These reflections came to mind as I watched the Sarasota Ballet in a program entitled “Conflicted Beauty,” which combined works by the choreographers Edwaard Liang, Frederick Ashton, and Paul Taylor. In many ways it was the newest ballet, Liang’s “The Art of War,” from 2015, that felt the most ephemeral. In contrast, Ashton’s “Dante Sonata,” an early piece created just as the Second World War was beginning, was like a time capsule, a product of its time worth considering for what it reveals about the artist who made it. But it is Paul Taylor’s 1991 “Company B,” last performed here in 2012 (and staged by Michael Trusnovec) that felt the most timeless, and, in a way, the most perfect—and the most well danced.

What is it that makes it so? After all, it is a period piece, a meditation on the world of WWII America, the world of sock-hops and the Andrews Sisters (whose recordings it is set to) and GI’s going off to fight in Europe and Asia. And yet Taylor’s dance is so well-constructed, so light of touch, so knowing and subtle that it was as fresh at this performance as it wass the first time I saw it. In fact “Company B” is so cannily made that it is often mistaken for a nostalgia piece, pining for a happier time, when in fact it is driven by melancholy and the ghostly recognition of the ever-presence of death. Many of the grinning boys who dance in the “Bei Mir Bist du Schön” and who whistle at the skirts of the belle in “Rum and Coca-Cola”—as innocent as she is sexy—are doomed to die on distant battlefields. The men we see in silhouette in the background of in “The Pennsylvania Polka” are already in battle. At the end of the exuberant, elegant solo set to “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” the titular boy shudders as his body is riddled with bullets. The women are lonely, even desperate for company. There is the sense of a generation being lost to war.