The Complicated, Paradoxical Paul Taylor : Dance: The dean of choreographers conceives works that aren’t quite as simple as they might first present themselves. His company performs tonight and Saturday at UCLA.

Choreographer Paul Taylor is retelling a favorite story about the origin of “Company B,” his 1991 pop ballet set to songs by the Andrews Sisters.

Seems, he says, he was on his way to the studio without a thought in his head for a new work commissioned by the Houston Ballet. “I had very little in mind until I had passed a trash can. A record was lying on top. I picked it up. It was a recording by the Andrews Sisters. I played it and thought, ‘That’s not bad,’ and went from there.”

It’s an engaging story, and Taylor, the charming, down-home, immensely gifted modern-dance figure, has told it to many a journalist. But it isn’t true.

He confessed to a Dance magazine writer last year that he made up the whole thing. “The Andrews Sisters are part of my life,” he said then. “Everytime I feel glum I put on the Andrews Sisters.”

It’s not that Taylor is, well, exactly a liar. It’s just that like “Company B,” which Taylor’s company will dance tonight and Saturday at UCLA’s Royce Hall, and many of Taylor’s other works aren’t quite as simple as they might first present themselves.

So be cautious about anything the paradoxical, 62-year-old, still-boyish Taylor ventures.

Works such as “Company B” and his new “Oz,” premiered in New York at the end of last month, show, he says, “a view of America falling apart, in a pleasant way.” But despite that critical slant in the works, Taylor insists he is “not angry at the country. I’ve never been angry at the country. I always felt lucky to be here.”

But when Taylor was named as one of this year’s Kennedy Center honorees, an award that includes a White House ceremony, the choreographer said he was concerned about accepting the award in light of the controversies that plagued the National Endowment for the Arts during the Bush Administration. “The sole reason I accept the award is for the field in general,” he said at the time. “I do it for the sake of dance.” (The award ceremony will be televised in December.)

“I try not to preach,” he adds. “Of course, many of the pieces are American. They can’t be anything else. But underneath all of them is my hope that they can be interpreted broadly. I have a hope that goes beyond a specific country or time.”

So he’s hopeful? “There’s always hope, I suppose,” he opines.

The repertory danced during the UCLA engagement spans 35 years of Taylor’s creativity. But he’s made no effort “to make an overview of my career. That would be sort of hard to do on two programs. I don’t think that’s my job. I don’t sum up and try to put my dances in categories. Other people sometimes do.”

One of the pieces on tonight’s program--”Lost, Found and Lost”--dates to 1957, the year Taylor went out on his own as a choreographer and earned an infamous blank page review by an unhappy dance critic who saw the new work.

“It’s based on a very early piece that had to do with posture,” Taylor says. “But it’s presented entirely differently now. (The new version was created in 1982.) I call it ‘Lost’ because the material was lost, that is, forgotten, dumped. Then I found it again. I wanted to recycle it.”

He added the third word, “Lost,” to refer “to the lost generation--not the Lost Generation of the ‘20s, but dancers who seem bored, lost in a sense. . . .

“Living in New York City, I steal certain things I see around me. We do a lot of waiting. That’s a broad enough interpretation. French people think it’s (waiting at) a pissoir . Wall Street people see it as waiting at the bank. It depends where you’re coming from.”

Taylor describes the 1988 “Counterswarm,” on the Saturday program, as merely “a bug dance. I see it as battling bugs, something the sexes do, too. You know how nature is--eat or be eaten. There are certain bugs where the female eats the male after they’re done with them. It’s not full of actual information about bugs, really. I just collect beetles. It’s natural for me to do a bug dance or two.”