There was something for everyone at the opening night of the Fall for Dance festival at City Center on Wednesday night. The program opened with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, which performs annually at the theater, and included two dancers from the Kirov Ballet, which comes to City Center in April. But Wednesday night’s roster also included the London-based Indian dancer Shantala Shivalingappa and the Juilliard School ensemble (neither is scheduled for City center seasons, at least in the near future).

Affable and athletic as it is, “Arden Court” is not Mr. Taylor’s strongest or deepest piece to baroque music. The company’s men are dominant here; they engage in mock jousting or tilting or support one another in slow-motion cartwheels. The women are more recessive, posing decoratively or hovering on the sidelines, but they are never out of the picture. The Taylor dancers performed the piece with a kind of knockabout blitheness — an airy braggadocio — that is unique to this company.

The Kirov’s contribution was Alexei Ratmanksy’s “Middle Duet,” which he made for the company in 1998. It was danced by Ekaterina Kondaurova and Islom Baimuradov and they were both at their best. “Middle Duet” can sometimes look like no more than an excuse for two dancers to fling themselves around, but here it had rigor and a hint of emotional content that made all the difference. Tall and long-limbed, Ms. Kondaurova has the same high extension now pursued by virtually every woman at the Kirov, but she, unlike her colleagues, shapes her limbs with discretion and intelligence. This is all the more rewarding in a piece that certainly demands loose joints and high-jabbing, dodging limbs. Her line could totter or expand into flights of grandeur or become a strident declamation. Her very slim arms and legs proved at times an oppressive emotional weight on Mr. Baimuradov, whose presence projected a hint of something haunted that provided ballast to the memorable duet.

The program continued with Ms. Shivalingappa’s “Varnam,” an excerpt from “GAMAKA.” This was the only piece performed to live music, during which the musicians and vocalist sat on the side, at a right angle to the dancers. The piece was a solo for Ms. Shivalingappa, in which the rhythms grew more complicated and the phrases longer and more elaborated as she progressed. More often than not, each note was heeded, which made for percussiveness that avoided becoming trite. Ms. Shivalingappa was articulate all the way through, from her drubbing descents into the ground to her supple reach of her twining extremities.

Finally, there was Twyla Tharp’s “Deuce Coupe,” a nice, historically important piece that goes on too long. The vignettes of counterculture that it encompasses were clichéd even by 1973, when she made the piece, set to the music of the Beach Boys, for the Joffrey Ballet. “Deuce Coupe” was an early sounding of Ms. Tharp’s love/ hate relationship with ballet that she pursued much more intensively in later years, although the piece shows Ms. Tharp’s use of ballet vocabulary did not progress all that much from its starting point here.

The hub of the piece is ballerina who performs mostly by herself or in isolation from the “children.” You can’t fault the soundness of Ms. Tharp’s diagrammatic concept nor her astute weaving of varied states of kineticism, ranging from the purely balletic to direct quotations from popular dance, along with many gradations of synthesis. The Tharpian imprimatur stamps everything and is capable of considerable virtuosity in mixing and matching the different languages. Yet Ms. Tharp has rarely known when enough is enough, and today “Deuce Coupe” seems not only overextended, but also calculated and even opportunistic. The Juilliard dancers are attractive and skilled and gave it their all. Their performance was certainly of professional quality.