Over four decades, Alvin Ailey’s vision of a popular modern-dance company based in African-American culture gradually translated into a super-skilled ensemble that does accessible high art on a grand scale. The 32-member Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater opened its annual FleetBoston Celebrity Series week at the Wang Theatre a week ago Tuesday with two Boston premieres and a revival, plus the company’s signature piece, Revelations, which Ailey choreographed when the world was new.

Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s Prayers from the Edge retold the Romeo and Juliet story under the trendy auspices of tribalism. Skimpily clad in team colors of red and gold, two seven-member "tribes" trample through each other’s territory but manage to co-exist until one of the gold tribe’s women (Linda Celeste Sims) falls in love with a tall, light-skinned man (Clifton Brown). He wears red but he’s different from his tribe mates — a visitor, perhaps, or "another," as the program suggests. The gold woman’s kin disapprove of the affair and drag the lovers apart.

In the next scene, two gold women flirt with two red men. When the game turns ugly and one of the provocateuses gets raped, she accuses the stranger, who hasn’t even been present. With this as an excuse, the simmering warfare breaks out in earnest. The tribes chase each other and fight in a series of warlike encounters. Both lovers are killed, then ceremonially brought together by a female priestess (Asha Thomas). By the time she drapes a cloth over their entwined corpses, the tribes have gone their separate ways into the desert.

Taylor-Corbett sets all this in a glow of pseudo-Oriental movement, shamanistic conjuring, and artful tableaux, with lush music by Peter Gabriel. She calls the seven scenes "Prayers" in the program. Does she mean that tribal brutality and persecution are connected to a magic purpose we spectators can’t discern? Or that we should pity the savages from our safe contemporary vantage point?

Ohad Naharin’s Black Milk, which was made in 1984 and revised in 1992, also has a ritualistic, primitivist flavor, but the intentions of the five men in white dhotis are even less obvious. Perhaps the dance is some kind of initiation ceremony. Four of the men are going through a series of formal motions, circling around a bucket, while the fifth waits downstage. When the invocation is complete, they line up so that each one in turn can plunge his hands into the bucket. With some transforming substance they draw both hands down their faces, chests, and hips to mark themselves with two dark smears. The odd man out is the last to execute this strange sacrament; then he becomes one of the group.

They perform a series of games or exercises, a training regimen, perhaps, within which mysterious duets take place. Two men could be making love or wrestling ferociously. Another episode hints at the healing of a fallen comrade. One man, not the new recruit, finally returns to the bucket and scoops great handfuls of liquid over himself. Only now it’s clear water, and it cleanses the dark stripes from his body. I never understood what all this preparation was for, but the intensity of the men’s activity, their common understanding of what had to be done, convinced me that they would be a formidable presence in the next campaign.

Steve Reich’s great Music for 18 Musicians was a musical turning point in 1976, building harmonic and textural richness onto minimalism’s rhythmic austerity. Three years later, Elisa Monte, a graduate of the Martha Graham company, set a small slice of Reich’s hour-long composition for her first choreography, Treading. A man and a woman slowly, deliberately stretch and coil, their evolving plastique working like a ground bass in contrast to the dense but delicate propulsiveness of Reich’s percussion, winds, and voices. Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell and Clifton Brown maintained an objectivity that allowed us to imagine their complementary shapes as abstract designs, comical creatures, or even a mandala of love.

Revelations (1960), Alvin Ailey’s first mature work, was a chamber-sized masterpiece that conveyed the black spiritual experience, from deep longing and contrition to salvation and vernacular praise. That dance no longer exists. Something with the same name ends every Ailey program and invariably leaves the audience screaming. But a goosed-up cast, overblown and over-loud musical arrangements, and externalized movements submerge the humanity of the dance’s original theme under a cascade of thrills. I can see it now only with regret, even though Ailey himself started it on the road to glitzville.