Right now seems like a very good time to be Mark Morris. This month, during a celebration of his company’s 25th anniversary at BAM, Mr. Morris’s dances have been accompanied by staggering quantities of live musicians. He has curated a film series and made his conducting debut. He has a fabulous new building full of studios across the street from BAM. Mr. Morris, one may safely assume, is working with more resources – more musicians, more full-time dancers, more studio space – than any other modern-dance choreographer in America.

On Wednesday evening, the curious turned up to see what he has been making lately. In the third and final week of this BAM season, Mr. Morris at last unveiled his two New York premieres: “candleflowerdance,” which made its debut last September in Berkeley, and “Cargo,” first performed at Tanglewood last June.

With its evocative title, “candleflowerdance,” set to Stravinsky’s Serenade in A (played live onstage), seemed to promise sensory delights. In fact it was a pretty cold, acetic exercise. A bland vase of flowers sat on the ground by the piano bench. Two clusters of candles were placed off to the side.

The visual focus was on a rectangular box drawn on the floor, which looked like it had been made with thick white chalk on pavement. It was a playground box, and the costumes, by Katherine Mc-Dowell, were loose and boyish, too – pants and short-sleeved shirts in Crayola colors. The youths occasionally tumbled around; sometimes they put their hands together as if in a game of London Bridge. After a while, the green-tinted back wall reminded me of a teacher’s chalkboard, and the petite, spunky dancer Lauren Grant, with her big tuft of blond hair, made me think of Charlie Brown’s little sister, Sally.

In the absence of a recognizable melody, my ear picked out the music’s percussive qualities. It was often staccato, and sometimes terribly busy, as if a dog were up on the keyboard chasing its tail.

Through it all, those six boys and girls in casual clothes stayed mostly in the box. First they lifted their index fingers up in the air, pointing. Then two boys faced each other like untrained karate opponents, each shuffling in his corner, before doing a smooth little side-by-side duet. More dancers came on and off, always slipping into the box, which became increasingly important. I started to worry about them stepping out of it – like those gymnasts in the floor exercise who lose points for going out of bounds. Toward the end these brightly colored kids made a formation like a tall clump of weeds. Then they tilted, stumbled, and fell into a corner, careful not to cross the line.

The dance was an interesting exercise, though its temperature was quite cool. For me, it went back to the music – intellectually invigorating, yes, but detached. The same is true of the Bartok string quartet that serves as the score of “All Fours,” a 2003 piece revived on Wednesday night’s bill. Watching “All Fours,” with its black-clad dancers moving against a stark, stoplight-red backdrop, was like watching a superior draftsman work at his table. Geometric precision and clever rhythmic intelligence came into play. But while the dancers engaged in dialogue with the music, they spoke neither to each other nor to the audience. It was quite austere.

This is one side of Mr. Morris’s work, but he is also the creator of “Gloria,” with its fervent Verdi score, and “Dido and Aeneas,” to Purcell’s vibrant opera, both of which were seen earlier this BAM season. In “Cargo” (2005), Wednesday’s other New York premiere, Mr. Morris used a straight-line element again – a long bamboo pole. This time, though, the music – Darius Milhaud’s “La Creation du monde” – was rich, warm, and jazzy.

“Cargo” has the kind of mystery that draws you in, rather than excluding you. The dancers came out wearing nothing but white underwear and rippling sinews. As with the playground box, the pole was a formal device, a problem for Mr. Morris’s mind to work on throughout the piece. (A girl hangs by her elbows from it; or from her knees; now one elbow and one knee; and now it’s a Chinese sedan chair.) But here was more of a human story – the story of a tribe with rules. People got startled by things, cowered, and finally fled.

The dance had some wonderful things in it. At one point dancers erupted into fits of leaping and pouncing. During a cunning little move, almost hieroglyphic in flavor, three women carrying poles turned profile and strutted across the stage; every so often, they stopped and thrust their pelvises forward and back. Sometimes a group grabbed a pole and raised it up while turning snaky circles with their torsos; sometimes, they raised the pole on an angle, like a sailboat’s mast.

The program’s closer was a 1990 comic piece called “Going Away Party,” set to a medley of country and western songs by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. (The Western Caravan played the songs live, complete with crooner and fiddle.) “Going Away Party” is supposed to be a kind of a lark, with its three Technicolor cowpoke couples prancing through its kitschy steps, its deliberately literal gestures that mime the lyrics, and its sex gags. But it’s a lark with an odd man out – in the old days, a part played by Mr. Morris.

The pathos of the odd man out didn’t come through, so “Going Away Party” ended up feeling like a long stretch of good, intermittently funny dancing to some very good live music. I found myself wishing I could see a new comic piece from Mr. Morris; I would like to see what makes him laugh now. For what continues to intrigue me about Mark Morris, even more than his passion for music, is his lively, bawdy imagination.

The Mark Morris Dance Group will perform again on March 25 at 5 p.m. at the Mark Morris Dance Center and at 7 p.m. at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House (Brooklyn Academy of Music, 718-636-4100).