propiatory rites, including an astonishing series of duets. The piece demands hair-trigger attack and precision, and was brilliantly performed by the company to a things-that-go-bump-in-thenight score by Patrice Sciortino.

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On Friday, the company revived Ulysses Dove’s 1990 “Urban Folk Dance,” in which two embattled couples thrash it out in tandem, living in side-by-side, virtually identical apartments. Affection is repelled as much as sought between each couple.The movement is in Dove’s characteristically aggrieved style: Knotty, impacted frustration finds release in slashing movement performed to furious violin fiddling composed by Michael Torke. At one point, things get so raucous – perhaps the apartment walls are too thin – that the men exchange hostile words while the women defy each other to see who will blink first.

The left-hand apartment housed Matthew Rushing and Linda Celeste Sims, while Ms. Smallwood and Clifton Brown were on the right. All four dancers tore into the psychodrama with galvanic energy.

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s season runs until January 1 at City Center (131 W.55th Street,between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, 212-581-1212).