For his company’s opening night at Lincoln Center on Tuesday, Paul Taylor paired a new dance with some of his earliest works — but age won out. The older pieces had more to offer.
Now going on 83, the senior genius of modern dance has been choreographing for nearly six decades. This premiere, “Perpetual Dawn,” has its sunny moments, including concerti by 18th-century composer Johann David Heinichen and a delicate ocher backdrop by Woody Allen favorite Santo Loquasto. Taylor makes up his own mimed language, and two women have a brief conversation in it as friendly rivals. The dancers waltz in the pastoral landscape, and, for one pair, there’s a tender duet toward the end.
But Taylor’s covered this ground — baroque music and couples gamboling in the fields — several times already, and better. Here, when five women line up only to leave, they’re waiting for something to happen that never does.
Plenty occurs — most of it funny — in 1995’s “Offenbach Overtures.” One of Taylor’s goofiest works, it had the cast amping up the humor even more. Some of the new jokes are good. In the lead, Laura Halzack spills to the floor with ladylike dignity.
Some routines are so fussy — like the fight two assistants have over their dueling masters — that the original joke is lost. It doesn’t help that all the evening’s music is recorded — at Lincoln Center, no less — but the humor is less “Saturday Night Live” and more Benny Hill.
Yet the senior works have held up. “Junction” (1961) contrasts austere Bach with quirky steps. As the cello thunders, the dancers enter flailing their arms or slowly pace the width of the stage. One woman stays motionless atop a man’s back for several minutes. When she finally rises, it’s only to be carried off, perched on another man’s shoulder like a totem.
If “Junction” seems mysterious, “3 Epitaphs,” made in 1956, is a complete enigma. Its five dancers are covered from head to toe in black with small mirrors on their heads and palms — they’re strange-looking humanoids.
To scratchy recordings of New Orleans funeral jazz, they lope across the stage to the sad beat. Even with that title, it’s surprisingly funny: At one point, a man slouches onto the stage, and just when you think he’s going to do something, he leaves.
Yet there’s more to the piece than sight gags. The problem with “Perpetual Dawn” is there isn’t enough darkness, but the shadows flickering through “3 Epitaphs” have made it more than a joke for 57 years.