Opening Night of a Portfolio of Premieres and Old Favorites
<First published online in the New York Times on March 1, 2008>
Only four choreographers alive today have each created a number of works that stand as classics. It is remarkable that all four - Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris - are American. Though all have had important contact with ballet during their careers, it’s also remarkable that they first made their mark in modern dance, and only Ms. Tharp has become so much a crossover artist that she can no longer be counted as primarily a modern-dance choreographer.
Of the four, Mr. Taylor alone is so enshrined in the hearts of the New York public that a season by his company, presenting a mixture of new pieces, old favorites and revivals of long-unseen works, is an annual fixture.
The Taylor season that opened on Thursday at City Center presents an astonishingly dense anthology of his work. Nineteen pieces will be danced, from the 1962 “Aureole” to two New York premieres. Viewers can see all 19 only by attending seven particular performances, and even then see only three works twice.
Opening night, characteristic of the season as a whole, included one work new to New York (“De Sueños,” presented last year at the American Dance Festival), one work not seen here since 1986 (“... Byzantium,” new in 1984) and one familiar and popular work (“Arden Court,” 1981).
In the program Mr. Taylor quotes from Jung: “So difficult is it to understand a dream that for a long time I have made it a rule, when someone tells me a dream and asks for my opinion, to say first of all to myself ‘I have no idea what this dream means.’ ”
And that’s the main meaning here: the illogical fluency of dreams, in which innocence can turn to corruption, in which people from different worlds meet without conflict, in which vulnerability can become fatal, but in which death can be casual. Mr. Taylor is like Williams in that it often seems that he can’t help creating powerful situations or help making material that plays well moment by moment. And yet, as with “Camino Real” and several of Williams’s much later plays, “De Sueños” just isn’t as absorbing as it tries to be.
It wins a bigger audience ovation than “... Byzantium,” which plays to three strange and uncomfortable scores by Varèse. But I find “... Byzantium” the more truly original and haunting piece, even while it remains thoroughly inexplicable. A weird reimagination of human history, it is connected in the program to the final line of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”: “Of what is past, passing or to come.”
“Passing,” “Past” and “To Come” are successive scenes, and they show us lives with and without religious ritual. In the opening scene the brief depictions of anguished or wracked modern loners amid the passing crowd show one masterstroke after another, and my first reaction is to check when I can see it again.
I return to Mr. Taylor at this stage in his career with powerfully mixed feelings. While I love “Arden Court,” for example, I don’t adore the bright smiles the women adopt in it. Mr. Taylor’s women are more varied than his men, but their facial expressions often lend an air of strain or even phoniness: they even suggest that in male-dominated kingdoms like “Arden Court” women are not really as welcome as everyone is pretending. Most Taylor men are the muscular jock type, and though they are by no means uniform, I find the fascination of this so solid Taylor male ideal distinctly finite.
But Mr. Taylor remains a master. The sheer authority of these three works, even in their least successful passages, is exceptional. The Taylor season lies ahead, and with it come some of the most powerful contrasts and conceptions to be seen on any stage.
@New York Times, 2008