Dance Paul Taylor Dance Company Edinburgh Festival Theatre

When choreographers take to touring the world with compilation programmes of their greatest dance hits, you can't help wondering if they've slipped into semi-retirement. The American dancemaker, Paul Taylor - whose company is visiting Edinburgh as part of its 40th anniversary world tour - has included two or three recent works in his greatest hits selection: a public reminder, perhaps, that he's still a active figure in American modern dance. (You only have to dip into Taylor's autobiography to realise how much importance Taylor attaches to fame.)

However, neither his 1993 Spindrift nor the 1991 crowdpleaser Company B are likely to knock the huge and enduring hit that is Taylor's Aureole from its number one perch. Created in 1962, this breezy, shapely work set to excerpts from Handel's Concerti Grossi, harnesses its vivacity and quirky bravura within a framework of sublime architectonic order and handsome simplicity. But the most surprising thing about it is that its steps seem entirely based on walking, running and jumping - these actions stylised, combined and enlarged to often dazzling effect.

Each of its five sections demonstrates the human body's own innate laws of opposition. Exaggerated, permutated forms of this core movement material send the dancers bounding past each other on a series of intersecting pathways. Ram-rod arms help propel the body across the stage in low runs. Leaps that slice high and wide on a clear diagonal are contrasted with smaller, tucked-leg jumps scooping whole phrases of small, rapid steps off the ground.

Entrusted with the work's second movement - the solo Taylor originally cast on himself - Edward Talton-Jackson, a beefcake with arms so long and hands so large that you could see his fingernails from the dress circle, is a tower of tensile strength and authority as he sculpts the space above and around him. The women, typically Taylorish, are more demure, even as they lean and swerve into the music with fearless abandon.

Next to the other pieces - Spindrift, Company B, and the 1979 Profiles - shown in Programme One on Wednesday evening, Aureole cannot hide its age. It looks decidedly Sixties, but that doesn't detract from its freshness and inventiveness. Profiles plunges both dancers and audience into darker territory where two psychologically mismatched couples behave as though condemned to spend the rest of their days together in some hellish place. They pull, jerk and flinch, or violently rebound off each other's bodies, rather than be strangulated by an embrace. The third work, Spindrift, meanders unsatisfyingly alongside the alternating warmth and mystery of Schoenberg's String Quartet Concerto, its central role for Andrew Asnes as empty and grey as the clouds on the backdrop. But with Company B, a set of 10 divertissements to songs by the Andrews Sisters, the lightness of mood is unashamedly restored and Asnes wows everyone with his show- stopping solo to Tico-Tico.

n Programme Two tonight and tomorrow.Booking: 0131-529 6000