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Although Taylor has made many, many beautiful and "accessible" works (like Airs, which, not surprisingly, has found its way into ballet company's repertories), he can also be arch and oblique, and it's hard not to miss the wink in his choice of music for Le Grand Puppetier Stravinsky's Petrouchka, in a reduction for pianola, no less. It takes a certain chutzpah to make a dance about a puppet to this famous score of a dance about a different puppet, but, fortunately for us, reticence and reverence are not among Taylor's virtues. But while this discordance gave luster to the comic splendor of his Le Sacre du Printemps, in Le Grand Puppetier it's just another almost-meaningful bit building to a cumulative reaction of "yes, and...?" In Le Grand Puppetier, unlike most Taylor, what you see is what you get; if there's some biting commentary or purple lasciviousness hidden in its meager and predictable narrative, it was beyond my discernment. Basically, an Emperor who looks much like Napoleon, rules with the aid of a magic wand which appears to turn his subjects into puppets, or at least easy subjects for mind-control. The Emperor also has his own "real" puppet (as opposed, I suppose, to the ones the real Napoleon was want to set on thrones here and there) whom he drags around by a leash in the person of a rather Pagliacci-ish Patrick Corbin (Corbin's only appearance this season). The Emperor's naughty daughter (Lisa Viola) is enamored of one of his guards, while the dandyish fop to which the Emperor wants to betroth his daughter seems more interested in the Emperor's other guard. The daughter flirts and schemes with the guard, and tries to avoid the suitor. The puppet eventually frees himself from his collar and steals the Emperor's wand (have I lost you yet?), which he uses to free the enslaved people, and turn the Emperor into a puppet himself. Ah, zut alors! The piece ends with a blackout, just as the Emperor triumphantly regains his wand, a reversal which might've been surprising had Taylor not seemingly taken pains to make this ending seem all but inevitable, as I felt like calling out to the happy, celebrating Puppet and friends, "Look out, that nasty Emperor is skulking around, and he's after that wand!" Well, I would have, if I'd cared; but I didn't. The sad thing about Le Grand Puppetier is not that it's got a silly story, but that there's just not much to look at. The pigeon-toed, floppy limbed Puppet isn't very interesting, nor is the Frankensteinnish Emperor, once he's been taken over by the wand. Although Viola has some typically deadpan witty moments, they're nowhere near enough to rescue Le Grand Puppetier from its empty preciosity.

However slight or disappointing the season's new works might have been, the bulk of the repertory was made up of gems from Taylor's decades-long creative flowering. Promethean Fire, from 2002, is a big, dense and powerful work set to Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D minor, Prelude in E flat minor, and Chorale Prelude. Danced by the 15 dancers, the work presents imagery of death and rebirth the program quotes Shakespeare: "fire that can thy light relume" and seems clearly to be Taylor's response to September 11. This is a high-energy dance, with the ensemble seeming much larger than its actual numbers, massed in lines or circles, in almost constant motion. Santo Loquasto has dressed the dancers in black tights and tank tops embellished with silver diagonal threads, which, as the dancers perform against a black backdrop, break up the dancer's bodies into almost-disembodied bare feet, arms and heads, connected by little more, it seems, than flashing glitter. I was struck, as I have often been, with how Taylor's sure touch lets him succeed with movement devices which have become stale and obvious in lesser hands, as when he has every dancer jump up and fling him or herself to the stage floor on successive beats, with very much the effect of a toppling row of dominos, or when all the dancers congeal into a mass of limp bodies in the center of the stage, from which emerge Lisa Viola and Michael Trusnovec for the dance's central duet, with a particularly breathtaking moment coming when Viola leaped, backwards, at Trusnovec who caught her with her legs wrapped around his chest. The monumental effect of this dance, of vast energies coiling and uncoiling, with various dancers emerging from and returning to this mass, is exhilarating and uplifting, despite, or perhaps because of, its overall air of dark menace.

