For a regular dancegoer in New York City, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater seasons arrive with the comforting predictability of a Christmas Nutcracker. Superb dancers, Ailey’s sublime Revelations, jubilant audiences, stirring evocations of African-American identity: it’s easy to begin to take these things for granted.

When you haven’t seen the Ailey company for a while, a season packed with these riveting dancers is a newly wondrous thing, a fresh discovery of the particularity that makes the troupe both a cultural and historic phenomenon.