LEAVING AILEY.(The Talk of the Town)(Dudley Williams last dance performance)

Dudley Williams looks like something out of an eighteenth-century engraving--all line. His bald head is shaped like an egg; his feet taper to a point. His elegant, spidery hands are always in the air, talking. At sixty-six, Williams is, to his knowledge, the oldest dancer in any large touring company in the United States. But on May 8th, at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, in Newark, he will give his last performance with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre.

The other day, after a rehearsal, he sat down to talk about his career. "This is all a fluke," he said. As a boy, he and his friend Melvin would go see movie musicals and then reproduce the dance routines on roller skates. He intended to become a classical pianist, however, and his mother, who had bought him a spinet--an honored piece of furniture in their apartment, in Harlem's East River Projects--when he was ten, may have intended this even more. He contacted the High School of Performing Arts, and it turned out that the music department's application period was over, so he turned to the dance department, assuring his mother that he would transfer to music at the end of the semester. Then, when the semester ended, the head of the music department told him, first, that he was a very good dancer, and, second, that opportunities for black classical pianists were rare. "I ran upstairs, and I ran up to the dance teacher and said, 'O.K., let's go! Let's dance!' " His mother took it pretty well, he recalls.

After Performing Arts and a stint at Juilliard, he began dancing professionally, in the companies of Donald McKayle, Talley Beatty, Martha Graham, and, finally, Alvin Ailey, whose troupe he joined in 1964. He always told the people he worked for that he didn't want to do any partnering. This choice may have been partly practical--Williams weighs a hundred and thirty pounds--but he says it was a point of pride: "I don't want to carry anybody around the stage. I want ...