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Kinks and all
Paul Taylor at the Shubert
BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL


The Paul Taylor Dance Company is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and for a miserly three Celebrity Series performances at the Shubert last weekend it brought two different programs featuring a pair of new works and some choice oldies. Some of Taylor’s mid-to-late works look a lot like ordinary contemporary dance, the athletic but formal Mercuric Tidings (1982) and the steamy Piazzolla Caldera (1997), for instance. But even these claimants to popularity don’t quite succeed in disguising his contrarian view of dance and people.

In 1962, Taylor rocked the dance world with Aureole, a lyrical essay to selections from Handel concerti grossi. The five barefoot dancers were dressed in white and maintained formal, presentational patterns. They looked almost (gasp!) balletic to the modern-dance establishment at the American Dance Festival, where it premiered.

Aureole was subversive in other ways, too. The women streaked over the ground in their little filmy skirts, suddenly fracturing their easy runs into sideways-tilted zigzags, then righting themselves and continuing on. Both men were solidly built, and both worked against expectations: Dan Wagoner with a solo of ecstatic jumps and heel pivots, Taylor sinking and scooping into the space around his body like some great wading bird.

The present-day Taylor dancers may not have the unflustered look of the originals, but led by the serenely balanced Michael Trusnovec in Taylor’s role, they gave a good account of a dance that long ago lost its innocence. Runes (1975) takes place in a darkly moonlit space, a setting for strange rituals that wouldn’t be spoken of during the day. As it begins, a man is lying on the ground. Other people make cryptic gestures over his body, as if it had some power that they needed to dispel or assimilate.

The man on the floor isn’t really dead. He gets up and joins the group; later, someone else takes his place. Roles are exchanged by magic. Individuals dance desperate, earthbound solos and are taken off. A man and a woman seem to be dancing together; then he begins to chase her. She scrambles away, but in another sudden switch he’s lying on the ground and she’s sitting astride his body, a triumphant hermaphrodite.

We don’t ever learn what these rituals are about, but we see that they’re essential. The community marks each passage with somber processions or circles of witness. By the end of the dance, everyone seems to have entered the body of everyone else, in a process more arcane and fateful than sex.

Taylor’s new Dante Variations carries an epigraph from Inferno, about the "nearly soulless" who can’t be judged one way or the other. Its agonies are not as deranged as those of his first Purgatory dance, Scudorama (1963), but its characters are condemned just the same, to an existential acting-out of the impossible. György Ligeti’s Musica ricercata, played on a barrel organ, wheezes through eccentric one-note rhythms and short-circuited melodies as people try to dance with their hands or their knees tied together. A woman is blindfolded and has to follow the group. A man does a grotesque minstrel dance with a piece of cloth tied to one toe.

I suspect Taylor may have toned down the whips-and-chains aspects of Le Grand Puppetier after critics read them in the light of the Iraqi-torture scandals that broke around the time of its premiere. But people treat each other horribly in lots of his dances; the scenario of master and captive isn’t a new theme for him. What was interesting to me about Le Grand Puppetier was how Taylor deconstructed the 1911 Stravinsky/Fokine ballet Petrouchka to deprive the victims of their reward.

The dance, perhaps still in process, uses a pianola arrangement of Stravinsky’s coloristic score. Instead of following the Russian folk tale of a puppet who returns from the dead to curse the magician who controlled his life, Taylor’s puppet, Silvia Nevjinsky, gets free of her captors and rouses the entire community against the Emperor (Richard Chen See). But they have no plan for putting their new power to work. Maybe they’re careless; maybe Nevjinsky gets a little power-mad herself.

While they’re celebrating, the villain sneaks back, to the performing bear’s music that’s usually heard in scene one. Somehow the puppet gets swallowed up in the crowd, and the Emperor emerges brandishing a sword, ready to subjugate them all over again.

Paul Taylor has the comic soul and the moral distance of a satirist. He doesn’t take sides about who the guilty parties are. Or the innocent.


Issue Date: May 28 - June 3, 2004
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