Paul Taylor and the Legacy of American Modern Dance

PAUL TAYLOR AMERICAN MODERN DANCE—2018 KOCH THEATRE SEASON

The recent passing of Paul Taylor at age eight-eight marks the end of an era of male modern dance pioneers. Taylor had been making work for the better part of six decades, along the way fostering a huge, enthusiastic following and creating a large, memorable corps of company alumni. With the instrumental work of Bettie de Jong as rehearsal director (and in recent years, longest-tenured dancer and Taylor standard-bearer Michael Trusnovec as associate rehearsal director), even the earliest repertory has looked crisp and vibrant generations later.

Taylor's death also renders the Paul Taylor Foundation's newish performance model for its primary New York season practical and visionary. It is already three years into commissioning other choreographers to make work on the Taylor Company, and inviting other companies to perform modern dance icons. Thus, even as the Paul Taylor Dance Company has grown older, it has become more modern. It now moves forward without its founder, but under the leadership of Michael Novak, thirty-five, who was only recently appointed as artistic director designate.

I will discuss the topic of legacy in modern dance later, but will first look back at the Taylor enterprise's final Lincoln Center season (2018) during Taylor's lifetime. Paul Taylor American Modern Dance, a three-week annual New York season, comprises Taylor repertory, new commissions by other choreographers, and revivals by modern icons. (The name Paul Taylor Dance Company refers to the group, founded in 1954.) Until the establishment of PTAMD in 2015, the company's repertory season was slightly more predictable. Taylor typically created two new dances a year (for 2018, one), performed with sixteen-to-eighteen repertory works. Each performance was a different line-up (that is unchanged), and each slate a balance of a lively opener, a dramatic or thought-provoking middle, and an exciting closing work, often a "classic" such as Esplanade.

With the advent of PTAMD, the mix changed with the incorporation of modern dance classics by other creators—Martha Graham danced by PTDC; Jose Limón and Trisha Brown danced by their respective troupes; and Donald McKayle by Dayton Contemporary Dance Company—plus two or so new commissions by other select choreographers. While many 2018 programs comprised works solely by Taylor, more often than not other artists' work could be seen on a slate.

2018 PREMIERES AND GUEST PERFORMANCES

The juxtaposition of Taylor's work with other choreography can serve to magnify the strengths of Taylor's classic repertory. When viewed after Bryan Arias's mellifluous if amorphous commission, The Beauty in the Gray, a canonic work such as Esplanade reads like a master class in structure, dynamics, and pacing. Still, comparisons can be drawn between the dances. In Beauty (with music by Nico Muhly and Olafur Arnalds), Arias employs silhouettes of dancers as background textures, echoing a favored Taylor device; pairs and trios imply relationships. But it pales in comparison to the incisive middle "family" scene in Esplanade in which the dancers interact but never touch, a cushion of air between hands and bodies implying unbridgeable distance. Arias's choreography at moments evokes the geometric modernity of Jiri Kylian (he danced with Nederlands Dance Theater), but myriad hand gestures accrue to superfluity.

Half Life, a commission by Doug Varone, opens with a recurring motif of two dancers "skating" side to side. Varone's lush, organic style suits the Taylor dancers. Santo Loquasto designed the daring set—rows of hue-changing light tubes positioned like a ceiling that gradually descends. Julia Wolfe's music sets the tone—spiky strings and tetchy notes that quaver and skitter, and costumes (by Liz Prince) are mute-toned separates. An omnipresent tension exists between the dancers, who interact by pulling, pushing, and exploding apart. Even stasis is fraught; frozen poses seem to store energy to be released. The prime dynamic is a coursing restlessness, but there are sections of contained movements by a group that appears to spin cyclonically as one organism. The dancers form columns and burst out of them; hands shoot up, out...