PAUL TAYLOR

DANTE VARIATIONS

City Center, 55th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues. (212) 581-1212. Paul Taylor Dance Company’s 50th anniversary season runs through March 20.

DANTE’S vision of hell, with all those circles of agonized despair, is a grim, but endlessly fascinating place to visit – strictly, of course, as a tourist.

Paul Taylor’s new ballet “Dante Variations,” having its premiere as part of his company’s 50th anniversary season at City Center, is a very special descent into hell.

Set to the sonorous vibrations of the polyphonic music by Hungarian Gyorgy Ligeti, Taylor’s choreography is at times a horrifying mass of writhing mortal coils, suggesting those 19th-century illustrators of Dante, John Flaxman and Gustave Dore.

The brilliant dancers all wear snakeskin-patterned tights, with similar snakeskin bras for the women, designed by Santo Loquasto, and they dance with the diabolic vacancy of blindfold souls.

Soon solos emerge from the chaotic ensemble – a woman with her arms tied behind her back, a man vainly trying to shake off a cloth tied to one foot, another woman blindfolded – all leaving an impression as hopeless as it is helpless.

Taylor’s vision of hell – and we have seen it before in some of his darker pieces such as “Churchyard” (1969) and “Last Look” (1985) – is violent, relentless and unforgiving.

This is just the Taylor formula for Dante dreams and human nightmares. It has never previously been more tightly or more eloquently expressed than with these fallen angels with dirty faces.

Happily, other Taylor work is happier – and this 50th birthday season is a rich abundance of choreography, which has already shown in repertory such seminal works as “Aureole,” “3 Epitaphs,” “Company B” and the more recent “Black Tuesday.”

This is a season no dance lover can afford to miss.