Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, a half-century old, is back in Atlanta, part of a 50-city global tour.

Thursday evening, the first of five performances at the Fox Theatre, the visit felt as much about rewarding its fans with the gift of dance as certifying its stature among our pre-eminent arts organizations — achieving what it sets out to do as well as anybody. For this tour, the New York company was recently named by the U.S. Congress as the nation’s “Cultural Ambassador to the World.”

HYOSUB SHIN / hshin@ajc.com

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is celebrating its 50th year with a 50-city tour that comes to the Fox Theatre this weekend. Sweet Honey in the Rock will also perform with the troupe.

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In Atlanta they dance two programs in rotation; both close with the emotionally jubilant, visually splendid and iconic “Revelations,” from 1960.

The Friday and Saturday evening performances (repeated Sunday at 3 p.m.) are led by a delicious collaboration: Sweet Honey in the Rock, the a capella gospel-blues-jazz sextet, on stage with Ailey dancers for “Go In Grace,” a new, half-hour work with choreography by Hope Boykin, an Ailey company dancer.

As Boykin’s first major choreography, the project started two years ago with what she calls “a short story about a family and their wisdom community” inspired by the much-used (and sometimes abused) African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child.”

The original music and words from Sweet Honey summarize the spirit: “Some paths we take mislead us,/lessons we face should tell us:/What goes ‘round comes around and ‘round and back again.”

Central to Boykin’s conception was integrating the singers on stage as part of the dance. “Hope had to figure out movements we could do easily and look natural,” says Sweet Honey’s Ysaye Barnwell. “It’s hard to leap and spin and still sing. But her story is of exceptional interest — a central character is deaf, and as we composed the texts and music we got attached to each other’s work.”

For Boykin’s part, she says the Sweet Honey singers “move pretty well on their own. They have a groove. As the piece began to take shape, there were times I’d given them too much [to dance] and other times they asked me for more. They had to trust me.”

“Go In Grace” will someday be performed without Sweet Honey in performance, says Boykin, “but for a recording I’ll have to re-choreograph it. Right now they’re integral.”

That’s the new work. The Thursday Ailey show — which repeats Saturday at 2 p.m. — surveyed the founder’s “classic” choreography, much of which has entered the popular culture as the way American youths — not just African-Americans — dance and move and communicate with the body.

“Blues Suite,” for example, must have shocked at its 1958 premiere. It evokes what Ailey (who died in 1989) called his “roots in the sun and dirt of the South.”

The clean economy of the dance in “Mean ‘Ol Frisco,” where five field hands work and sweat with a red kerchief around their necks, helps bundle together intense physical pain, yearning, anger, sexual swagger, exuberance.

And the sassy, crude and ultimately affectionate pas de deux, “Backwater Blues” — with the charismatic Renee Robinson and Glenn Allen Sims — showed the troupe as a collection of brilliant individuals who continue Alvin Ailey’s core mission.