For David Parsons, the Focus Now Is on Variety : Dance: In works with his own company, the once-daring Paul Taylor dancer works to see that each new piece has its own movement vocabulary.

When David Parsons founded his dance company in 1985, he was hardly your average fledgling dance maker. He had acquired a reputation as one of the most exciting and daring members of a leading modern dance company--Paul Taylor’s--and had already choreographed such works as “Caught” and “The Envelope”--that immediately established themselves as audience favorites.

Since he set out on his own, things have tended to move fast for the 32-year-old Parsons, who brings his eight-member company to UCLA tonight and Saturday. But that has been true since he set his sights on dance, came to New York from Kansas City and joined Taylor’s company at 18. He made an immediate impact and seemed born to dance Taylor’s robust, antic, muscular works. He was equally at home in the space-devouring flights of “Arden Court” and in the agonized end-of-the-world spasms of “Last Look.”

The Parsons Dance Company now has a busy and peripatetic schedule, with six months’ worth of touring engagements annually that enables Parsons to guarantee the dancers 40 weeks of work and offer complete health benefits. After several years of handling all the administrative duties himself (“That almost did me in,” he recalls), he can now rely on his full-time executive director, Gray Montague, and has been able to choreograph an extensive and varied repertory.

“Choreography is such a learning situation; it takes so many years,” Parsons says. His earlier works tended to fasten on a concept--or, some felt, a gimmick--such as the strobe-light fixing Parsons’ leaps in space during “Caught,” or the oddball androgyny in “The Envelope.”

These days, Parsons explains, his focus is on musical variety and on making sure that “each new piece has a totally different vocabulary.” He acknowledges, even relishes, the inevitable Taylor influence on his work: “What he taught me is in my blood, and I don’t want it to leave--he taught me ways to move the torso that I never want to lose. I think that having my own ideas, being a different person from Paul is enough.

“The work is tending to get really dark now,” he says, and he goes on to gleefully describe “Hairy Night on Bald Mountain,” the opening work on the UCLA program, as one in which “nasty things happen--it’s absolute chaos. I wanted to see how crazily I could mix horror elements together. I play Death, a detective and a director.”

Set to music by Grieg and Mussorgsky, the dance was originally performed by Ballet Chicago last year. “Rise and Fall,” which also dates from last year, will feature live accompaniment by the Turtle Island String Quartet, performing jazz compositions by Katrina Wreede, David Balakrishnan and Darol Anger. The quartet will also give a new twist to “Caught,” improvising in place of the usual Robert Fripp score.

Parsons will perform that solo, which has become something of a signature work, and his recent solo, “Tower,” which responds to all the controversy that has swirled around the issue of arts funding. Its score plays a crucial element, and Parsons was able to draw on his earlier sound engineering experience in assembling it.

“During all the National Endowment for the Arts controversy, I taped shows like ‘Crossfire’ and ‘Nightline,’ putting together a collage of people yapping at each other, and I mixed in some music with the words. It tries to make a short, precise statement about the integrity of the artist.”

The origins of “Nascimento,” the closing work, date back to a performance by the company in Rio de Janeiro. The Brazilian composer Milton Nascimento liked what he saw, and offered to compose a score for Parsons. The ensuing collaboration proved to be quite a learning experience, the choreographer relates: “It’s so hard to work that way; people don’t realize that you work with a composer for months, sending faxes and snippets of work. It’s important to me that it was done from scratch. People tend to think we just go to a store and buy the music. Also, he did it as a gift and gave it to us for free!”

Parsons sounds a bit dubious when he speaks of the upbeat, sweet quality of the resulting dance, as though the final product sometimes surprises even the choreographer himself. But, he observes, “I don’t make dances all the time for myself. I make them to create a scene, an environment that’s different from other things that I’ve done. I get tired of people who make art to make themselves appear the way they want to be perceived.”