King of the moderns

Paul Taylor is still the real deal

by Marcia B. Siegel

In the 40-plus years since Paul Taylor began choreographing, modern dance has succumbed to many seductions and distractions, from the dazzle of ballet technique to the impertinent pedestrianism of the early postmoderns. Taylor has sampled all of this and more, yet he remains a modern dancer in the older, finer sense of the term. Boston caught a glimpse of the Taylor company last weekend in a pitiful three performances, courtesy of Bank Boston's Celebrity Series. The audiences at the Shubert Theatre clearly knew this was the real stuff.

Not that Taylor's dance looks like old-time modern dance; it doesn't. It's as sleek and accomplished as anything on the contemporary stage. But it has an individuality, a disregard for what's proper, and an assurance that it can score its effects without resorting to everybody else's tricks. Like the early modern dancers, Paul Taylor, I think, believes dance should be in perpetual evolution, and that it should always rise above mere frivolity. He probably also believes that there's nothing "mere" about frivolity.

All of these notions converged in Esplanade (1975), the earliest piece shown last weekend. Esplanade now serves as the Taylor signature dance, but it was actually the fortunate first child of his mid-career crisis. He gave up dancing in 1974, after two decades of risqué experiments and masterly compositions. Esplanade was a test of his ability to choreograph without relying on his own movement or his own presence on the stage. It turned out to be a thrilling essay on the nature of dance itself.

Starting with the most basic actions, walking, turning, hopping, kneeling, gesturing, Taylor applied the most sophisticated music, the two Bach violin concertos, and turned those ordinary movements into dance. Then, with small variations and almost no new material, and without straying for a second from the formal dictates of the music, he opened up a whole human, dancing world.

Esplanade seems to me to contain all of Paul Taylor's strengths: the musicality and movement invention, the gift for design and the knack for wrecking a design, the inclusiveness that welcomes harmony and danger, the strange and the sublime, equally into the dance. Esplanade belongs to a particular genre, the pure-dance piece, though no Taylor choreography is entirely without some shadow of character or narrative. Taylor makes these more or less lightweight dances as a pretext for some exploration into a formal concept. In the case of Esplanade, for instance, he pushed at the dance possibilities of non-dance movement. In Syzygy (1987) he played with the idea of tensions and attractions between bodies in motion. The title, from astronomy, refers to conjunctions and oppositions of celestial bodies.

Cascade, which was premiered last summer at the American Dance Festival, seems to be about balance, about making one formal episode reflect another without imitating it exactly. Set to parts of three Bach piano concertos, it may have been inspired by the opulence of the Renaissance. The 12 dancers wore fussy but streamlined gold and black costumes with a vaguely Elizabethan cut, by Santo Loquasto. With its gold mesh backdrop, the dance reminded me of those huge, heavy, overdecorated ballets the Europeans used to do when they were so much better funded than American dance companies.

Rather than make us wade through the swordfights, attenuated death scenes, and peasants clanking mugs of newly harvested wine that upholstered those ballets, Taylor gives us six varied episodes of dancing, full of surprises and mood swings. He jolts expectations right off, introducing a group of men led by Andrew Asnes who dance in low-to-the-ground pliés and scooping arm swings. It's the women who are airborne initially, and as they streak through, the men gradually absorb their jumping and leaping. There's a double duet (Lisa Viola, Robert Kleinendorst, Kristi Egtvedt and Andy LeBeau) that begins with the man and woman of one couple doing the same thing as the other couple, only in reversed roles. Half a dozen switches later, they end up with their original partners, only on the opposite sides of the stage from where they started.

Francie Huber does a meditative solo that reminded me of Pavlova's nearly immobile Dying Swan at one moment and a flock of some other birds, in flight, the rest of the time. Asnes leads a squad of four men in copycat maneuvers that include jumps, lifts, and a jogging formation borrowed from Balanchine's Rubies. After a slow duet by Patrick Corbin and Maureen Mansfield, the whole company returns for a big, fast finale and a picturebook tableau as the curtain falls.

