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Paul Taylor--Better Than Ever
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17009 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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8 / 1990 |
1,886 Words |
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Otis Stuart
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Once upon a time, back before dance had entered the market economy full-throttle, the celebration of a company anniversary was a sometime thing, generally a single memory-laden event toasting the old and ringing in the new. The proliferation of dance companies in the last two decades has changed that for good, and not only by the simple multiplication of making every other performance somebody's anniversary. With an eye to casting a gala over theaters that must be filled every night in an increasingly competitive commercial environment, companies everywhere now opt for the anniversary season, making each performance a special occasion. The box office potential is obvious: New York City Ballet's recent fortieth anniversary stretched over a full year and a half, and American Ballet Theater's current fiftieth birthday celebrations may well last even longer.
Cusp of the Times
True to form, the Paul Taylor Dance Company's Thirty-fifth anniversary season at City Center this past spring was filled with wry asides on the anniversary trend. A thirty something birthday, after all, cuts right to the cusp of the times. Taylor's apparent comments on the subject - just keep moving folks - was as clear as his performers blissfully at work blissfully at work onstage. The Taylor ensemble danced their hearts out for the entire season and showed us a birthday as a present-tense event, one that doesn't have to look back to mean something: The season brought not a single guest performer from days gone by. Instead, the anniversary faced the future, here and now, introducing Taylor's best crop of new recruits in years and saying goodbye to the most celebrated of his senior dancers, the great Kate Johnson, who retires from performing after the company's summer engagement at Jacob's Pillow.
The season repertory, a jackpot, was an even surer sign that the Taylor company can anticipate continued good health as it sets sail for forty. In addition to two Taylor premieres, it embraced the full spectrum of his work, touching base in each of the widely diverse departments that have made Taylor the most genuinely eclectic of all contemporary choreographers.
In Snow White (1983) and Minikin Fair (1989), you got Taylor the cut-up, building a cottage out of dwarves in the former, as well as alternating a single male dancer as the prince and the evil queen; in the latter, reinventing the circus in characters as chaotic as a "double dwarf" and "quadrupedients." The Sorcerrer's Sofa had the best of both, Snow White's wicked caricature and Minikin Fair's punch. In Taylor's latest cartoon, the eponymous couch belongs to a doctor who is more quack than shrink and who sports a beard to rival Father Time's. His office becomes the setting for his most timid patient's most terrifying nightmare. Assisted only by a purple Chaste Longue on pointe, who has a few tricks up her own lining, the quaking "gynophobe" is beset by scarlet-colored medusas, each complete with serpentine hairdo and six breasts (five at the waist). Nobody wins, except the audience who gets to see Freud rewritten by the Marx Brothers with a dash of Mae West.
The season balanced the out-of-left field Taylor with the lyric Taylor of Esplanade (1975), Arden Court (1981), and, best of all, Roses (1985). The first transforms a pedestrian movement vocabulary no more complicated than walking, skipping, and running - with a few heart-stopping lunges thrown in for good measure - into an essay on
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