In another, pairs of friends skip onstage arm in arm, but the mood doesn’t last soon, they’re shoving one another around, hard. In one of its nine sections, a creaky, tremulous old man (portrayed by Michael Trusnovec) shambles around a small area of the stage. “Lines of Loss” is, as the title suggests, a meditation on loss in many forms. And his fondness for diagonals asserts itself in a shocking final image: a line of intertwined bodies, swathed in blood-red fabric, slowly sinking to the ground to form a vivid diagonal streak.

She bends her back at an impossible angle, her face and neck reaching toward us. Taylor’s trademark muscular tension - which has given us so many distinctive shapes in the past - produces a stark new one: a woman in extremis, her back to us, her knees bent deep. It’s surprising then, that “Lines of Loss” has so many startling moments. Taylor, written in the muscular, expressive dance language he has been refining for more than half a century. “Lines of Loss,” which had its world premiere Friday, the opening night of the Paul Taylor Dance Company’s two-and-a-half-week City Center season, is unmistakably a work by Mr.

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