Paul Taylor’s “Banquet of Vultures” had its New York premiere on Friday night, but the excitement about it began months ago, when the normally circumspect Mr. Taylor acknowledged he was making an anti-war piece. Though Mr. Taylor declines to link his new dance explicitly with current events, there will be those who see its images (soldiers in camouflage fatigues, Death in a power suit and a red tie) as topical. Still, “Banquet of Vultures” is less a political work than a deeply moral one.

With “Banquet of Vultures,” Mr. Taylor reminds us that he is among the few contemporary choreographers still willing to tackle large subjects without irony. Making a war piece with heroes and villains leaves him open to charges of heavy-handedness. The concept – voracious lions and defenseless lambs – could not be more obvious.Yet it succeeds because it is not prosaic; because Mr. Taylor gives his dance the atmosphere of myth. In working with archetypes, he gains access to the viewer’s most elemental feelings: fear, the desire to protect, pity.

“Banquet of Vultures” begins in a dark, dark gloom – so black you can hardly see a thing. Small points of light twinkle like fireflies. An ancient, hollow-sounding oboe plays unsettling fragments of melody (it’s the opening of the score, Morton Feldman’s dissonant 1976 “Oboe and Orchestra”). The eye struggles to find the hooded figures in the darkness, finally realizing that these are soldiers in mesh eye masks.

Mr. Taylor and his longtime lighting designer, Jennifer Tipton, are masters of suspense. The soldiers carry small candles that are both a blessing and a curse. The soldiers want to be able to see what’s out there. They don’t want whatever is out there to be able to see them.

Under the spell of that strange, foreboding music, the reluctant soldiers move their puny candles around the next corner, bracing for the worst. Three soldiers tangle under a single dusty spotlight, grappling with one another’s arms and legs – it’s not clear why.Then, off to one side, a tall man in a sharp, trim suit jerks to his feet.

This man wears shoes, while the soldiers’ feet are bare. His arms and neck are covered, while theirs are exposed. He eyes them like a predator, then glides across the stage and knocks them down before slipping offstage. As the three soldiers fall, their comrades come sprinting from the wings like birds in flight.

“Banquet of Vultures” is mesmerizing in this dim world of uncertain identities and urgent survival. When the three men tussle, you can hear them panting over the music; whenever one person lifts another off the ground, the captive’s feet flay the air.It is more mesmerizing still when the sinister man in the suit (Michael Trusnovec) returns; from the moment he begins to move, “Banquet of Vultures” is unlike any dance you’ve ever seen.

He moves jerkily, with a perverse, exaggerated quality. His demeanor is icy, so that his catlike march steps give you chills. He undulates his torso like some vile beast, then rises on his toes, throws his head and chest back proudly, and clenches his fists. He does high, vain kicks and show-offish turns – debonair one minute,laboriously crawling across the floor the next. Mr. Trusnovec performs it all with palpable, riveting concentration.

And as he stands smugly at the center of a circle of soldiers, arms folded, we sense his immense power, and realize: He is a killer. The men marching around him live or die at his pleasure. He drops one arm like a paper cutter onto a soldier’s back, and the body slinks to the ground, inert. (There is something so cold, so merciless in these crude stage killings that they stay with you long after the curtain falls.)

As the bodies pile up, one unfortunate girl (Julie Tice) dashes out from the wings with her candle, unmasked. Her contortions of grief, long and supple and passionate, draw you in, but at the same time, you see what she can’t: the man in the suit behind her. When she finally realizes this, her terror turns her into a hunted animal. She runs and kicks and struggles, then finally bares her throat like a creature about to be slaughtered. That she should be stabbed with her own pitiful little candle is the final insult.

Mr. Taylor’s admirers are well aware by now that he does not balk at turning the full power of his imagination to cruel scenarios; we have “Big Bertha,” and “Last Look” to remind us of his unflinching mind, as well as “The Word” and “Speaking in Tongues,” both on this season’s City Center program. The drama of the crushed innocent, though immensely well done, was familiar to me.

Far more moving was the thing I didn’t expect.It happened after the man in the suit carried the limp, dead girl offstage. Another man in a suit (Robert Kleinendorst) walked out with measured steps.And then suddenly he flung his body down to the ground – hard – scrambled up, and flung it down again. It was an appalling fall; one wondered if he was hurt.Then he did it again, and again.

A dozen times in a single minute, he hurled his own body hard at the floor. Then he slithered toward center stage, buttoned his jacket, and walked methodically toward the crowd, toe-heel, slamming each heel with a jolt to the ground. Was Mr. Taylor trying to say that it is not natural to put on that suit – that one has to beat the humanity out of oneself to become a killer? Or was it simply another inexplicable perversity in that profound gloom? It is part of Mr. Taylor’s virtuosity that his new dance leaves you with questions and potent, unforgettable images to turn over in trying to answer them.

“Banquet of Vultures” belongs to the list of major Taylor works. Like them, it is a meditation on aspects of good and evil; like them, it veers close to stereotypes but ultimately creates archetypes.And far from being topical,”Banquet of Vultures” gives every indication of being timeless.

The Paul Taylor Dance Company’s season runs until March 19 at City Center (West 55th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, 212-247-0430).