JOKES, FRENZY, ACROBATIC LYRICISM : PAUL TAYLOR DANCE CO. RETURNS TO ROYCE HALL

The Paul Taylor Dance Company flew, leapt, dashed, stretched, flexed, contorted, crept, spun, posed, tumbled, twitched, twisted, joked and soared this week end at Royce Hall through just about everything Taylorian from soup to nuts.

Or, at the very least, everything Taylorian from egg to apple.

A kinetic adventurer and musical iconoclast par excellence, Taylor is not the sort of choreographer who can hold things back. One can savor the splendor even in his excesses.

His dancers, a violently virtuosic ensemble of gentle athletes, give their all for the master. Whether agonized or comic, frenetic or heroic--their performances seem all the more dramatic, and ultimately all the more triumphant, because of a constant underlying flirtation with physical danger.

In two separate programs, the 17 dauntless modernists offered a quartet of novelties sandwiched between a pair of familiar Taylor classics. The company defined a broad and sometimes brazen repertory of barefoot-and-cheeky images with pervasively delirious discipline.

The curtain-raiser, Friday night, was “Images,” which dates back to 1977. A highly stylized, highly imaginative evocation of primitive fertility ceremonies and sexual metaphors, it is set, piquantly, to Debussy piano pieces.

The grand finale, Saturday night, was “Esplanade,” a model of acrobatic lyricism that dates back to 1975. With wondrous perversity, it fuses seemingly casual non-dance maneuvers--bravura running, falling, walking, crawling, sliding and body-catching--with the seeming formality of an ornate Bach concerto.

Between these stable staples came Los Angeles premieres that demonstrated the disparity of Taylor’s current interests: self-parody, neo-Baroque ritual, romantic indulgence and Angst exploration.

The parody--a very broad parody at that--took the sprawling, pratfalling form of something called “Ab Ovo Usque ad Mala.” That refers literally to egg and apple, but, gaining something in translation, Taylor cites soup and nuts. No matter.

The piece offers a wildly distorted lexicon of Taylor cliches, from the leap-into-his-arms pyrotechnics of “Esplanade” to the man-is-a-beast routines of “Cloven Kingdom.”

Alex Katz dresses six eager couples in revealing Roman togas and tunics, adorning the muscular, bearded heroes with mock-hairy legs and chests for bad measure. The men exude proud macho manners, at first, while the women impersonate silly geese. Eventually, however, the geese impersonate ganders, and the vices become versa.

It is all rather clever, rather stupid, a bit ponderous and marvelously executed. Gilding a musical lily, Taylor tries frantically to get a handle on the ersatz Handel of P.D.Q. Bach.

The other Bach--the august Johann Sebastian--provided the lofty inspiration for “A Musical Offering.” One can find no courtly 18th-Century flourishes here, however. Taylor pays his homage in terms of tribal movement bearing a distinct Polynesian accent.

The dancers are equipped with scullcaps, loincloths and, where appropriate, skin-colored bodices designed by Gene Moore. They adopt blank stares and stiff, zombie-like gestures, presumably to convey something timeless or impersonal. Yet they miss no beat, ignore no inflection.

With time and repetition, the mystical rote evolves into a feverish dance of death. Miraculously, Taylor manages the transition without violating either the dynamic scope or the implicit affect of the score.

The same cannot be said for “Roses,” presumably an evocation of the tender Wagnerian sentiment of the “Siegfried Idyll.” Taylor uses the lush little serenade as impetus for five couples in black and gray who seem to want to waltz.

The meandering nostalgia and expressive contradictions of the music, with its simultaneous allusions to the “Ring” and to nursery tunes, somehow eludes Taylor’s kinetic vocabulary. A few delicately rhapsodic configurations go a long way.

The choreographer adds kitsch to convention, and degrades Wagner in the process, when he appends a jarring coda. While the others watch, a rapturous new couple in white entwines to the rinky-dink bel-canto of an 1820s Adagio for clarinet by one Heinrich Baermann.

Donald York’s score for “Last Look” sounds surprisingly like a mawkish mating of Wagner and Baermann. As such, it provides a contradictory impetus for a very bleak, very painful examination of the brutality of alienation in modern society.

On a dark stage haunted with mirrors, Taylor’s spasmodic dancers emerge from a pile of bodies, enact horrible fortissimo dramas of sadism and masochism, twitch in numbing exorcism exercises and eventually rejoin the human heap.

It is exhausting and, in its relentlessly tawdry way, poignant.

All the music, not incidentally, was presented on tape, and all of it was distorted because of grotesque over-amplification. It may be asking too much to ask for a genuine pit orchestra in Los Angeles--such luxuries apparently are reserved for New York. But it would hardly be unreasonable to ask our technical wizards to turn down the volume.

A canned piano, after all, is still supposed to sound like a piano. At UCLA it sounds like a calliope on the brink of breakdown.