New York

This year March Madness isn't limited to basketball. Dance-watchers have already found this month about as jam-packed as any period in recent memory.

To take but two examples, the Paul Taylor Dance Company is now at City Center with what seems like an endlessly varied mix of Mr. Taylor's dances: 19 different works making up 18 separate triple bills. Among these are two of the master modern-dance-maker's newest works and the revival of one not given for nearly 40 years. Across town at Japan Society, the Awaji Puppet Theater Company, unseen hereabouts for 10 years, offered four performances of the 500-year-old art form's dance-theater productions.

'Changes' uses the Mamas and the Papas as a soundtrack and takes '60s California as its theme and setting. Tom Caravaglia

Though the prolific Mr. Taylor and his dancers pay annual visits to New York, this unusually ambitious season felt somewhat retrospective. The oldest work, "Scudorama" from 1963, is what the 78-year-old classes as one of his "real oldies." He told the New York Times he revived the work because of "money," meaning there was funding interest in his bringing back such vintage creations.

Heavy hanging clouds, and the ways they scud in the background as part of Alex Katz's eye-filling and often sinister d&eacute;cor, help give Mr. Taylor's dance its name and its eerily changeable nature. Set to a moody, mildly dissonant and scrappy modernist score by Clarence Jackson, "Scudorama" was created even before the score was ready, and was adjusted to fit it later on.

"Scud," as it's called around the company, showed men and women in everyday guises and in second-skin body suits of strong, solid colors who are trapped in, tortured by, or just striding through a kind of loveless Limbo. In the central role originally danced by the incomparable Mr. Taylor himself, a stalwart Sean Mahoney made a strong and duly scary impression.

In a slightly lighter vein, "Changes," a commission Mr. Taylor fulfilled for San Francisco Ballet last April, to songs and rehearsal recordings of the 'Mamas and the Papas, takes as its theme California in the 1960s. Mr. Taylor's program note says the "changes" often associated with the demands of that "radical" time make the era seem singular, but, he adds, "in fact it was not."

His seven-part dance, with 12 of his dancers in Santo Loquasto's marvelous hippie get-ups, is typical of Mr. Taylor's often sidelong glance at a would-be familiar world. Magically nestled amid the apt free-for-all activity is a dream sequence. Set to "Dancing Bear," an atypical Mamas and Papas number, "Changes" presents a tender duet for father and son, lending the devil-may-care suite a delicate gravity.

"Beloved Renegade," first shown last November on tour, is Mr. Taylor's most recent work. Its six-part structure takes musical inspiration from Poulenc's 1961 "Gloria" and uses quotations from Walt Whitman to suggest its themes. So far, it seems more a puzzle than a picture.

Mr. Loquasto has dressed the 15 dancers in trim, light outfits of colors nearly bleached to whiteness; they suggest a safe spring collection from the Gap. Jennifer Tipton's air-filled, open-skies lighting is ravishing, as is the statuesque Laura Halzack, clad in a sleek unitard that makes her resemble an alabaster goddess.

Except for an intriguing, odd segment in which Michael Trusnovec, as the work's pivotal, poetic figure, watches a series of would-be children's games that include such vernacular details as held noses to indicate someone having broken wind, Mr. Taylor's choreography exudes a strongly perfumed sense of being beloved and leaves the indicated renegade aspects as little more than a word in the dance's title.

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The four-foot-tall puppets from Japan's Awaji Island have heads and hands of wood, and cloth, usually kimono-clad, bodies. They evolved from devotional figures used in Shinto rituals over the past centuries into the popular theatrical "performers" they remain throughout Japan today. These male and female "characters" enact their parts in plays written especially for them, with their "choreographers" in full view. When the artform began, each puppet was manipulated by a single puppeteer. But since the mid-18th century, three puppeteers per puppet have become the norm: One works the head and the right hand, another the legs and feet, and a third the left hand.

At Japan Society, the Awaji Puppet Theater Company's production of "Ebisu-mai" features a four-foot-tall puppet that is manipulated simultaneously by three puppeteers. Tadashi Ogino

These powers-behind-the-puppet are dressed all in black and are said to be their puppets' shadows. With their miter-shaped headwear and their faces fully veiled, when you notice these puppeteers -- and it's part of this theater's craft how soon one almost forgets they're there -- they can suggest penitents in Christian processions.

Older than Japan's renowned Kabuki theater, Awaji puppet theater presents plays from its past. The program at Japan Society included three excerpts of works that spanned the theater's centuries-long history.

"Ebisu-mai" acted as a curtain-raiser. In this work with links to ancient Shinto practices, Ebisu, the deity of prosperity, presents himself as a sake-loving fisherman who dances a kind of Samurai jig and catches, as luck would have it, a tai, or red snapper, which is an auspicious symbol in Japan. Accompanied, like all Awaji plays, by a chanting narrator reciting old-world Japanese and an attendant musician -- here a taiko (drum) player -- "Ebisu-mai," though harkening back hundreds of years, incorporated topical, local color into its script. With a sly, smiling delivery, chanter Takemoto Tomosho had the sake-glugging Ebisu make sing-song toasts with key words in English, such as "world peace" and baseball's "Yankees."

To see the subtle but sure gestures of Ebisu's host as he carefully poured out dishes of sake, which the jolly deity imbibed with lip-smacking relish, was to witness a fine movement art practiced with remarkable finesse.

From its 18th-century past, Awaji Puppet Theater offered "The Ferry Crossing Scene" from "Hidakagawa Iriai Zakura." This tragic and demonic episode shows the transformation of a spurned woman into a sea serpent vengefully pursuing the lover who tried to prevent her from reaching him. Here, thrillingly, the hundred-year-old Kiyohime puppet, with the whitened face of a Victorian porcelain doll, morphed in the blink of an eye. When a puppeteer worked a single unseen string, the demure woman became a leering, wild-haired, saw-toothed, horned she-devil. No Joker in the most high-tech "Batman" movie ever proved so instantly frightening.

The double-suicide and resurrection scene from "The Miracle at Tsubosaka Temple" (1887) had further beauties and mysteries, including a glowingly painted misty landscape. In this episode concerning the devoted wife of a blind, repentant husband, both protagonists leap into an abyss only to be brought back to life by the Kannon, the goddess of mercy.

Kannon, manipulated by a single puppeteer, took the 21st-century artistry of Awaji Puppet Theater directly back to its roots. With her black-clad manipulator as little more than a vestigial shadow, the goddess stands motionless in iridescent light to restore life to a loving wife and husband. The first stirrings of Awaji puppets as powerful presences came from their role in religious ritual. Five hundred years later, they can still hold their onlookers spellbound. Let's hope it won't be another 10 years before their next visitation.

Mr. Greskovic writes about dance for the Journal.