Misbehavin' Taylor

Devils with halos, seraphs with horns at Jacob's Pillow

by Marcia B. Siegel

In a pre-performance interview before the second program of a week devoted to his work at Jacob's Pillow, Paul Taylor affirmed a provocative quote from his autobiography put to him by Village Voice dance critic Deborah Jowitt. "Turn Order and God over and what've you got there in back? Chaos and Satan, naturally. But the back side is not the opposite; it's of the same cloth -- some say it's exactly the same thing." We didn't have very far to look for the evidence.

Even if the orderly, Baroque-flavored Cascade (1999) were nothing more than its glossy surface, the new dance that followed it, Fiends Angelical, made the audience uncomfortable long after its initial offenses wore off. This was good, I thought. Taylor can be deceptively ingratiating, and the modern audience, having been indoctrinated by a world of technically polished and empty dances, can get so pleased with the Taylor dancers' accomplishments that his misanthropic undertones go undetected. His particular blend of syrup and vitriol prevents the audience from becoming too complacent, too familiar.

The fiendish piece smacked open with the high-pitched, grating chords of George Crumb's Dark Angels, a sudden flood of harsh light (by Jennifer Tipton), and there in the glare a bunch of -- what? creatures? -- in flesh-colored leotards banded with multicolored tape and black nappy Afro-wigs with red headbands. (Santo Loquasto was responsible for the costumes.) The creatures are virtually unisex, and they might represent some kind of stereotypical primitives, a clutch of pickaninnies squatting on the ground, then springing up with kinked legs and arms. I think it's the wigs that establish these unfortunate associations, but maybe they'll be eliminated once the dance has been road-tested.

Francie Huber, in a sarong, dreadlocks, and cunning brown horns, seemed to preside over the populace. My mind was ticking back to several other Taylor dances where a strong and mysterious female instructs, tests, and finally transforms a bunch of communicants, usually bringing them some kind of enlightenment. And I thought of his enigmatic Runes (1975), where everyone was potentially a shaman and the rituals seemed desolate, even pointless.

In Fiends Angelical, the rabble surge across the stage with heavy feet and clawed hands, forming clumpy circles and two-dimensional groupings. Lisa Viola and Patrick Corbin emerge to do a duet of snarling intimacy and a demonic softshoe. They finish by choking each other to the ground. Huber performs incantations over them and eventually the other dancers draw a thin red ribbon out from the midst of their crumpled bodies. I suppose this symbolizes an exorcism -- the opposite of the ribbon of hatred that Medea swallows in Martha Graham's Cave of the Heart as she incites herself to revenge.

The group pull the ribbon out into a five-pointed star, so that they all partake of its healing power. Corbin and Viola dance a formal kind of rededication to each other, and finally the group return, still in distorted postures but floppy, relaxed. Huber shows them how to lift their arms, and the dance ends as they seem to be testing new wings.

The other important event of the Taylor company's two programs was the revival of Big Bertha, his bloodcurdling view of Americana from 1970. With a vigorous cast of young dancers (Kristi Egtvedt as Big Bertha the mechanical band machine and Orion Duckstein, Heather Berest, and Annmaria Mazzini as the doomed tourist family), the piece holds up as perhaps the best and bitterest satire ever choreographed. I thought of it as the inverse of Fiends Angelical, a process of dissipation, the ruin of innocence rather than its restoration.

Taylor is a big fan of American artifacts -- music, dances, movies -- and he found the music for Big Bertha in the St. Louis Melody Museum. Band machines predated the jukebox. They were like extravagant music boxes or player pianos: you inserted your nickel to start a tape with the notes punched in it, and as the tape rolled through the machine, it activated a piano or organ, and sometimes a whole gang of other instruments, all thumping away without the benefit of human operators. Big Bertha is a life-size drum majorette, padded and corseted 1890s style, who decorates the front of the gaudy band machine. Taylor endows her with the mean, raunchy soul of a dominatrix. When the customer puts in his money, she jerks into action, keeping time to the music with a baton and a robotic goosestep. Furtively, alarmingly, she coughs, belches, scratches between her shoulder blades with the baton. Something about these too-human actions seems sinister, and you remember that just a minute ago, when the curtain opened, three wounded figures you hardly noticed were scrambling away and didn't return.

A sweet, typical America family do arrive: dad in loafers and an untucked flowered shirt, prim and pretty mom, and little daughter in a pink circle skirt with appliqué'd poodle. They start the machine and Big Bertha seems to eye them with anticipation. As she wields her baton, they start to dance. Daughter shows off a little. Pleased, mom and dad do a few steps from when they were kids. Bertha eggs them on, singling out dad for special commands. Things start to go out of control. Dad stomps heavily into the floor, and his arms go loose. He tries to pull mom into a sexy dance. When she hesitates, he slaps her. He pats daughter on the shoulder, a little too appreciatively. She's shocked but kind of likes it. The good clean fun goes carnal. While dad drags the daughter behind the machine, mom pulls off her wedding ring and does a lascivious shimmy. Big Bertha plays "Take Me out to the Ballgame" and "My Blue Heaven" and "The Old Piano Roll Blues." When everybody's exhausted and degraded, Bertha takes dad as her partner, prodding him into a stiff duet of robot love.

Paul Taylor may have been commenting on the buttoned-up proprieties of his generation in the '50s, but dancing and popular culture still represent a safe place where our raunchiest desires can be acted out, or at least vicariously experienced. I respect him deeply for having the courage to bring back this epic critique of family values. I'm not sure you could find this deep vein of malevolence in every Paul Taylor dance, but some of the ones with the smiliest façades can break into crazed misbehavior.

Aureole, for instance: done on Program B, it was considered Taylor's "white ballet" when it was choreographed. In 1962, modern dancers weren't supposed to make pretty, serene, formal dances with a lot of jumps in them. But in Aureole's last movement, which is still extremely patterned and musical, the dancers tilt way off center, rotate their arms inward, veer across the space like racing cars gone berserk. Taylor's social-dance pieces seethe with the sexual anger of the tango (Piazzolla Caldera) and the ironic escapism of wartime lindy and rumba (Company B).

It was Taylor's 70th birthday, July 29, that prompted last week's celebration. Jacob's Pillow not only devoted the programs in the main theater to his company but assembled a whole roster of related events. In addition to his talk with Jowitt, the Taylor Two company performed, and several Taylor alumni presented their own choreography. There was also a fascinating exhibition of his assemblages, little art pieces made of found objects, things that drift in and out of the landscape around his Long Island house. Each item is artfully arranged and titled with some sly or wise reference. There's a piece of driftwood in a frame with the big letters "AND" painted on it but partly worn off. It's called "A word to the wise." One of a series of variations for spinning dancer/choreographer Laura Dean is a rakish spiral of raffia and wood titled "To dance is to twirl." A frog, after a possible encounter with an automobile, reposes under glass with the caption "Dancing flat out." There are dead butterflies, bugs, mice, all laid out appealingly and playing the role of messengers from Taylor's witty mind.

"They're just games," Taylor told Deborah Jowitt about the assemblages. "The subjects are the same as in my dances. Death. Leaving. Is there anything else besides that? Well, there are the sexual aspects."