Taylor—Shifts Subtle and Tectonic

Cloven Kingdom, clockwise from left: Michaels Trusnovec, Apuzzo, and Novak, and George Smallwood. Photo: Paul B. Goode

The revolution in the inaugural season of Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance isn't just the presence of Shen Wei Dance and the Limon Company (performing Doris Humphrey)—it's the new use of live music for nearly every dance. And given that Taylor has favored classical music for many of his dances, it's a huge windfall. 

The big musical surprise was Cloven Kingdom (1976). Corelli's haughty music vies for primacy with lurking drums (by Henry Cowell and Malloy Miller, combined by John Herbert McDowell). In the prologue, the percussion is usually faint in the recording; done live, it was at first too distant to glean the sense of foreboding, but they eventually balanced out. The dancers must surely savor the immediacy of the live music after so many seasons of predictability. It can only have added nuance to their renditions.

Shen Wei's Rite of Spring led off the program on Mar 17, to a recorded piano interpretation of Stravinsky's famous score. It felt very strange in the context. His style de-emphasizes emotion and human interaction, and communicates through a tightly contained expressiveness of the body and stage patternings. Drama is conjured, for example, when a cluster of dancers stands upstage at the right, and one downstage dancer faces the group, forming a line of tension. The stage floor is covered with a painted canvas of strokes and charcoal tones which resonate with the dancers' costumes; their socked feet make shushing sounds as they glide. 

Shen Wei's movement has moments of beauty—when a dancer swirls and twists, following organic looping shapes. But the repetition of a rapid shuffling step, arms held immobile at the side, soon takes on an annoying affectation. The cool, reserved aesthetic is so different from Taylor's that it might enlighten some viewers, but it also may distance others. Would that it were Taylor's Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal) (1980)—among his most fascinating dances.

The rest of the Mar 17 program fell into the more intense, dramatic side of Taylor's oeuvre. The Word (1998) ranks among the choreographer's studies of indoctrination and rebellion. The 12 dancers wear Santo Loquasto's witty prep school uniforms of white shirts, ties, and knickers. Some of the men wear smeared-on lipstick. Jennifer Tipton's fluorescent tube installation lighting the upstage wall, covered in gray fabric, feels appropriately austere, institutional, and soulless. The commissioned score, by David Israel, is played live. The movement is strident and limbs are arranged in lines and angles; Parisa Khobdeh is the only errant dancer, in a nudie-painted unitard. As with many demons or rebels in Taylor's canon, she chassees with her arms slashing like scythes, hands, claws. Francisco Graciano is lifted and carried as being initiated or honored. Whether about religious, intellectual, or viral infection, its edges still cut.

Diggity: Francisco Graciano, Eran Bugge, George Smallwood, and furry friends by Alex Katz. Photo: Whitney Browne

In Promethean Fire (2002), the live performance of Bach's symphony injected a clarity and immediacy into this rep staple. And for the first time since its early years in the rep, Michael Trusnovec did not dance the lead male role, now held by the warm, lyrical James Samson. To those who follow the company, it felt like the beginning of a sea change that is inevitable, even if it is simply to spread around the choice roles. Trusnovec, the paragon of Taylor's style, has danced the lead with a simmering emotional intensity that seemed to key off of the underlying terror, and redemption, that imbues the dance, made in the wake of 9/11. Samson's rendition is yet serious, but the potential for cataclysm is more remote. And while Samson has in recent years been shifting into the role of a company lead, he still has a few steps to take in order to fully assume this power. It's almost as if he wears it like a cloak, whereas Trusnovec has long since internalized it. 

The Mar 19 program, in which all three dances were designed by Alex Katz, led off with the whisper-light Sea Lark, which I discussed here. Last Look came next, with its frenetic, ping-ponging series of solos, the dancers' psychoses tuned to an altered state. Katz's lurid-hued satin dresses for the women were refracted off the freestanding panels—a house of mirrors capturing a moment of wild abandon. The pile of bodies at the end evokes the same image in Promethean Fire, spinning a mental connecting filament within Taylor's oeuvre. The effervescent Diggity, with its lovable field of dog cut-outs, closed the bill. The lead role was danced by Eran Bugge, whose generosity and charisma are cherished gifts.

The slate on the evening of Mar 21 contained a surprise—an amended version of Death and the Damsel, just a week old. The entire final act was cut, in which Jamie Rae Walker wakes up to realize she defeated the real or imaginary demons overnight, and wipes her brow in relief (also treated in a recent post). The revised version ends as she is surrounded by the dark spirits and swallowed up. It's a more fitting ending to a work that has garnered some unintentional nervous laughter from audiences unsure of what to expect.
  

Sunset: Aileen Roehl with Michael Trusnovec and guys. Photo: Paul B. Goode

Sunset (1983) began the evening looking splendid as always, and getting a lift from the live performance of Elgar's score. The core male duet continues to be danced by Trusnovec and Rob Kleinendorst with great sensitivity to its numerous emotional note. Aileen Roehl has distinguished herself this season, not just with her tremendous athleticism and energy (she's got the big split leap), but with her luminosity and generosity of spirit. Here she takes the role of the woman whose feet never touch the ground for an extended spell, as she's continuously lifted and then steps and rolls on the men's backs. Not just a portrayal of genteel flirtations and camaraderie, Sunset is a poetic remembrance of the toll of war. 

