Paul Taylor, who died in 2018, made an impressive 147 dances, but in his last decade there wasn’t much to say about the premieres except that there was another one. Thankfully, Michael Novak, artistic director of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, is not loyal to the whole career but only to Taylor’s genius and how it might entice new audiences. Besides the marketing ploy of discounts to the under-40 and student set, Novak has favored Taylor in lyrical mode. With the excellent chamber Orchestra of St. Luke’s in the pit and equally well-chosen dancers above, Arabesque (to Debussy) and Spindrift (early Schoenberg) return after a decade to join such perennials as Airs (Handel) and the Bach Esplanade and Brandenburgs. Also not to be missed: the Pam Tanowitz commission. She, too, is a dance genius. When the New York choreographer fuses her spiky wit with the idioms of Martha Graham or Taylor, the results are revelatory. Finally, for midcentury-modern-dance completists: Alwin Nikolais’s Tensile Involvement, featuring an outsized cat’s cradle in which dancers are the twining fingers and wide rubber bands stretched from ceiling to floor are the twine. To the bloop and plonk of ingenue electronic music, the 1953 work possesses the goofy, creaturely air of the poetic shapeshifters Pilobolus. —Apollinaire Scherr