DANCE REVIEW : Premieres by Paul Taylor Company at Royce Hall

One of the most unsparing of modern-dance visionaries, Paul Taylor began the 1980s with “Arden Court,” an unexpectedly comforting showpiece in his ‘60s “Aureole” manner that gave American athleticism the nobility of European classical style. He’s ended this decade, however, with triumphs of discontinuity--works in which both the social order and individual human motion suffer drastic fragmentation.

Danced along with more familiar pieces, the three local premieres presented during the Taylor company’s latest visit, Friday and Saturday in Royce Hall at UCLA, each featured a watchful central figure presiding over a world of shudders and twitches, shards of American popular dances and increasingly threatening outbursts of mass flailing. All three works represent outgrowths of Taylor’s innovative dance-without-steps mode that seemed to reach a dead-end midway through the ‘80s in the magnificent, malignant “Last Look.” Little did we know.

In the 1987 “Syzygy” (Saturday) Taylor allowed only Kate Johnson to make integrated whole-body statements, and her unhurried, majestic turning balances served as the North Star to the surges by 11 off-center, hip-twisting, arm-shaking human comets. Donald York’s score complemented the constant changes of level, direction, speed, scale and body focus--though much of “Syzygy” came straight from the shoulder in attack.

Later on, spectacular turning jumps heightened the work’s virtuosity, while the sudden stops and perfectly executed repeats also proved that Taylor’s wild, throwaway motion wasn’t being improvised. However, a core of hostility in the pursuits and confrontations kept anyone from applauding the sensational feats by Johnson, Christopher Gillis, Joao Mauricio and their colleagues. “Syzygy” may be a showpiece, but its dark vision of relationships comes right off the streets of our cities--not something to inspire intrusive audience dog yelps.

Equally bleak: the satiric “Danbury Mix” (Friday), which is a 1988 collage of pieces by Charles Ives and excerpts from earlier Taylor choreographies. Just as the scenery by David Gropman began in quasi-abstraction and ended by deconstructing the shapes and colors of the American flag, the group movement here started out weighty and gnarled, with huddled masses inching forward, arms crossed over the torso or back.

Soon, however, violent individual assaults and nasty celebrations of group solidarity heralded a sense of desperate physical dislocation--an idea explored in a long, brilliant solo for Gillis. Chief onstage witness to the process: Miss Liberty herself (Karla Wolfangle), growing progressively alarmed and sardonic as anarchy loomed in the Land of the Free.

However, Taylor’s magnum opus in downbeat Americana turned out to be “Speaking in Tongues” (Saturday), an hourlong 1988 dance drama in which a sense of brooding disconnection informed the narrative structure, movement style and sound score (by Matthew Patton) alike.

What did the words mean that we saw burned into the planks of Santo Loquasto’s barn-like setting--or half-heard in the layers of music and sound effects? What exactly happened to the bedeviled Man of the Cloth (Gillis) and his anguished, hyperconservative congregation? We were given lots of potent behavioral evidence and a fascinating social context, but no tidy explanations or resolutions, other than a mocking Ultimate Resolution that told us nothing.

Throughout, we seemed to be looking at artifacts of a distant culture, a forgotten language, a movement idiom assembled from scraps, as if this were a post-apocalypse museum exhibit collecting vestiges from the decline and fall of America in the 1980s. Hypocrisy and conformity, lust and death: Film at 11 (always)--and Paul Taylor growing ever more coldly furious year by year.