A dancer in Paul Taylor’s company is not a bona fide “Paul Taylor dancer” until he or she develops a particular curve within a phrase. You see it most readily when the dancer runs in a circle in those little scuffing-slipper steps of which Taylor is so fond —the way the entire body is magnetically flexed to the center, the spine answering that empty space, the chin and shoulder listening, as if the dancer had been turned on a potter’s wheel. Except the dancer is not clay but muscle, and the space is not empty at all, but a volume or vacuum with its own agenda. Taylor dancers run and jump, walk and crawl, jerk and twitch. But they are never more Taylor dancers than when they move in circles, even if they are circling themselves in one spot on the stage. It is in circles and rings and centrifugal swings that we see them for what they are: forces of nature.

And yet Taylor dancers don’t pirouette. Oh, scour the repertory and you might find some. These would be exceptions that prove the rule. The pirouette of classical dance takes place on pointe or demi-pointe, and is an act of high artifice, generally a three-step structure consisting of 1) a codified preparation in plié (like a deep breath), 2) up on toe and twirl (the final swirls of a Dairy Queen cone or the coloratura’s most difficult trill), 3) down and repose (to show you didn’t fall). Taylor has no interest in preparations, and he likes falls—his incomparable Esplanade contains a pelting summer storm of flying falls. As for the pirouette, it is something no animal would ever do, and therefore Taylor dancers don’t do them either. It’s too superego—though he might say prissy or stuffy.

Taylor spent his formative years in the dances of Martha Graham, a mythic realm where superego is constantly grabbed at the heel and pulled down, undermined by id. As a dancer with Graham’s company in the 1950s, Taylor knew the fight firsthand, for it is worked into the Graham technique where a dancer’s bright breastbone, his or her angelic liftedness, is constantly undercut, halved and jack-knived inward in Graham contractions, hungers of the gut and groin. Martha Graham was Modern Dance, the opposite of Ballet. She dragged dance kicking into a big empty box of sanctified space, then filled it with totems and taboos, mysteries of the couch post-Freud and mid-Jung. Still, Victorian-born, circa 1895, she never let go that golden thread to Heaven.

Taylor severed the thread. Not for him Graham’s ancient oracles and high priestess pronouncements which assume, by extension, the divinity of man. “I believe in Darwin,” he told The New York Times in March, just before his two-week season at City Center, “and the natural world.” And so the tracks and grooves of Taylor technique grow out of the grounded muscularity, the insular physics, of the animal kingdom: the racehorse’s heavy tilt into the turn, the big cat’s jazzy, deep-shouldered directional shifts within the chase, the concentrated stillnesses of both prey and predator, the easy elegant grazing on grasses. Taylor dancers are always Homo sapiens— descended from the apes—human animals rather than human beings. This is a profound distinction.

And it is uniquely Taylor’s. Even if he didn’t spell it out every once in a while— in Three Epitaphs, where black-masked dancers droop and stoop like the primordial ooze they crawled out of, or Cloven Kingdom, which quotes Spinoza in the program note, “Man is a social animal,” and sees four men in tails (evening clothes, not fur) performing a series of chest-beating tribal rites—the Taylor dancer embodies this distinction, spelling it out in his or her musculature: strong calves, solid rear, compact and seamless upper body, and again, that flex and curve within a phrase, as if these dancers were bred for leverage, a bipedal torque and balance that lets them roar within the radius of their own limbs, not needing to transcend their bodies as ballet dancers aspire to do (ballet dancers in Taylor are like helium balloons tied to a rail, tugging toward the sky). When the eight o’clock curtain comes up on a Paul Taylor program, it is a thrill distinct from any other in dance. These breathing creatures braced before us, they may not have moved a muscle but the energy is already flying. And if it’s just men onstage, as in Cascade, one of this season’s program openers, the thrill doubles, because Taylor men, even those who ride a fine line of chubbiness, are magnificent—the NFL and Michelangelo’s David, Man o’ War and Mister Ed, all rolled up in one.

Taylor has a New York season once a year, and in that season he usually presents two new works. He likes introducing new works in twos, and there is often an obvious duality in what he’s done, one dance savage, the other soft, or maybe acid and ice cream, cutting edge and elegy, sci-fi and slapstick (this March it was Fiends Angelical and Dandelion Wine, sinister and sunny, but both a bit labored). This game of oppositions is yet another pitch and curve within the repertory, as if Taylor is saying he’s not subject to any one theatrical tradition or temperament, not placing one ideal above another. Taylor isn’t in thrall to any ideal, to any dogma beyond Darwin’s: objective observance of the natural world. What he sees is what we get. And he sees like a collector—in genus, in genres, in populations and pools.

