What was clear watching Paul Taylor’s company perform at City Center was that the aggregate in his work is more important than the individual — the aggregate indeed often functions like a single, but heterogeneous organism. At the same time Mr. Taylor is uncannily sensitive to the personal body language as well as the theatrical expression of each performer, using their attributes so that the roles he creates are often as reflective of the performer as a holographic manuscript.

Last Wednesday, Mr. Taylor’s “Profiles,” originated in 1979 by a stellar quartet of Taylor interpreters, didn’t register with the same intensity I recalled from the original cast and the dancers who came immediately after them. “Profiles” is based indeed on movement in profile, and functioned as a warm-up for Mr. Taylor’s “Le Sacre du Printemps,” created the next year. The music is a commissioned score of string buzzings and dronings by Jan Radzynski. There are blunt moves and equally blunt interlocking concave/convex convergences. The dancers slam and bump into one another. But while the original performances contained an element of impacted psychological defensiveness, graphically indicated by the dancers’ sometimes fetal positions, the current cast seems to have dispensed with human psychology. The dancers were instead a weirdly mutant tribe.

This season the company revived Mr. Taylor’s “Book of Beasts,” dating from 1971, after a 23-year absence. In a succession of zany charades, black-clad minions mindlessly and doggedly go about creating mayhem, framing the appearance of an assortment of comic beasts. The music is classical chestnuts played by E. Power Biggs, the great organ popularizer of the 1940s and ’50s. He was partial as well to the pedal harpsichord, on which all these selections are played, lending them a mock gothic timbre that contributes to the hilarity, as does the faux “let’s put on a show” naiveté of John Rawlings’s costumes. One dancer, entirely encased in a tube of fabric seems like a cousin to the Addams family’s “It.”

A Phoenix wields cheerleader tassels, waving them like Juju sticks, and they seem to be getting the better of him. Two men enter carrying an animal quarry on a spit; they unload their prize, which shows itself to be a shaggy monster who dances to Saint-Saëns “Dying Swan.” Then the monster and one of the men carry off the other man on the same spit. A band of what could be silent-movie bad guys finds a green Loch ness monster emerging from their ranks. A would-be Sun King gets deposed or at least taken down a peg. And in a wag-the-dog episode, a dominatrix pet owner finds her pet getting the upper hand. Power reversals cannot come fast or furiously enough for Mr. Taylor’s evident satisfaction.

Mr. Taylor’s “Roses” has seemed to me a problematic work since it made its premiere in 1986. The crowning duet once appeared excessively balletic, but performed Saturday afternoon by Lisa Viola and Michael Trusnovec, it no longer seemed like a strain or a reach in ways that it had originally.

Still, there are structural flaws relating to Mr. Taylor’s choice of music. First he uses Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll,” threading through it various duets and ensemble sections. Wagner’s harmonic, expository, and motival agenda, however, is enough to undermine and overwhelm any choreographer. The lead duet is then performed to a sweet little bel canto adagio for clarinet and strings by Heinrich Baermann, so that what one expects to be the climactic apotheosis becomes anticlimactically small scale. Perhaps, though, Mr. Taylor’s musical “mistakes” here were a calculated risk on his part — he knew what he was getting into.

Dancing Mr. Taylor’s 1987 “Syzygy,” performed to Donald York’s specially composed minimalist-samba music, on Wednesday night, the dancers never stopped flailing, striking, or shaking. The compulsive movement is a counterpoint to moments of repose principally realized here by Ms. Viola. An aerobicized Brazilian carnival, “Syzygy” might be Mr. Taylor’s answer to Twyla Tharp’s 1986 “In the Upper Room.” There is a note of satire to the mindlessly frenetic, high-impact, nonstop crescendos of this piece: Mr. Taylor has got the 1980s dead to rights.