The big event for me was the New York debut of Twyla Tharp Dance, the latest troupe assembled by one of the great choreographers of our time. Tharp would like us to believe she hasn't had a company, hasn't even been in the dance business maybe, for more than a decade, and that with her new dancers and her new home base in a Brooklyn church, she's making a dramatic comeback. The fact is, she made 21 dances in the last five years of the 20th century alone, for American Ballet Theatre, the Royal Ballet, and the New York City Ballet, as well as Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and two semi-permanent ensembles of her own. There have been half a dozen major achievements among them. Her last, intriguing work for Boston Ballet, Waterbaby Bagatelles, was choreographed in 1994 and revived here a couple of seasons ago. Just this month, two Tharp blockbusters were on an " all-American " program in Stockholm, where the Swedish Ballet did Push Comes to Shove and In the Upper Room, together with George Balanchine's Valse Fantaisie.

Tharp's creative energy continues to be unquenchable. When she knows her dancers, and they know her, the combination of risk and trust boosts the work to new heights. The dances on last week's program at the Joyce Theater premiered last summer at the American Dance Festival. They showcase Tharp's perennial infatuation with dancers, her ability to take on widely differing musical ideas, and her gift for propelling high-technique past any previously established brink of mastery.

Most of the six dancers in the new company have danced in Tharp ballets before, and they're all ballet-trained, though neither new work is set on pointe. Mozart Clarinet Quintet K581 and Surfer at the River Styx are constructed from a typically Tharpian lexicon of classical virtuosity plus any other kind of move that serves her immediate purpose. You can't say these are either modern dances or ballets, but aside from the supersonic level of the technique, I'd say Tharp is working more like a modern dancer than anything. That is, she's not satisfied with just displaying technique or formal structure; she has deeper agendas. It seems to me that in both these dances she's thinking about community - harmony and dissension, the competition of egos and the blending of talents, a metaphor for how to make a bunch of people into a dance company.

For his clarinet quintet, Mozart apportions the melody, the accompaniment, and the embellishments variously among the instruments, and you never feel either the clarinet or one of the strings has exclusive rights to the thematic material. Tharp follows this model of orchestration with five dancers (John Selya, Keith Roberts, Benjamin Bowman, Ashley Tuttle, and Elizabeth Parkinson). Like the voices in the quintet, they can take solo roles and develop their own variations or else combine with others in different units, dissolving from foreground to background.

After an initial men's trio, Roberts pairs off with Parkinson. Selya and Bowman form a duo that goes back and forth between rivalry and comradeship and continues when they cooperate to partner Tuttle. It takes a while to establish these subdivisions, but then they remain constant for the rest of the dance. Also like the music, the dance is smooth and almost placid, with spiky humor from Parkinson as a slightly goofy sylph and Tuttle as the upside-down trophy in the game that Selya and Bowman play.

Surfer at the River Styx is a darker, demonic piece with clangy post-minimalist percussion music by Donald Knaack and David Kahne. Alexander Brady joins the quintet of dancers and again the dance is a series of shifting alliances. Tharp says the piece was inspired - loosely - by The Bacchae of Euripides. For Greek tragedy she really needed twice as many dancers to back up the antagonists, Selya and Roberts. So the four others team up different ways as the chorus. Tharp says she isn't really telling the story of the play, about the defeat of the King of Thebes by Dionysus, but even if she's only showing opposing personalities, the argument isn't too clear. Roberts may be the strutting Pentheus, and Selya the demure seducer Dionysus, though it could be the other way around. I think Tharp's sympathies are with Selya, but it's Parkinson who gets carried off transfigured after they pierce the orgiastic heights of dancing.

David Parsons, whose company appeared at the Emerson Majestic over the weekend, shared a week with Tharp Dance at the Kennedy Center last fall. Together they were billed as " The Legacy of Paul Taylor, " but their indebtedness to Taylor differs greatly. Tharp entered his company at the beginning of her career and quickly declared her independence. Parsons danced in the Taylor company for nine years, and in his own choreography he leans heavily on the Taylor movement style. In fact, one piece, Bachianas, could have been a discarded draft for Taylor's signature piece, Esplanade, which also has music by Bach. I have to mention that when a woman perched on the head of one dancing man, I remembered my first sight of Twyla Tharp, in 1963, sitting on the head of Dan Wagoner in Taylor's Scudorama.

Parsons, of course, contributed to the evolving Taylor movement style, and on his own he's used the eccentricities and witty inversions he excelled at to construct elaborate choreographic jokes, like The Envelope, which describes the travels of a package with an ominous but unknown power. But Parsons's smorgasbord of seven short pieces seemed one-dimensional. There were modern-dance abstractions, comedy and acrobatics, an everyday-movement-can-be-dance piece, a sort of bossa nova, and Parsons's miniature spectacle, Caught, in which the dancer (Elizabeth Koeppen) operates a strobe light to illuminate herself in stop-action flight. Each piece featured a different effect or design, but there didn't seem to be any inner paradoxes or tensions to season our enjoyment.

In its way, Parsons's dance probably points the way toward the future as much Tharp's. She exploits high-tech virtuosity; he makes dance into variety entertainment. But at the Boston Conservatory's winter concerts, authentic Paul Taylor was on view, reminding us that he was one of the first modern dance choreographers to go balletic and initiate contemporary dance. His 1978 Airs, to selections from Handel operas and concertos, is indeed airy and bright, but instead of consistently matching the Baroque neatness of the music, Taylor throws a curveball. After clearly separating the men and the women, he makes their pairing-off less than idyllic by adding an extra woman who glides through every once in a while, throwing the romance off balance and even putting questions into the audience's mind. Who is she? Why is she alone? Is she happier than they?

Once again, I had a moment of recognition: in a role David Parsons used to dance, one of the men dropped to his knees and trundled around in a duck-footed pirouette. It was the same move with which Parsons had saluted his own company and the audience during the curtain calls the night before.

In addition to being the period when modern dance was entering the ballet world - within three years, Airs went into the repertory of ABT, for instance - the mid '70s was the peak of the minimalist movement. Lar Lubovitch's Marimba (1976) is a terrific, maybe terminal example of a style that couldn't really evolve. Ten dancers create subtly unfolding patterns in space and time, to Steve Reich's Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ, which was played live by the Conservatory Orchestra under Ronald Feldman.

Minimalism has always been subject to accusations of boring repetitiousness, but I find Reich's layered rhythms and imperceptible modulations exhilarating. Lubovitch visualizes Reich's structures and textures in the progressions of the group as it gradually changes direction, reconfiguring from clumps to lines to circles, and in movement that grows from small tilts and sways to swings, hops, lifts, and explosive jumps and then winds down to a centered, meditative close.

The conservatory's ballet students did a Spanish-flavored pointe piece by Luis Fuente, Momentos. There were nine women in black flamenco dresses with full skirts lined in red, and another woman (Li-Yin Chen) who danced apart from them, I wasn't sure why. Classical ballets used to adapt folk and ethnic dancing for colorful divertissements (see act three of Swan Lake), but now that contemporary ballet choreography mixes classical, modern, and anything else, " character " work is most likely to be seen in shows like Riverdance. Another wave of the future.