At least two other Taylor types besides his pure dances were represented in the Boston performances: the suite based on popular dance and entertainment iconography; and the more free-form, even wayward, pursuit of a metaphor. The popular pieces -- Piazzolla Caldera and Oh, You Kid! -- are deliberately approachable, and they deliberately throw in zingers just so we won't get too charmed. In the Piazzolla, a smoky discourse on the tango, a male couple appear amid the heterosexual partnerings. They dance tango too, but they also somersault slowly over each other's backs, and one knees the other in the crotch. The audience, seemingly thrown by this dark séance, responded with cheers for the technical feats, laughter for the implied violence.

Oh, You Kid! uses just about every signature movement ever seen in turn-of-the-century vaudeville and silent movies, including a melodrama with a girl tied up in rope by a villain, a staid preacher descended from Martha Graham's Appalachian Spring, a drunken bum, and a dog. The line-up includes a jolly quintet of hooded Ku Klux Klanners and a truly tasteless pseudo-Oriental contortionist kootch dance.

Taylor is so good at these musical inventions and visual designs, and at sending up our favorite pastimes, that you start thinking of him as incredibly facile, spinning pleasantries and thrills with his eyes closed. Then he does something like Arabesque and you remember that underneath his jokes is lurking perversity, maybe even malevolence. Arabesque premiered only a few weeks ago at the University of Iowa, and as it started, Taylor seemed to be simply continuing the line of exacting, eyecatching movement he was pursuing in Cascade. To my relief, the dance journeyed into weirdness instead.

Prompted, I think, by the modal impressionism of Claude Debussy -- four unrelated selections of chamber music -- Taylor draws us into an archaic Greek landscape of nymphs and fauns and menacing things crouching in caves. Beginning with the second movement of Debussy's String Quartet, the dance appears to be a frolic in the woods -- the eight men and women skipping and jumping rapidly on the music's pizzicato rhythm, with embellishing arm and hand gestures. Silvia Nevjinsky seems to rule the revels, posing seductively as the men watch, shooing the women away with one petulant foot.

That foot, shaking out as Nevjinsky hunches over with outspread arms, signals that this is not the idyll it seems. A minute later Michael Trusnovec is reclining on the floor like an odalisque -- did I say the dance is full of role reversals? Taylor is always attentive to traditional gender roles and their revision. In Arabesque the men wear short skirts and bare chests, and they dance almost girlishly at times.

Nevjinsky comes up behind Trusnovec as if to embrace him, then covers his eyes with her hands. When they separate, he's been blinded. From then on, the dance twists and turns, from romance to terror and retribution, never quite abandoning its superficial flightiness. Except for Nevjinsky, who's revealed as a monster or an oracle, to the sounds of the flute solo Syrinx. With curled fists and turned-in feet, she seems to be puffing herself up like a poisonous insect. She jumps in a circle of barrel turns, squats and slides sidewise in a huge second-position plié, gestures sternly in all directions. When the music ends, she's posing the same way she did when the dance began, now no longer the uncomplicated object of desire she'd been, but no less desirable.

The same music that started the dance is repeated, and all the dancers jump and skip very fast again and flip their wrists again. But they all seem sharper, kinkier, as if Nevjinsky had cast a spell over them, or taken away some of their innocence. The end of the dance, after Trusnovec turns the tables and blinds Nevjinsky, brings no closure. Ted Thomas carries Nevjinsky on in the odalisque pose and everybody rearranges him- or herself into the same tableau that had begun the Rêverie section, after Trusnovec's blinding. We are left to guess what Nevjinsky will invoke next.

Watching this dance was like blundering through a maze. Actions recurred, people encountered one another, but when you thought you recognized a motif, it turned into something else. Familiar passageways opened up vistas with icy cliffs at the end, and there was no returning comfortably home. When Taylor enters this territory, I'll follow him anywhere. Especially if the conjurer is the splendid Silvia Nevjinsky, who dances with a glow even when she's breathing ice.