Again, any season which brings back Taylor's 1983 masterpiece, Sunset, can't be all bad. This brief encounter between a group of uniformed soldiers in red berets, and women who flirt, dance with, and, ultimately, bid farewell to them, starts out looking a bit more like a khaki-colored Fancy Free than I'd remembered from twenty-one years ago (where has the time gone?). There's a moment early on when the men form up, a bit jauntily, in a line, and I found myself waiting for the sticks of chewing gum to emerge. Which, of course, they didn't. Although Taylor's soldiers have their moments of pugnacious cameraderie, their relations to the women are far more respectful, even worshipful, than Robbins' testosterone-laced sailors. One particular passage, where the men combine to lift and carry a woman so her feet never touch the ground so reminiscent of Balanchine's The Unanswered Question, but so different shows us that these are, essentially, nice boys who know how to treat a lady.Although the general mood is quiet and contemplative (thanks in no small part to the Elgar to which Taylor set the piece), Taylor laces his encounters between the sexes with imagery that could be flashbacks, or forward, to combat, as the men occasionally writhe almost luxuriantly on the ground. Are we seeing slow-motion murder, or just a kid enjoying a midsummer roll in the grass? Taylor loves such ambiguous imagery, using almost the same device in his later Company B. At Sunset's end, the soldiers respectfully doff their berets, and march off into the wings. You notice one beret left onstage; one of the kids must have dropped it accidentally. One of the women picks it up and holds it to her breast as she reaches longingly after the departed soldiers, and the curtain drops. This ending's as heartbreakingly effective as ever, and, sadly, even more topical today, underscoring the vulnerability of the young men we send in harms' way, for good reasons or otherwise.

While some might consider last year's Dream Girls to be little more than another Taylor trifle, its wit, both biting and corny, elevate it far above this season's disappointing offerings. The wink here is pretty obvious: most of the five women who haunt these four men (costumed, respectively, like dance-hall girls and cowboy/prospectors who all seem to have forgotten that one usually pulls pants or some other outer garment over one's union suit, especially if it's as fetchingly pinstriped as Santo Loquasto's creations here) are anything but dreams. Dressed in body suits that give them pumped-up bosoms, one, (Lisa Viola as Hard-Hearted Hannah) assaults and terrifies the men. Another does a tipsy Sally Rand fan-dance, revealing two jugs strapped to her breasts (get it?) from which she takes an occasional swig. The charm of Dream Girls lies in the cleverness with which Taylor enacts the various songs' lyrics (showing that he gives up nothing to Mark Morris in this regard), and the sharply sketched characterizations he makes of the game yet often hapless men and the spunky, if not downright predatory women. If the happy ending seems a bit incongruous, it's nevertheless wonderfully calming, as couples pair up romantically, the men offering their hands to the women, to a stirring hymn.

The spooky, midnight rituals of Runes are as mysterious and affecting as ever (who are these people, with their oddly fur-trimmed unitards?), but, sadly, Mercuric Tidings, a bouncy, "pure dance" romp to Shubert, showed me what I'd missed in my night at Taylor: that some of these men just aren't up to the level of twenty years ago. While they can soar as well as ever in those amazing, preparation-less leaps Taylor likes, these men, except for the magnificent Michael Trusnovec and a few others, get fuzzy around the edges in the tough spots. For instance, Taylor's fond of a side-skipping, mazurka-like cabriole; here it was too-often muddy, without the necessary stretch and clarity. It's sad to see some of the men struggle with the harder turning combinations, or, worse, Taylor's often ambitious partnering. It would have been better, perhaps, had Taylor left Mercuric Tidings lie fallow a bit longer, until he has an ensemble which can really do it justice.

That isn't to say the company isn't without some fine, even magnificent dancers. Patrick Corbin, of course, who's been the company's leading man for well over a decade, only appeared in Le Grand Puppetier. He'd have been missed more in other roles, had not Michael Trusnovec, blond like Corbin, and with a commanding stage presence, filled in so well in Corbin's other roles. I once thought Lisa Viola was a strangely deadpan successor to such short Taylor firecrackers as Lila York, Carla Wolfangle or Carolyn Adams, but her sometimes affectless style in the pure-dance works only emphasizes the clarity of her dancing; her underlying wit shines through in comic roles, as in Dream Girls, or the recent Black Tuesday or Offenbach Overtures. Perhaps the most-noted dancer of the season was Annemarie Mazzini, who, despite a less than perfect physique for dance, has become an audience favorite thanks to her boundless enthusiasm and fearlessness.

As with New York City Ballet, even in lean years, Paul Taylor is well worth a visit, or even several.