A Season’s Worth of Splashes From Paul Taylor’s Rich Reservoir
<First published online in the New York Times on March 11, 2008>
The Paul Taylor Dance Company’s three-week season at City Center ends on Sunday. Anyone can afford to find (as I do) several of the 19 individual works flawed or negligible, because there remain the central classics of the repertory, from “Aureole” (1962) to “Promethean Fire” (2002). It’s agreeably tantalizing, too, to realize how many major Taylor works are absent from any one season. (Just to list “The Rite of Spring,” “Mercuric Tidings” and “Sunset,” none shown here this year, is a reminder of his diversity.)
It is possible to dissent from central features of the Taylor dance style. The beefy and so often bare-chested men charging about the stage, the glowing women rushing to and fro with sometimes gratuitous smiles and other exaggerated facial expressions, the phrases that give us the same jump or stride or run several times in quick succession: all these can seem a bit too simple and old-fashioned for comfort.
But even while I admit that these are occasional drawbacks, I recognize how often Mr. Taylor counteracts them. Everything in his dance theater has its opposite and underside. And when I occasionally meet dance fans who don’t love masterpieces like “Esplanade” or “Cloven Kingdom” - both among the supreme expressions of human self-contradiction and peaceable paradox - I can only sigh and say, “It is your loss” (just as several of Mr. Taylor’s admirers look at me pityingly when I say I don’t adore his “Piazzolla Caldera”).
On Sunday afternoon I was able to see again his latest piece, “De Sueños Que Se Repiten.” (“Of Recurring Dreams”). Though it didn’t grow on me on a second viewing, a few moments started to get under my skin. Michael Trusnovec, the hunkiest of Mr. Taylor’s current crop of men, plays an antlered stag-man, the Mexican version of the Greek hero Actaeon, I presume. And his role - here as in its companion work, “De Sueños” (“Of Dreams”) - distinguished by the factor that makes the Actaeon myth moving: heroic pathos.
It’s enthralling to study the way he follows the golden goddess figure (Laura Halzack): like other characters, he strides on his knees, but where the others end each stride with an emphatic jolt, he moves with a rapt legato that’s mesmerizing. Elsewhere just to watch him fall is touching: his whole role (often passive with or subservient to Ms. Halzack throughout their duet) displays the vulnerability of his very hunkiness.
Ms. Halzack herself proves haunting. Neither here nor in any role does she mug for the audience, and her statuesque, suave, quiet inscrutability becomes captivating. Her goddess is serenely acrobatic, and the fluency with which she moves through split-legged positions is coolness itself.
Another woman, Michelle Fleet, has a brief episode that has the feel of a star turn. She comes on, slowly prancing on half-toe, her fingers splayed, her torso squared to the audience as she proceeds across the stage, dominating a young man until he flees. Her manner menacing, absurd, implacable is almost comic, almost a period piece. All too soon, she quits the stage, leaving us longing for more.
“De Sueños Que Se Repiten” begins with a masterstroke of lighting by Jennifer Tipton: the sideways shaft of light on the isolated face of Mr. Death (Richard Chen See). You could watch an entire Taylor season as a study of Ms. Tipton’s range and mastery. How dramatic she makes light! How she changes stage space, makes paths thrilling, makes dancers richly three-dimensional!
The range of Mr. Taylor’s long-term designer, Santo Loquasto, is equally remarkable. “Antique Valentine” (which introduced Sunday’s program), a comedy of clockwork-doll movement, is not one of Mr. Taylor’s most substantial works, but Mr. Loquasto makes these human dolls entrancing with the different stripes and colors he gives their tights, bodices and waistcoats, boots, bonnets, mini-tutus: the details had such charm that they kept me as happy as the dance and the dancers.
Among those, Lisa Viola, in this, her final Taylor season, deserves special tribute. In “Promethean Fire” she dances with Mr. Trusnovec the dark, urgent duet that best establishes the tragic dimension of this spectacular work; in “Antique Valentine,” through underplaying and perfect focus and shrewd timing, she gives the clue to all the funniest moments.
She’s funny, too, as the Emperor’s rebellious daughter in “Le Grand Puppetier,” while the joy of her solos in “Esplanade” becomes the best expression of one of that masterpiece’s most surprising aspects: the rapture, amid so many lovers and so much community, of being alone. Many Taylor devotees have seen the performances of this senior dancer many more times than I over the years, and I am aware that this is my loss.
I should single out other Taylor performers. Briefly, then: Orion Duckstein is a heartthrob across the repertory and often heart-catching in the timing of his jumps; Robert Kleinendorst cracked me up as the fop in “Le Grand Puppetier”; and Annmaria Mazzini though she mugged the most is always a source of rich dance tone and lyrical exuberance. Francisco Graziano, James Samson and Sean Mahoney all played several roles each with utterly appealing energy and freshness.
But as a Taylor season adds up, what stays most with me are the particular features of the company’s dance style. In several dances I love the juicy way the women’s hips tilt one way or another while their shoulders often tilt the opposite way. In sculpture this principle is called déhanchement, and the way the body redistributes its weight is what can give old statues transcendent life. It is often beautifully employed in Indian classical dance, and independent performers like Sara Rudner can exemplify it, but I know no Western company that delivers it so gorgeously as Mr. Taylor’s. You can’t miss how fully the whole torso is involved even in standing or striding. And that fullness is one of the glories of dance today.
@New York Times, 2008