On an icy night in late December, Miami native Robert Battle, the new artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, saw his past and future come together in the heart of New York City.

He rushed from backstage, where his Ailey dancers were warming up, to a reception room off the lobby of the packed City Center Theater, where he greeted two teachers who had guided him at the New World School of the Arts: Peter London, beaming and laughing, and Gerri Houlihan, whom Battle adores and still addresses as “Ms. Houlihan.”

After a year and a half of public grooming, of working alongside his towering predecessor, Judith Jamison, Battle was finally at the head of modern dance’s most famous company, and in programming the troupe’s annual five-week season at City Center, a major event in the New York dance world, he had made his real debut as director.

The moment was one he’d anticipated with a mix of excitement and fear.

“Certainly there was that part of me that thought, ‘What if people don’t show up?’ ” Battle says. “That sense of ‘Oh my goodness, I’m finally here.’ But then it all went down, and everybody showed up, and it all worked out.”

With all the famous and powerful folk he meets these days — last week Battle chatted with Michelle Obama after one of the Ailey troupe’s sold-out shows at the Kennedy Center — he has a special regard for the people who shaped and taught him growing up in Miami. He’s looking forward to lots of hometown love when the company returns beginning Thursday for what has become a regular engagement at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.

“It’s great to celebrate with people in New York,” says Battle, 39, who grew up in Liberty City and studied dance at Miami Northwestern Senior High and New World before heading to New York’s Juilliard School in 1990.

“But the people that saw you grow up in dance, who saw me as the scrawny little boy who hated wearing tights, when I was painfully shy … we all look at each other and say, ‘Can you believe this?’ When I see them it reminds me that this is amazing. The feeling I get is it happened to me and to us.”

That sense of responsibility to a larger dance community and to his roots are guiding Battle as he begins to shape this enormously popular and expectation-laden institution. His appointment is the most visible aspect of a generational shift at the 54-year-old Ailey troupe. Sharon Gersten Luckman, the executive director since 1995, departs in 2013, while Sylvia Waters retires this year after 35 years as head of the junior troupe, Ailey II. Many of the company’s 32 dancers are new; nine started in 2011, and 21 — two-thirds of the company — have come on since 2008.

“Every time there are changes in the company people reassess,” Battle says, adding that a number of dancers departed to start families or new careers. “But a lot of these changes had been sought out.”

Where Jamison had been a star dancer and protégé of founder Alvin Ailey, Battle had never been a member of the company, though had he taught and choreographed for it.

“Mr. Ailey set up such a foundation, and Ms. Jamison took it to such a level,” said Matthew Rushing, a 20-year Ailey dancer who has taken on the additional role of rehearsal director. “But spending time with Robert, I realized that his not being part of the company gives him another perspective, so he can take the company in directions we cannot see.”