The Orchestra of St. Luke's needed to tune its strings a bit more prior to Brandenburgs (1988) which closed out the bill. The opening minutes were filled with distractions, including the slightly off-key notes and the well-meaning opening curtain applause, which drowned out the early bars. But as the beautifully structured dance progressed, on through Trusnovec's series of duets with three women—Bugge, Michelle Fleet, and a vibrant Parisa Khobdeh—the strings seemed to blend better, building through the final sections when the nine dancers' swoops and leaps synced with the orchestral dynamics. As always, Trusnovec, in the male lead differentiated by his costume of olive tights, was the paragon of strength and vulnerability, precise and yet plush. Emerging into his own throughout the repertory is Michael Novak, who presents the pleasing Taylor lines with elegance and brio.

The fact that Taylor was able to make a major change to the latest premiere—during the season—is somewhat astonishing, but it makes some sense given the tectonic shifts in the company's structure over the past year. The announcement that Lila York, Larry Keigwin, and Doug Elkins will be choreographing works for PTAMD is heartening, after this year's logical inclusion of Humphrey (performed by Limon) and the more artistically puzzling addition of Shen Wei. The addition of live music is obviously great, but the amount of work it entails should be acknowledged—the hours of rehearsals on the part of the orchestra, and with the dancers, all add up to an enormous artistic and financial investment, from which we viewers profit immensely. The run continues through this week.

Paul Taylor Company—0 to 60 and Back Again

Cloven Kingdom, the perfect gala dance. Photo: Paul B. Goode

Paul Taylor opened its 60th season last Tuesday at the Koch Theater, but there's little time to celebrate this momentous milestone. Yesterday at a press conference, the company announced plans to restructure, and by this time next year we should be seeing Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance performing its first season. 

This reincarnation of the current Taylor company anticipates the choreographer's eventual (but not currently planned) retirement. Work by other modern choreographers will be performed alongside Taylor's impressive oeuvre; the alien works—commissions and existing rep—are sure to be acquired slowly, so the programming probably won't be radically different at first. The release says: "To best showcase masterworks, they will be danced by legacy companies or artists trained in the signature techniques of the choreographers show pieces are being presented." Taylor was reluctant to name companies (and to speak, in general; if he were not a man, he'd be a clam), although Martha Graham popped up, and Merce Cunningham in the context that it might not be possible to perform his work.

Another interesting tenet says that live music will be used "where intended by the choreographer," and/or when possible. This addresses the one consistent criticism of Taylor's six decades of seasons, including by the union—the use of recorded music, which is an understandable compromise, faced with survival. What this means in practical terms is, again, yet to be determined. But in an impoverished dance climate, it is heartening to think of opening up this one-artist institution as a repository for modern dance, while maintaining Taylor's oeuvre.

To help finance this transition, four Rauschenberg artworks in Taylor's personal collection will be auctioned off in May, to raise an estimated $10 million. A representative from Sotheby's was on hand to speak about the specifics. One piece is a mixed media "combine" from 1954; another, Tracer, from 1962, includes a bicycle wheel and was made for the Paris Opera Ballet. Two additional 2D works round out the sale. You can't help but think about the trend of cultural organizations considering the sale of artworks to prolong the life of the institution. But in this case, apparently the Rauschenbergs have been in storage, and might never be seen otherwise. And it stems from personal relationship wrought in the nascent modernist movement of mid-20th century New York—reaping what was sown.

Sunset. Photo: Paul B. Goode

As for the current season, the company looks sharp, with some relatively new faces. Cloven Kingdom (1976) remains one of the gems in the rep; it opened the run, and was included on the gala program last night in a shrewdly sardonic bit of scheduling. As the tux and gown clad gala-goers took their seats, the curtain raised to reveal a parallel universe of fancily dressed women with shiny accessories (albeit mirrored objects on their heads) and men in elegant white tie tuxes behaving alternately like pouncing beasts and society swells, moving to a potent mix of classical music and tribal rhythms. The fact that it was being performed in the David Koch Theater, with its namesake in attendance, only contributed to its pungency.

Sunset (1983) followed, a gentle, if bittersweet paean to a bygone time of chivalry and military service. Each element fits perfectly within the whole—Alex Katz's mint-fresh set, Elgar's lilting string music augmented by the sound of loons, and Taylor's reductive, lyrical mode of movement in which even difficult feats are made to look effortless. Its undercurrents of war casualties and muffled male romance emerge, but never weigh down the mood. Guest artists Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild danced a duet from Airs (1978). As you might expect, they added some speed and height to the more technical elements like jumps and hitting shapes, and rendered it with a far lighter—airier—touch than the grounded Taylor dancers. 

Piazzolla Caldera (1997) is an oddity in the repertory, with its stylized interpretation of the tango tied to Kronos Quartet's interpretations of Piazzolla's tunes. It dawned on me that in two programs, I hadn't yet seen one of Taylor's "pattern" pieces, often set to classical music, but that Piazzolla Caldera actually contains a fair amount of group traffic exercises and patterns that bind together a series of solos and duets. Michael Trusnovec slices and slips his way through his opening solo and duet with Michelle Fleet, making the tango feel truly dangerous, and in a section with Rob Kleinendorst, the contrast between a warm Eran Bugge and the cool Laura Halzack clicked nicely.

On Tuesday, the company performed Dust (1977). Made a year after Cloven Kingdom, but lacking its sociological and kinetic incisiveness, it features the visual punch of Gene Moore's set—a thick, twisting column, like Jack's beanstalk—and costumes, flesh-hued unitards with blobs of color. Black Tuesday felt like a retort to Cloven Kingdom, with its Depression setting and roster of characters either succumbing to poverty and loneliness, or finding the brighter side. The absence of Parisa Khobdeh (out with an injury) and her current role as the company comedienne and daredevil was felt strongly here. Christina Lynch Markham handled the "Big Bad Wolf" solo ably, while Heather McGinley continues to make her mark as a memorable presence (flame-colored hair doesn't hurt). The season continues through March 30.