Taylor 2 Gives a Paul Taylor Sampler at Pace The mission of Taylor 2, the six-member budget version of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, is to bring Mr. Taylor's works to places that may not be able to afford the main troupe. It's an honorable mission, which one group of dancers after another has been fulfilling admirably since 1993. But at the Pace University Schimmel Center for the Arts on Saturday (the second of two programs), the current crop looked decidedly junior varsity. "Images," from 1977, exhibits Mr. Taylor's idiosyncratic imagination. To impressionistic piano pieces by Debussy, he gives us an archaic world of friezes and hieratic formations. The vocabulary reaches into Mr. Taylor's past as well, into his roots with Martha Graham, particularly in the Cassandra-like solo titled "Oracle." On Saturday, Christina Lynch Markham rendered that solo incisively, and in the rest of the dance the ensemble ably depicted the group patterns in their austere beauty. But austere beauty is only one side of the work, and these dancers struggled with the antic gestures, tricky steps and comic swerves that Mr. Taylor threads throughout the dance as if to mock the antique mode. When Justin Kahan patted the rear ends of the women who pranced by him, the playfulness was already there, built in to the choreography; in the rest of his performance the attitude of playfulness tipped over into weak camping. "Funny Papers," from 1994, is much more straightforwardly silly, a suite of vaudeville sketches inspired by newspaper comics and set to novelty tunes. On Saturday, however, the only punch line that fully connected was the broadest one. A woman (the appropriately cartoonish Ms. Lynch Markham) exults in an awful recording of "I Am Woman," standing and stretching a foot above her head with her hand; then a man (Manuel Sanchez) does the same. Through the remainder of "Funny Papers" only tiny Madelyn Ho had the looseness, the lightness necessary to bring out the fun in the vernacular steps. In "Images" she was the sharpest, making the clearest shapes in the air. Lightness and ease were also lacking in "Esplanade" (1975). This work, of course, is a classic, the kind that deserves applause when it starts. On Saturday much of this anticipatory applause seemed to come from a contingent of Taylor alumni. Its elementary steps are so brilliantly put together and developed that the dance is a joy machine no matter how performed. In "Esplanade," as they were in "Images," the Taylor 2 dancers were more comfortable with the slower, more serious passages. The men's tender cradling of the women, the crawling in a circle - these moments were as affecting as ever. The cast gave its all to the headlong finale, the women now leaping into the men's arms, everyone sliding across the floor. But the show of effort was just the problem. Any sense of strain here diminishes the pleasure. Wobbles and near-mistakes can perhaps be excused in a junior troupe. Hesitancy of tone is a bigger issue. Mr. Taylor's compositions are solid enough to handle some roughness of execution, but the mixing of light and serious is what makes Taylor Taylor. Even with reduced numbers, a Taylor company has to get that right for the work to convince.