In her four decades as chief Urban Bush Woman, Jawole Jo Willa Zollar choreographed Black female experience as comedy (the sassy Hairstories and Batty Moves), as tragedy (the prescient Shelter, about homelessness), as ruminative biography (Walking with Pearl, about the early dance pioneer and anthropologist Pearl Primus). Awards of the “lifetime” and “genius” variety have lately poured in. Now Zollar is working to ensure future geniuses—and lifetimes—in dance. She proceeds according to “the Africanist worldview [that] the past, present, and future communicate with one another,” she has said. At Urban Bush Women, which she left last year, she prepared her replacements from among the troupers. For her first commission from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, she is choreographing alongside longtime Ailey dancers Samantha Figgins and Chalvar Monteiro. Holy Blues will debut on a program with older holy blues: Alvin Ailey’s iconic Revelations and its perfect contemporary complement, Ronald K. Brown’s Grace. —Apollinaire Scherr