Funny Papers.

It used to be that Paul Taylor's dancers were "different." The men were big, with chests like barrels and the thighs of football players. The women, for their part, were anything but sylphs, although they could be airy and lyrical. Moreover, the Taylor company always danced "big." When arms opened, the motion came from deep in the torso, like a sunburst. Last but not least, Taylor's dancers were fearless. They leapt and fell like celestial gymnasts, with a freedom that courted danger and a nonchalance that defied it. Both made them thrilling to watch.

Although Esplanade and Aureole remain as joyous as ever, the company that now dances them has blunted their physical edge. Of Taylor's seventeen dancers, fewer than one-third have been with him for more than five years, and although the newcomers include the likes of Denise Roberts and Edward Talton-Jackson (superb in the male solo in Aureole), who have the articulate torsos and feeling for gravity of an older generation of modern dancers, they include others, like Patrick Corbin and Angela Vaillancourt, who retain a strong imprint of their grounding in ballet.

To judge from the casting during this fortieth-anniversary season, Taylor finds the ballet look appealing. At the same time, he seems intrigued by the harmonious line and ritual formality of ballet, both of which permeate this year's new Moonbine. The music is Debussy's Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, a late work that seems to flow imperceptibly through time, even while haunted by echoes of Jeux or Prelude a l'Apresmidi d'un Faune, first made into dances by Vaslav Nijinsky. Taylor picks up on these Nijinsky echoes in the angled profile stance of the women (combined here with flexed feet and hand positions suggestive of Javanese styles) and in the perverse games of the protagonists (Vaillancourt and Talton-Jackson), shamans of a ritual that turns, like Nijinsky's Rite of Spring, on a maiden's capture and death. The game they play is London Bridge, with their arms forming the vise that captures a succession of would-be victims and from which all but the last manage to escape.

The tension builds through small climaxes that belie the serenity of the music: indeed, the contrast between the two heightens the strangeness of what transpires. At least some of the action is desultory: Corbin's solo, for instance, goes on far too long. The high point comes at the end, when Lisa Viola spins from the arms of her captors with the frenzy of a dervish, only to be pinioned anew and lifted above the others like a totem of death.

The sublime dopiness of American popular culture has always been a favorite Taylor theme, and in Funny Papers he treats it with a freshness absent from his recent explorations of the genre. This vitality stems from the unusual compositional method: rather than choreographing the piece from start to finish, Taylor solicited chunks of material from six of the company's dancers that he then "amended and combined," as the program puts it, in addition to choosing the loony songs that accompany them--"Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini," "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose its Flavor (On the Bedpost Overnight)," and the like.

The resulting work has all of Taylor's quirky humor and craft, while avoiding its cliches, and an energy that gives the whole a contemporary edge, despite the cartoon gestures and clips from old-time vernacular dances. The best of the vignettes is "I Am Woman," where Denise Roberts, as a high-stepping cheerleader, parades her bionic powers over a chorus line of men to the refrain of "I'm invincible." When Hernando Cortez struts his stuff in turn for an all-lady chorus, the reversal is a hilarious send-up of a certain brand of 1970s pop feminism.

Unlike some of the older works, Funny Papers showed the new Taylor company at its best. This is not to say that the newcomers are incapable of investing these works with new life, only that to do so, they need the kind of coaching evident in the recent "Radical Graham" season. Even if Taylor himself prefers to adapt his choreography today to the current qualities of his dancers, he owes it to the older works to see that they are performed in a way that retains their stylistic integrity. Their life depends on it.