Lisa Viola covered a lot of ground in her final performance with the Paul Taylor Dance Company Sunday afternoon at City Center. She appeared in each of the three dances on the program: “Cloven Kingdom,” “Lines of Loss,” and “Esplanade.” Each is totally different from the others and in each she was able to look and dance differently. It was an intensely satisfying way to watch her bring to a close a career with the company that began in 1992.

In Mr. Taylor’s 16-member company, the collective rules. No one, however gifted, is a star in the traditional sense. The individual dancer is a pinpointed figure one moment and part of the ensemble the next. Ms. Viola’s final performance illustrated this. We first saw her as a member of the rampaging hordes of revelers in “Cloven Kingdom.” Swishing her long jersey skirt with abandon, Ms. Viola and the rest of the 12-member cast acquiesced with increasingly riotous abandon to the anarchic calls of nature. Then, in “Lines of Loss,” Ms. Viola performed a poignant and powerful role that itself seems like a statement of finality and departure.

First shown in 2006, “Lines of Loss” is performed to a suite of somber tracks by modern composers from around the world. When the curtain rises, we see two figures silhouetted onstage against Santo Loquasto’s backdrop of crinkly black lines shuttered against a white field. The silhouettes begin to move in what seems to be a pious procession. Ms. Viola almost immediately begins to dance a lachrymose solo, in which she performs back hinges with incredible strength, control, and intensity. She is hobbled on her knees, penitential. She clasps her hands, wipes away tears; there is a suggestion that she is an apostolic figure, weeping for the sins of the congregants who surround her.

“Lines of Loss” proceeds by way of parable. The 11 dancers come back onstage, ostentatiously demonstrating a convivial togetherness that, given the context of this piece, you know immediately isn’t going to last. And soon enough there is trouble. All exit except James Samson and Richard Chen See. They’re jovial for a moment, and then in an instant they’ve started pushing eachother around. Ms. Viola and the entire cast return, and all have turned aggressive.

The penultimate section of “Lines of Loss” is Ms. Viola’s duet with Michael Trusnovec, in which they embody a grandeur that Mr. Taylor sometimes achieves by borrowing from balletic idealization. But he can also achieve it as he showed here, entirely through varied partnering techniques and sculptural resources that belong particularly and primarily to modern dance. There are blunt statements and attenuated ones in this duet. There are repeated splits and convergences, established right away as Ms. Viola and Mr. Trusnovec begin the duet by repeatedly walking away from each other and then twining back together. Sitting on the floor, they arch their backs toward each other. They cup their hands in front of each other’s eyes. Toward the end of the duet, they sit on the ground and she cartwheels backward into his arms. They walk away, exiting to opposite wings, blowing kisses to each other.

Their duet crowns the piece and, for a moment, one thinks that “Lines of Loss” could very well end here. Instead, Mr. Taylor leads us once more back to the community. The cast reappears onstage, now dressed in red robes, except for Ms. Viola, who remains in her white tunic and tights. We hear a bell tolling, as she walks past the assembled dancers and exits upstage. As a comment on retirement, this would have been a perfect finale, but instead the performance ends with “Esplanade,” which has closed countless Taylor performances, many of them featuring Ms. Viola.

“Esplanade” gives Ms. Viola free rein to fly loop-de-loops while remaining on the ground, her powerful legs drubbing, drilling, skittering, tapping circles, and making figure eights. When most of the company is paired, she remains on her own in “Esplanade,” an autonomous law unto herself. After the hurtling spirals of the final movement, Ms. Viola brings the curtain down with Mr. Taylor’s choreographed gesture of acknowledgment toward the audience. At Sunday’s performance, her outstretched arms became especially significant and were welcomed with particular gratitude by the audience.