Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing

Paul Taylor Dance Company

I met someone at an intermission during the Paul Taylor season at City Center (April 14–May 3) who told me how excited she was by the concert. “It’s the first time I’ve seen avant-garde dance,” she confessed. The same night, a friend complained, “Why doesn’t he just go ahead and make ballets?” To some, Taylor is the most accessible of the (older) avant-garde; to others, he long ago entered the mainstream of modern dance. To still others, Taylor is a fine craftsman as well as a showman who understands not only how to make a legible dance, but also how to put together a concert with tastefulness and variety. Taylor caters to every dance constituency. While this versatility might be a virtue for a politician, it leaves a curious vacuum at the core of a choreographer’s style. It’s not that Taylor has no movement style; you can look at a phrase and know that he made it. But the movements and postures that are distinctively Taylor’s form a limited, neutral vocabulary . The expressive qualities in a particular dance come not so much from the dancing itself as from the context the movement finds itself 97 k Paul Taylor Dance Company : Dance Magazine, August 1981 in: the lighting, the costumes, the props, and above all, the music. Of course, every dance uses such elements to create its meaning. But with Taylor’s work you often feel that these are the strongest and most reliable means of expression. While it’s true that part of the power and complexity of dance comes from the multiple meaning potential of gesture and movement, in Taylor’s case this kind of ambiguity causes problems . It doesn’t make the dances hard to watch; on the contrary, they’re highly accessible precisely because the spectator doesn’t need to “read” meaning in the movement. The dancing is a bland, homogeneous skeleton fleshed out with the expressive qualities the nondance elements provide . One might argue that classical ballet also uses a neutral, limited vocabulary to mean a range of different things. But even the most musical of choreographers find ways to use movement distinctively, matching strong choreographic statements to the music’s substance. Taylor’s Polaris (1976), revived this season, more or less acknowledges these points. Taylor himself presents the dance as a small exercise in dance theory: If you change the dancers, the lighting, and the music, but you keep the steps the same, do you get two different dances, or two instances of the same dance? The glacial quality of the dance is already given by its title. Five dancers dressed in pastel patterned leotards (originally , they wore bathing suits) enter to take their places inside a coolly gleaming chromium frame. Illuminated by pale lighting and motivated by fairly uninflected music, the solos and group interactions that occur as the dancers emerge from their confinement take on a frosty sheen. In the second half, the lighting is more dramatic, the music more suspenseful (reminiscent of a Bernard Hermann movie score), and the dancing seems to take on a more forceful attack. The dance heats up, so to speak. Is it an optical illusion, or do all the theatrical cues for drama and urgency accompany an accelerating energy powering the movement? Public Domain (1968), another revival this season, is like an exercise in making dances to the widest variety of musical examples. Here Taylor recycles his own material, bits from Graham, and various other dance images so familiar they seem to exist in the public domain. To a collage score (by John Herbert McDowell) of snippets of music and dialogue, Taylor whips up one choreographic fragment after another, like a short-order cook. Public Domain is a comic dance, but its humor comes not from the dancing itself—which tends to “mickey-mouse” the music—as from the abruptness with which the collage shifts from one musical style (with its dance accompaniment) to another. Dressed in 98    bright leotards, the dancers move from gothic poses (accompanied by a Gregorian chant) to cheerleader strutting (accompanied by Sousa) to various folk dance motifs to Graham’s Primitive Mysteries. Three men repeat the same solo—an essay in tangling the body—to two different pieces of music and a monologue. From time to time, small balls roll across the stage and finally, like a punch line, a woman rolls across the stage—like a ball. Lila York lies on the...