The current Paul Taylor season at City Center is offering welcome revivals of works not seen onstage for quite some time. Last week brought the revival of “Piece Period,” first performed in 1962, and now a rarity on the Taylor stage.

“Piece Period” wafts together various forays into historical dance to a medley of Baroque music. We begin with an enduring archetype rather than a localized historical period. Dressed in motley, Richard Chen See is the venerable jester who has whirled and scampered his subversion of authority since the genesis of theater. Then comes Lisa Viola, something of a burlesque queen, recalling the slatterns of Antony Tudor’s “Judgment of Paris.” (Mr. Taylor is the consummate observer and his eye and sensibility are remarkably retentive.) She is supplanted by Robert Kleinendorf, stomping out in a George Washington costume, performing an irate diagonal of pas de chats, as well as flexed foot entrechats and heel-clicking golubets.

As with Mr. Taylor’s 1965 “From Sea to Shining Sea,” which the company revived for its New York season last year, there is also some implied satire of Americana here. Four ladies gambol through neo-Attic revels that recall turnof-the-century enthusiasm for ancient movement forms. Throughout “Piece Period,” the dancers’ hands are extended in Mr. Taylor’s signature doggy paws, his avatar of the ineradicable bestiality that resides in the human personality.

“Piece Period” reminds us too of the provenance in Mr. Taylor’s early work of something like this season’s “Troilus and Cressida (reduced),” since both works have the flavor of revue skits, and demonstrate Mr. Taylor’s penchant for sight gags and absurdist humor. John Rawlings’s sets and costumes for “Piece Period,” including pails, chandeliers, and jungle vines, descend and ascend for no apparent reason; the dancers greet these intrusions unflappably. As the piece concludes, all the epochs and the dancers mix, eventually merging into one serpentine line that coils off the stage homogenously.

Saturday night saw a revival of Mr. Taylor’s 1976 “Polaris.” “Polaris” features the same choreography performed twice, by two sets of five dancers, to two different pieces of music by Donald York, who conducted and composed for the company for many years. The music to part one is warmer and more harmonic, while part two is edgier, skittish, more atomized, making us perceive the dances differently. Mr. Taylor’s response to the music is sometimes almost indifferent: now shallow, now deep; sometimes he seems to be just improvising a moment-to-moment response.

“Polaris” can be a stimulating perceptual exercise; your eye arrests movements during the first half so that it can see how they register differently the second time around. While the choreography may be identical, not only is the overall mood distinctly and determinatively different, but the movements appear to be accented differently according to the music to which they’re performed.

The choreography contains one of those wonderful duets by Mr. Taylor in which dance really is quintessentially and evocatively abstract. A man and woman collaborate on intricate partnering that is infinitely suggestive but finitely explanatory. Their movements don’t necessarily mean more than what they appear to be, and we in the audience are each free to spin our own connotations.

“Polaris” was a product of Mr. Taylor’s fecund collaboration with the artist Alex Katz, and Mr. Katz’s contribution is a constant in both halves: a steel cube center stage that serves as the most catalytic aspect of “Polaris.” Each dancer’s venture outside this enclosed, sanctified area seems imbued with significance.

Running through “Polaris” is Mr. Taylor’s enduring emphasis on transience and interchangeability. Not only are the dancers of the first half replaced in the second (the first cast returns briefly at the end), but dancers in the piece are instantaneously and constantly mutable. One dancer stands alone at the hub of the cube, receiving what looks like the adoration of acolytes. Then, in a flash, that dancer has been supplanted, and it is another who now becomes the revered one. “Polaris” may represent a certain emotional detachment in Mr. Taylor’s psyche: Dancers in “Polaris,” the shifting members of Mr. Taylor’s ensemble, pass in and out of Mr. Taylor’s orbit continuously, and no one, no matter how wonderful, is irreplaceable.