At City Center from February 28 to March 16, the Paul Taylor Dance Company titled their annual, three-week event the Dream Season. The inspiration for Taylor’s new works—his fascination with both Mexican culture and C.G. Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious as a reservoir of human experience—is fine fodder for dance. What was missing in both Suenos, though, was Taylor’s facile dance structure with its nuanced phrases that develop like metered rhyme. Some of Taylor’s best choreography, like Aureole and Esplanade, looks luxurious, even when he is pushing his dancers’ physicality to the limits. Taylor can manipulate arms, feet and torsos into cataclysmic cats cradles where phrases of movement surge forward like electric current. Unfortunately, the dancers in Suenos looked stuck, whether they were throttling themselves against the floor in the Aztec warrior scene or sashaying through a folksy waltz. By using excerpted recordings of the Kronos Quartet’s 2002 album Nuevo, the music contributed to the work’s overall effect—that of an ill-strung together strand of beads.

Fortunately Santo Loquasto’s costumes and sets saved both Suenos ballets from devolving into a series of unrelated dancers, where Taylor’s joyous jumps and skips alternated with visions of torture. Loquasto fashioned a landscape where light and dark intermingled. Lauren Halzack, in Loquasto’s gold-beaded unitard and a halo-shaped tiara, became a blazing sun goddess against Richard Chen See as the grim reaper in a black business suit. When Michael Trusnovec, who resembles a golden boy and who sported antlers half the height of his body, picked up Halzack, the ancient Mexican myth of a deer carrying the sun transported their simple duet into something sublime. Loquasto’s set design also charged the work. His black sequined ropes, hanging down on three sides of the stage, and his painted backdrop of sculls pooled under scorched tree roots said Studio 54 meet Dante’s seventh circle of hell.

Though Suenos didn’t hold together, Taylor’s willingness to go for big effects deserves praise. In New York, where minimalist Merce Cunningham and abstract-leaning George Balanchine are worshipped (in certain quarters) as purveyors of high-minded taste, it’s nice to see a work that isn’t afraid to enjoy baroque untidy-ness. Taylor’s use of glitter, weapons, beads and feathers also speaks to something true: a detail drowning, fugue state is as much a part of us as our steel-enforced, streamlined world.

Hopefully Taylor, known to revise his dances, will reshape Suenos into something more choreographically inventive. If a dream can be interpreted, certainly this dance can be retooled.

See, Halzack, Trusnovec