Beauty and brute reality exercise equal fascination for Paul Taylor's creative imagination. As Robert Rauschenberg, an early collaborator, has said in speaking of his own work, "There's art and there's life; I like to work in the space between." This remark easily applies to Taylor's work.
The April season at New York City Center's 55th Street Theater marked Taylor's thirty-third year as an active choreographer. Over the years, the choreographer has moved from once-a-year appearances at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y to yearlong world tours.
Although Taylor's own company remains the focus of his choreographic energies, his works have appeared in the repertoires of the New York City Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre, and the Royal Danish Ballet, as well as a number of other companies at home and abroad. And while pursuing his own career steadily and energetically, Taylor has nurtured a cluster of other choreographers--Twyla Tharp, Dan Wagoner, Danny Grossman, David Parsons, and Senta Driver--who have branched out to form their own companies. In his unassuming way, Taylor has created a school of choreography that bears his own mark of witty athleticism.
Instant Celebrity
An example of his wit, seen in the current season, is Lost, Found and Lost, a reworking of movement material from an early and revolutionary concert piece, 7 New Dances. When this program was first performed in 1957, Taylor became an instant celebrity in the modern dance world. The manager of the Kaufmann Concert Hall where 7 New Dances has been presented, told Taylor that under no circumstances would he ever be permitted to rent the theater again. The performance also provoked the most famous dance review of modern times--a quarter column of white space with the date and place of the concert listed at the top and the reviewer's initials at the bottom.
The dance was an exploration of gestures and postures that Taylor had observed in crowds on the street and was accompanied by recorded telephone company time signals alternating with silence; the costumes were everyday clothing. Deliberately low-key and deadpan, the piece predated and presaged by half a dozen years the radical experimental work of sixties choreographers that challenged the conventions of traditional modern dance.
By contrast, Lost, Found and Lost, reworked in 1982, has a string orchestra accompaniment of popular songs from the fifties. The dancers' new costumes are stylish black bodysuits with silver sequined accents, topped off by veiled black caps. The resolutely ordinary gestures and postures are now presented as alluring vignettes, but they still retain the sense of alienation that characterized the original. What had been commonplace has acquired the glamorous patina of a high-fashion magazine layout.
Similar contrasts have always attracted Taylor, who has often joined an Apollonian desire for order and restraint to a Dionysian impulse for uninhibited behavior. The two tendencies coexist in everyone to some extent; they provide the special dramatic tension that enlivens such Taylor works as Cloven Kingdom. The title itself describes a twofold division, subtly suggesting a touch of demonic energy infused with the
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