For the total Paul Taylor Experience, the three-week season at Lincoln Center is the thing. But for the weird old dances, “when Paul was still a foreigner in his own medium,” as his onetime friend and collaborator Robert Rauschenberg put it, the one-week summer stint at the Joyce is best. Even in the 1950s and 60s, and early 70s, the choreographer had his preoccupations. For abstract work, Taylor, who died in 2018 at age 88, favored tiny adjustments with big consequences. For Polaris (1976), on this month’s bill, he drove repetition to the limit by doing the entire dance twice. For the dramas and comedies, he often exposed the flimsiness of “civilization.” The tuxedoed men and gowned women in Cloven Kingdom, also from 1976, eventually throw off head-coverings constructed from a mirror mosaic to hunker down and pound the ground. The interest lies not in the provocations, though, but in the complications. Polaris takes place in and around an open steel cube that at once shrinks and magnifies the dance, and never explains itself. The Cloven dancers don’t so much transgress civilization as squeeze it into shape. This year’s rarities, Tablet and Churchyard, include one of each type: an abstraction (with Ellsworth Kelly costumes and set) and a surface-damning drama. —Apollinaire Scherr