From a Master Craftsman, Recurring Themes of Divinity, Death and Desire

<First published online in the New York Times on March 4, 2008>

“Life’s a curse, love’s a blight, God’s a blaggard, cherry blossom is quite nice.” With these words a character in Tom Stoppard’s play “The Invention of Love” sums up A. E. Housman’s book of verse “A Shropshire Lad.” A latter-day cynic could apply them to the dance works of Paul Taylor.

For all of Mr. Taylor’s vastly greater range, Housman-like themes keep coming around in his repertory, as his current season at City Center demonstrates. What living choreographer more often shows or hints at death? Or more often brings in figures suggesting the religious or the divine? Where Housman employed the idea of rural simplicity, Mr. Taylor invokes primitive ceremony. The image of a glorious hero in the prime of life is as central to his work as to Housman’s, and frequently that hero is marked for death, just as fulfilled love is shown as something finite.

The Playbill essay on Mr. Taylor reminds us, proudly, of his avant-garde beginnings in the 1950s. Is there anything avant-garde left in Mr. Taylor today? He retains a disquietingly original mind, which isn’t the same thing. Instead he has long since become a master craftsman. This authority is evident both in the complex dynamics with which he fits his dances to music (who knows more about how to make slow work against fast, or sharp against smooth?) and in his elaborate, but generally symmetrical, display of spatial geometries.

Sunday afternoon’s triple bill of Mr. Taylor’s “Equinox,” “Fiends Angelical” and “Piazzolla Caldera” seemed to celebrate his variety. “Equinox” (1983), set to Brahms’s first string quintet, is a modern “Love’s Labour’s Lost” view of four pairs of elegant male-female lovers, clouded by a woman’s central solo (danced by Lisa Viola) in which her private misgivings or grief intimate that the rest is already a memory.

In “Fiends Angelical” (2000), to George Crumb’s “Black Angels” (with its quotation of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden”), a priestess (Parisa Khobdeh) presides over a primitive tribe amid which twinlike lovers (Annmaria Mazzini and Michael Trusnovec) die and are brought back to life. “Piazzolla Caldera” (1997) distills the sexual desires and raunchy dramas of the tango, to music by Astor Piazzolla and Jerzy Peterburshsky.

For me, however, the diversity and craftsmanship of such a program exist mainly on the surface. The construction of “Piazzolla Caldera” (which always wins a warm ovation from the audience) is impressive. But neither do its actual dances grip me nor do its steamy dramas convince me for a moment.

Mr. Taylor lays emphasis at several points on one woman’s unfulfilled desires (Ms. Mazzini, legs signally parted much of the time, body writhing) and in one sequence on a male couple (Richard Chen See and Francisco Graciano) who are evidently plastered and whose physical togetherness is ambiguous. Though I can imagine enjoying these and other layers in another treatment, this piece’s account of them is heavy-handed.

“Fiends Angelical,” with its cult/love/death/religion story, is duller in the theater than it ought to be. But “Equinox,” which makes so much of the idyllic community and sweet love of its couples ought to be more bland than it proves. Here Mr. Taylor’s ingenuity as a dramatic poet rises, giving us multiple meanings and undercutting the dream with notes of pathos and paradox. His brilliance in contrasting a dance tempo with a musical one is at its most eloquent. Such subtleties, though, make the rest of the program feel the more crude.

Yet the span of Friday night’s program - “Aureole” (1962), “Troilus and Cressida (reduced)” (2006), “Counterswarm” (1988) and “Promethean Fire” (2002) - only grows with recollection. True, “Troilus” (to Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours,” the opera-ballet score that Disney made uproarious in “Fantasia” and to which Christopher Wheeldon restored its charm in 2006) is less funny than it tries to be. True, “Counterswarm,” to Ligeti, is a clever but unabsorbing conception of humans viewed as insects, and the real charm of “Aureole,” to Handel, is reduced by the women’s autopilot bright smiles (also by Mr. See’s exaggerated facial reactions). But all four of these pieces face in strikingly different directions.

“Aureole,” the oldest piece in this season’s repertory, is a true classic of Taylor style. You can feel its dance juice working richly through the whole body, and amid its several moods, the central male solo (originally performed by Mr. Taylor himself, now by Orion Duckstein) is a particular marvel of unbroken fluency.

“Promethean Fire” (to three Bach scores as orchestrated by Stokowski) includes images of love and death, and yet what’s more thrilling is Mr. Taylor’s kaleidoscopic sweep of successive group geometries. It has grandeur, urgency, touches of Busby Berkeley absurdity and “Metropolis” epic impersonality. How odd; how irresistible. We’re left thinking: who else but Mr. Taylor?

@New York Times, 2008