The formula isn’t formulaic

Sixty-four. That’s the number of movement phrases in “Fabrications,” one of the works performed Friday by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at UCLA as part of the company’s 50th anniversary celebration. And it’s also the number of poses in “Pictures,” presented Saturday.

Now, you’d think that any choreography formulated with such mathematical precision would be cold and heartless -- but “Fabrications” and “Pictures” are each highly atmospheric and emotionally resonant.

The overlapping diagrams on Dove Bradshaw’s backdrop for “Fabrications” deliberately clash with the warmth and individuality of the Bradshaw costumes: a range of daytime streetwear from an era less casual than our own.

Punctuated by weighty walking steps, the movement in this 1987 ensemble piece to music by Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta suggests a social panorama -- complete with a group tableau at the end -- as if Cunningham wanted to evoke shifting relationships from an affectionately remembered past.

Designed by Mark Lancaster, “Pictures” could represent a gallery memorializing those relationships: a collection of sculptural linkups between dancers that suddenly become silhouettes against a luminous light-field.

Created in 1984, with a delicately lyrical score by David Behrman, “Pictures” also exploits the implications of stillness and extreme simplicity, of one thing at a time isolated, and valued, before the next comes along.

Both pieces, incidentally, originally featured roles for Cunningham himself -- roles assigned at UCLA to Cedric Andrieux (“Fabrications”) and Jonah Bokaer (“Pictures”).

The Friday program also featured the lush spectacle of “Way Station” (2001) and the bare-stage athleticism of “How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run” (1965).

Set amid tendrilled arches by Charles Long that resembled sea anemones, “Way Station” alternately seemed an underwater fantasy and a sophisticated poolside entertainment at some tropical Club Med. At one moment, the dancers even paused to sunbathe, while the music by Takehisa Kosugi incorporated what sounded like surf noise toward the end.

A solo for Derry Swan that led to a duet with Andrieux anchored the work in challenging balance issues and the motif of limbs straining toward maximum stretch.

“How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run” distilled movements and formations from the realm of sports without ever growing literal, but created the biggest stir with its accompaniment: company archivist David Vaughan and Cunningham himself reading stories by composer John Cage.

Sometimes overlapping like the dance episodes, these stories offered a dry counterpoint to the jaunty group movement and sometimes upstaged it altogether.

On Saturday, however, the Cage-Cunningham “Interscape” (2000) offered the dancers a string of exciting showpiece opportunities starting with a spectacular hopping solo by Daniel Squire.

Set against a Robert Rauschenberg photorealist collage (the Parthenon, the moon, a warrior-steed, a reclining Buddha), the dancing began with the men buoyant in green leotards and the women more grounded in pale peach and pink.

Soon, however, the vocabularies merged, though the sex roles remained unusually distinct for Cunningham, as in a section near the end that found three men swirling around two women at opposite ends of the stage like busy workmen, setting one upright in a balance, then moving to the other, then back to the first.

Throughout the three-performance engagement, the exceptionally varied choreographic moods and energies, scenic contexts and lighting effects made the 16 Cunningham dancers look like four times their number -- which would be that magic number 64.

A half-century ago, Cunningham’s company featured dancers who have become icons of modernist abstraction. But the current fleet 16 look so fresh and accomplished, so alluring and so selflessly devoted, that every performance adds new luster to the legacy, and it’s easy to forget that there’s any other way to dance.

Musicians for the Friday and Saturday programs at Royce Hall included Kosugi, Andy Russ and Loren Kiyoshi Dempster.