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From Merce and Martha
Paul Taylor comes to the Shubert
BY IRIS FANGER

Paul Taylor came of age as an American artist in the heady post–World War II era of the 1950s. He was a swimmer on scholarship at Syracuse University when he discovered dance. After moving to New York City, he studied with Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, joining their companies as a performer; he sent a year with Merce but longer — 1955 to 1962 — with Graham, to consider her notions of theatricality and his of dance as an abstract form. "I think of Graham all the time," he admits. "I have to admit I was influenced by her. I swiped a run and put it in Aureole, a certain kind of run with arms swinging. She was very theatrical, but I didn’t want to deal with a lot of stage paraphernalia. The [Isamu] Noguchi sets were very heavy, nearly impossible to tour with. I thought dancing was the main attraction. Her influences were her general demeanor and her ability to inspire her dancers, in one way or another."

Taylor made his first piece of choreography in 1952; two years later, he formed the company that bears his name. Marking its 50th anniversary year, the Paul Taylor Dance Company will bring to the Shubert Theatre this weekend two programs of Taylor works ranging from 3 Epitaphs, which dates back to 1956, to the 2004 Dante Variations, a Boston premiere.

During its early years, Taylor was the company’s central attraction on stage. He was large by dancer standards, with the muscular body of an athlete, but he moved with a grace and buoyancy that belied his bulk. The works he made for the other male dancers in the company emphasized the reference to gravity that distinguished his performance style. He also endowed the works with a quirky brand of humor, dark-edged and complex, even sardonic. And though untrained in music (he says he doesn’t read it in the conventional manner), he had an innate musicality in his natural rhythms that allowed him to dissect a score, layering the movement in unexpected but satisfying ways. He once told George Balanchine, who invited him to learn a trio of works in the New York City Ballet repertory, that he preferred to remain a modern dancer, but many of his pieces have been performed by ballet companies the world over. (Taylor did dance a solo in Episodes, the Balanchine-Graham collaboration for NYCB in 1959. "Balanchine worked very differently from Graham, no yakking, no inspirational polemics."

Unlike Graham, who identified herself by the phrase "I am a dancer," Taylor says he was "relieved" to stop dancing in 1974. "Dancing was what I wanted to do. I liked to move. I really should have stopped sooner. I wasn’t well; it hurt. I felt I had to keep dancing. The dancers got better because I wasn’t making up steps on my own body. It was directly onto the dancers. I could sit out and see what was being done."

His choreography over the past 50 years ranges from works based on lyrical, balletic movement to those incorporating joky surprises that often reflect disturbing images of the American Dream. He has used every type of music, from New Orleans jazz to Beethoven, Handel, and Bach. He says the ideas for his work, "just come. The music is a big help. The variety is conscious. If you’re a one-choreographer company, you need to do different things."

The FleetBoston Celebrity Series presents the Paul Taylor Dance Company May 21 through 23 at the Shubert Theatre, 265 Tremont Street in the Theater District. Program A (Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m.) comprises Runes, Dante Variations, and Mercuric Tidings; Program B (Saturday at 8 p.m.) comprises Aureole, 3 Epitaphs, Le Grand Puppetier, and Piazzolla Caldera. Tickets are $42 to $60; call (800) 447-7400 or visit www.celebrityseries.org or www.wangcenter.org


Issue Date: May 21 - 27, 2004
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