This makes great sense for a dance company, which is tribal after all, and it’s one of the reasons Taylor has enjoyed such longevity: he never runs out of subjects, specimens. It’s also a reason Taylor gets attacked every few years by critics who want more “adult sexuality” on his stage, another way of saying they want more conventional male-female partnering—the R-rated repartee of movies or the only-you romanticism of Balanchine (which is another way of saying they’re not getting their quota of vicarious thrill, i.e., self-projection into the clinches). Taylor isn’t concerned with the genital stirrings of character A for character B; he’s more interested in the group pheromone, as in his megahit of 1992, Company B, in which erotic energies are heightened, enlarged, by WWII and the threat of premature death. Taylor’s most recent masterpiece, Piazzolla Caldera, really is R-rated, a rite of spring wearing the black lace of the bull ring, wielding a sharp tango heel, and complete with sacrificial maiden—a girl who’s sort of slutty. But again, the soloists who momently come forward in their own dank spotlight, showing us their ache or itch, are always step-locked back into the whole, the teeming backroom pool of vice and desire, where they take their place in the pattern, linked up in the eternal circle.

This locking device of Taylor’s is yet another aspect of the compleat Paul Taylor dancer. When they want to they can end a phrase like a gong, striking stillness with such energy that you see a bit of kickback, a vibration that anchors the image. As with the full-body curve, not all Taylor dancers lock in with the same weight and impact. It tends to be senior dancers, especially senior men, who achieve this level of virtuosity. And it may be a prerequisite to ascent within the company. The amazing Andrew Asnes, with his lush musculature almost laughably perfect and a happy hunger to do it all bigger, faster, cleaner—he could ring like a bell. When Asnes left the company last year, the gleaming Patrick Corbin slid effortlessly into seniority, more understated, stylized, his crew-cut centurion’s profile a portrait in helmeted concentration and strength. Corbin’s performances aren’t introverted, but to some extent he is. As the critic Joel Lobenthal observed, “He comes onstage with a concept,” which means he’s not go-with-the-flow, he is the flow. Corbin’s presence in a dance is like the vibrant hum of a tuning fork, a subliminal wave in the atmosphere. He’s the most elegant male dancer in America. And when he’s unsubtle, he’s that much funnier. In Company B, as geeky Johnny the girls can’t get enough of (“You’re not handsome it’s true/ but when I look at you/ Johnny O Johnny O Johnny O”), when Corbin pushes his chess-champ glasses back up his nose he bucks his head as if swallowing a pill—all on a dotted note. You wonder, where’s the Adam’s apple? The spaz timing is sublime.

But this is yet another level on which Taylor works, the way he’s willing to amplify his own compositional tactics and tics for an air-quote, cartoon quality. In Funny Papers, a throwaway dance from 1994 that looks larger and wittier with every passing year (it was only this season I noticed the spoof on Merce Cunningham that sits near the start), the lock effect is like the heavy outline in a comic strip. In 1999’s Oh, You Kid!, the company’s senior female Lisa Viola has a sideshow solo that fuses Bloody Mary from South Pacific with Dainty June from Gypsy. A tour de force for Viola, it’s one of the weirdest solos Taylor has ever devised, a string of vaudeville kicks and tricks, with poses so heavily punctuated they read like deadpan double-takes. The whole thing is reverb.

Perhaps the deepest reverberation in Taylor is one that is unconscious. In 1980 Taylor paid brilliant homage to Vaslav Nijinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, that grand spasm of 1913, the first aesthetic breakaway of the twentieth century. Taylor’s own Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal) uses the two-piano reduction of Stravinsky’s score, thus creating a black-and-white tonality perfect for his cinematic take on the subject: Taylor’s Sacre is Hollywood noir, a two-reel ritual, comic and tragic. Still, in his autobiography, Private Domain (1987), Taylor mentions Nijinsky only once, noting that in college he read a biography of the dancer-choreographer and found it “fascinating.” It is the place of Nijinsky in dance history—a dark, heavy hinge—that sounds in Taylor repertory like an echo from the depths, a kind of unbidden muscle memory.

