MERCE CUNNINGHAM

City Center, 55th Street, between Sixth and Seventh avenues. (212) 581-1212. Season continues through April 8.

MERCE Cunningham – the Grand Old Man of American Dance – is giving two major premieres during his annual New York season at City Center.

Cunningham – who will be 82 in a few days – not only loyally maintains that classic dance trinity of choreography, new music and design (the last often ignored by others), but adds his own special trinity of time, space and motion.

The more important of the new pieces came on Tuesday night with the New York premiere of “Interscape.”

This, with a score for an electronically assisted cello by Cunningham’s longtime collaborator, the late John Cage, had costumes and a montage-style setting by legendary painter Robert Rauschenberg.

Rauschenberg’s exuberant back cloth and front curtain – a repeated, magic mixture of photographic nostalgia and surrealism – and his multicolored costumes provide the background for dances proceeding through Cage’s music with a skittishness alternating with a dramatic solemnity enlivened with swirls of passion.

It is a work of quiet intensity, full of quirks and thrillingly intriguing oddities – indeed, Cunningham’s characteristic quicksilver switches among his own concepts of time, space and motion.

The season’s world premiere, “Way Station,” came last Saturday night at the season’s opening Performance.

Accompanied by a sonorous electronic sound score by Takehisa Kosugi, “Way Station” featured huge claw-like sculptural objects in clashing pastel colors by Charles Long.

They gave the dancers, prettily clad in James Hall costumes, interesting stage obstacles to dance around and through.

The choreography looked elegant and poised in its linear traceries, and the dancing, typified by Derry Swan in a delicate solo of consummate balance, proved, absolutely superb.