lucky cola ‘Grace,’ Ronald K. Brown’s Celestial Groove, Turns 25 at Ailey

She is transcendent and glowing: a mysterious woman in white. Standing center stage in a bandeau top with a strip of transparent fabric hanging down her front, and wide, loose pants, she remains still and rooted. This dancer, the mother god of Ronald K. Brown’s “Grace,” anchors the stage with a quiet strength as the sound of Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday” buildslucky cola, calling her body — and with it her costume, its fabric swelling and dipping like waves — to action.

She reaches her arms up and out, spinning fervently and pausing to hold out one arm and then the other as if she were protecting a precious flock. Lyrics echo across the stage: “God of love, please look down and see my people through.”

This season at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, “Grace” celebrates its 25th anniversary. The dance, which weaves together modern and contemporary dance with West African forms, was a masterpiece from the start. It was Brown’s first commission for Ailey — and it transformed the company. There was ease, intention, a silken, unforced approach to finding new rhythms.

Brown choreographed “Grace” with Renee Robinson, the Ailey company’s reigning queen at the time, as its centerpiece. The story is this: “The mother god comes down with angels,” Brown said during a recent interview at the Ailey studios. “She rounds up people who are behaving as if they don’t understand God’s grace.”

Book-ended by two versions of Ellington’s “Come Sunday” — by Jimmy McPhail at the start, Jennifer Holiday at the end — Brown’s rapturous dance is meant to stir the soul. The costumes help tell the story: In Omotayo Wunmi Olaiya’s vivid, sculptural designs, the angels wear white and the earthly people red. By the end, they are all in white — they have found grace — and the journey to get there is transfixing, pulsating and galvanizing.

Through his layering of movement idioms and music — there is also Roy Davis Jr.’s house track “Rock Shock” and Fela Kuti’s “Shakara” — Brown has a masterful way of digging into spirituality, of giving it a hypnotic groove. The stage can seem buoyant, as if celestial bodies are dancing on clouds.

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