“I am a man and not a beast… I am a man and not God… I am the earth.” Nijinsky’s struggle to understand what he was, what the life of the body is meant to be, plays out in his diaries—madly imaginative or just plain mad depending on one’s tolerance for poetic obsession splintering into nonsense. The same struggle, however, found a pagan formality in Nijinsky’s dances. In L’Après-midi d’un Faune his nymphs and faun (which he danced) are stylized sideways, moving in a kind of bas relief that grounds them. Tight twists at the waist accentuate the feral tension between two and three dimensions, between Debussy’s throbbing swirl of sound and physiques so flattened they might be slipping between senses (Mallarmé’s poem lies somewhere between memory and dream). In Sacre a year later, Nijinsky’s stooped and circling peasants curl their hands in at the wrists, little fists of introversion, blunt and mute. Their hands and feet have become clubs and hooves with which they beat out ritual time on hard ground, setting the stage for sacrifice, a girl’s death for the good of the crops —“I am the earth.” At their premieres, shortly before the stroke of WWI, these dances were considered blasphemous. Even today, ninety years later, they remain symbols hot to the touch, intense metaphors for a sudden internal plunge, an inarticulate, irrevocable shift in the mind-body balance.

Taylor’s Sacre was not part of the programming this season, but his Arabesque was. When it premiered in 1999, I dismissed the dance as not up to much, a little stop-start, and tonally odd (the use of Debussy in a bare-chested temple dance). This year, though, it shone like aged ivory, and its rhythms had the jump and flicker of a candle flame. A note under the title calls Arabesque “an ornate pattern with reflected figures,” and if the dance had a set, it might be a shadowy mihrab carved and niched with Islamic arabesques. But the “reflected figure” is not just the arabesque. Santo Loquasto’s costumes nod to a Diaghilev-era exoticism, the Ballets Russes of Schéhérazade and Le Dieu Bleu—ballets in which Nijinsky starred. Moreover, it was the music of Debussy that Nijinsky used in two of his three iconoclastic ballets. And the dancers’ hands—they’re curled in that little Sacre club-fist. Taylor’s reflected figure is Nijinsky, and, thinking back over the Taylor repertory, one begins to feel that Nijinsky’s footprint may have left a more pungent impression than Graham’s (for all her talk about the ground, Graham’s bare foot is never dirty). So much swarm and sacrifice in the dances of Paul Taylor, the call of the wild by moonlight and altar-light. And so often a use of the body in profile, faun-like, with that twist at the waist to show the animal is man. Indeed, Nijinsky’s famously thick-legged, round-muscled physique is pure Taylor. On the other hand: critical distance, peace with man’s place in the food chain, an ease and strength within the skin. Maybe this is why audiences leave Taylor in such high spirits. He’s just so balanced.

The program that began with Arabesque closed with Musical Offering, a dance first performed in 1986. It was an achievement then, a high-water mark both choreographically and in terms of execution. Because dancing is so grueling (especially dancing Taylor) and the career of a dancer so short, companies continually blossom and drop over the years, depending on how many within the company are hitting and holding their stride, how many are past prime or not yet there. Taylor’s company right now, except for Corbin, Viola, Kristi Egtvedt, and Richard Chen See, is in an immature phase (with Michael Trusnovec coming on like an engine). When Taylor joined the dancers in their curtain call after Musical Offering, he gave them a thumbs up, a gesture I’ve never seen him make before, as if to say “you got through.” But the company in the mid-to-late Eighties was flush, shoulder-deep in compleat Paul Taylor dancers. And Musical Offering—a dance built out of circles and curls, ringing stops and stillnesses struck in stone —seemed to rise up like a monument to the company’s palpable, physical coherence. It is a dance that Taylor calls “a requiem.” But for what? The short life of the dancer? The cyclic rise and fall of the company?

It is set to Anton Webern’s orchestration of Bach’s sixteen-part exploration of one theme—its own circling monument to Baroque musical structure. Leave it to Taylor to hear in this steeple of sound the crying voice of an ancient culture. But listen to the theme; it does seem to blow down over a mountain path. And the dancers respond to it with awe and obedience. Taylor sees them as primitive figures, girded in leather loincloths and headbands. He locks them into a language of totemic poses and strange slow-motion leitmotifs: they beat their chests with little fists in a dream trance, making X’s over their hearts; they raise their palms, upper body planted back in submission to the sky. And throughout the piece, like a metronome, they rock sideways on stiff legs, another X, as if they are imitating their own statues of worship. These big, simple shapes, keening and mourning, fit into a circulatory system of rounds and whirlpools, stately processions and pietà poses, and soon the dance is just pouring out as from a heavy urn, all its evocations—Bach’s everlasting command, Nijinsky’s inchoate ritual, the body’s mortal matter—joining in one current. It is a long dance, and yet it is never long enough, so sustained is the tone of stoicism, so inventive this vision of wordless lament pouring into emptiness, the salt and sand. Animals die, Taylor seems to say, but what powerful imprints we leave behind.