Taylor + OSL + Bach

Michael Trusnovec in all at once. Photo: Paula Lobo

Most of us don’t want to think about mortality, but let’s face it—we’re all human. Paul Taylor Dance Company is no doubt keenly aware of this now. It is moving forward under the plan structured while Taylor (who died last year) was alive—to showcase older classics by his peers, and to cultivate younger modern choreographers while keeping his substantial repertory vibrant, creating a kind of continuing dialogue and context for the importance of Taylor’s work. This larger project is called Paul Taylor American Modern Dance.

There’s another twist this year—the rescheduling of the main PTAMD season to Oct/Nov at the Koch, and the addition of three, all-Bach spring programs with Orchestra of St. Luke’s in the 2019 OSL Bach Festival, performed at the uptown Manhattan School of Music. (OSL performs music concerts at other venues.) Add to the mix the long-dreaded retirement of the peerless Michael Trusnovec after the OSL season, plus the exit of Parisa Khobdeh, Michelle Fleet, Sean Mahoney, Laura Halzack, and Jamie Rae Walker after the fall PTAMD season, and it’s a tectonic shift in a company that reveres tradition and longevity. Until the PTAMD project began in 2015, the troupe relied on strict programming formulas for its long season—up to 20 dances by Taylor, with three to a program; the dancers listed by tenure.

Reich Richter Pärt Mercado Little Spain

Reich Richter Pärt. Shown: paintings by Gerhard Richter, with singers mingling with the audience. Photo: Susan Yung 

With Reich Richter Pärt, the Shed offered a performative experience that differed from the abundant fare in New York. Practically speaking, this event could take place in one of the hundreds of large art galleries that dot the city, but it is the match-making at a certain level (in this case, by co-curators Alex Poots and Hans Ulrich Obrist) that differentiates the Shed event. The three collaborators—composers Arvo Pärt and Steve Reich, and visual artist Gerhard Richter—make work that, to put it in mercenary terms, commands a high price, or is in great demand. It was a visual and aural immersion in work by these titans of contemporary culture, in a gleaming, sterile venue in a fancy-shmancy new neighborhood.