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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 22.1 (2000) 60-64



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Paul Taylor, Live and on Film

Cheryl Tobey

Figures

Art and Performance Notes

Paul Taylor Dance Company, City Center, New York, March 2-14, 1999; Dancemaker, Film Forum, March 3-April 2, 1999.

IMAGE LINK= IMAGE LINK= Choreographer Paul Taylor's name has long been syonymous with one type of American dance. Indeed, Taylor's group is billed as the "quintessentially American dance company," a fitting epithet that describes not only their live performances but now also their appearance in Matthew Diamond's Academy Award-nominated documentary, Dancemaker. Both live and on film, Taylor's dancers achieve a human, and sometimes less-than-human, level. Unlike his mentor, Martha Graham, who depicted her dancers as mythic heroes and heroines, Taylor shows us people like ourselves. And rather than journeying into abstraction like Renaissance-man Alwin Nikolais or fellow Graham offspring Merce Cunningham, Taylor has continued to give us recognizable human beings in fairly identifiable surroundings. This choreographer brings us real life: regular people doing everyday things, with faults, flaws, and embarrassments included. He must realize that in America we are forgiving of those flaws: they make a person more human. We want to relate to the people we see onstage and on screen, and this is one reason why Taylor's audiences keep going back for more.

In Dancemaker, critic Deborah Jowitt explains that Paul Taylor creates dances that are beautiful as well as others that are frightening. It is the scary ones that are perhaps the most interesting, and Cloven Kingdom from 1976 continually crosses back and forth between beauty and ugliness--an appropriate title, since "cloven" refers to the divided hoof of an animal. The dance depicts the divided nature of human beings, whose behavior fluctuates between extreme civility and the animalistic. With the women in long dresses and the men in tuxedos, the group waltzes formally as if at a nineteenth-century ball. But, surprise!--out of the blue the dancers stop, drop, and roll, or a cartwheel is inserted where we least expect it. Before we know it, they're back on their feet, shuffling around with droopy wrists (or paws?) outstretched. A quartet of men hop on all fours, resembling apes in formal wear. After a four-way game of leapfrog, they straddle toward each other in a circle, eventually winding up on their backs. Like flipped-over cockroaches on [End Page 60] the brink of death, they "jump" in vain, trying desperately to right themselves. Cloven Kingdom's portrayal of Man is certainly a departure from Graham's tragic heroes. (Just imagine Clytemnestra "jumping" on her back like a cockroach, or Oedipus crawling around like an ape!) In Taylor's work, Man is not a godlike creation but an evolutionary accident--a tragicomic figure, and definitely less than perfect. Ironically, it is this connection of Man with the animal that makes him more human. And eventually the animal stood up and began to carry itself on two legs, which brings us to another source of inspiration for Paul Taylor: everyday human movement.

Taylor admits on camera that he is both a "spy" and a "reporter," and that he frequently gets his ideas when walking down the street. Dancemaker opens with a backstage view of a performance of Esplanade, the bulk of which is made up simply of running and falling. From this behind-the-scenes vantage point, we can hear the dancers gasping for breath as they dash offstage for a brief period, then hurl themselves bravely back into the spotlight. When discussing Eventide, one of his most recent works, Taylor explains that he wanted to find out just how effective a simple walk could be, which became the impetus for the piece. And the brand-new Fiddler's Green depends on frolicking, romping, and jumping as well--Taylor's version of the jig. The piece ends with a common movement familiar to anyone who has ever been in a hurry. One man stands alone tapping his foot, the gesture of an impatient person...

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