Paul Taylor poetic dramas-

<First published online in the Financial Times in November 23, 2023>

The American modern-dance choreographer Paul Taylor died five years ago at the age of 85. His dance company survives him. Its recent fortnight season at Lincoln Center’s opera-house-size David H Koch Theater (October 31-November 12) was well attended and an important opportunity to observe the Taylor legacy.

In many of his greatest works, Taylor was an astonishingly versatile poetic dramatist. Are those poetic dramas — often plotless, often barefoot — still eloquent after his death, and especially with a company most of whose dancers did not know Taylor?

Last year, when the Taylor company returned to the Koch Theater for its annual season, there was cause for concern that his male dancers were no longer his best heirs: they had begun to look slick and knowing, without the athletic innocence that had characterised so many of his. The great achievement of this season was that innocence’s return. Audiences watched as if those works were new. 

Esplanade (1975) remains one of the most miraculous dances in the world. It’s composed entirely of ordinary human movement (walking, running, halting, sitting, rolling, falling and so on) without a single formal dance step. And yet this is a supremely dancey work. Its overwhelming beauty lies in the way, without any plot, it summons intense feelings: as it juxtaposes company with isolation, evokes anguish amid exuberance, it keeps catching the breath, stopping the heart. To watch the risks with which the 2023 dancers threw themselves into the air was to feel Esplanade reborn.

Mercuric Tidings (1982), a very different work, likewise remains in ebullient shape. Heroic in energy and scale, this features many of the formal steps that Taylor often used. It also employs formal tableaux and geometries, sculptural jumps that hurtle through space with startling impetus and spectacular lifts that slowly spin in their course like planets. Although intensely responsive to its music, it seldom matches the music’s phrasing: it’s all about elaborate counterpoint while combining different groups at different speeds like parts of an orchestra. 

But what of the darker, subversive, disconcerting works that were a crucial share of the Taylor repertory? His Cloven Kingdom (1976) — a work that did not always register fully at the Koch during the last years of Taylor’s lifetime — was looking more fabulously bizarre than for some time. It exists on three planes at once: it shows men and women dancing with socially formal elegance (the women are in long dresses, the men in white tie); it shows them releasing animal energies and behaviour (stamping and pouncing, or clambering between one another’s legs); and, most strangely of all, it shows them as impersonal agents of the sublime (with geometric and metallic head-dresses, dancing radiantly outward into space). 

Cloven Kingdom’s unnerving masterstroke is to have its dancers dance to three different kinds of music, parts of which we do not hear: Corelli’s baroque string music, Henry Cowell’s Modernist gamelan-like tintinnabulations and Malloy Miller’s powerfully metric drummings. Cloven Kingdom changes your sense of what it is to be human.

These and other Taylor works, nine in all, were the triumphs of the 2023 season. (Book of Beasts, one of his flimsiest comedies, was the exception.) Also shown were five non-Taylor works, by four other choreographers. Some were pleasing, some tiresome. None amounted to much. 

Lauren Lovette, a former New York City Ballet principal now in her thirties, has been the Taylor resident choreographer since 2022: it’s hard to know why. Her new Echo, an exercise in smouldering atmospherics for an all-male cast to music by Kevin Puts, is probably her most accomplished work to date in terms of formal composition, yet it’s very slight in terms of expression. Her Dreamachine (made earlier this year) was yet more nebulous, a meandering essay in quasi-romping quasi-drama. Lovette is both prolific and versatile as a choreographer, yet never does she strike gold. 

Larry Keigwin’s Drum Circle, another premiere, is — like much of his work — lightweight in manner, but it channels the marvellous rhythmic weight of the Taylor dancers so forcefully that it was the most arresting non-Taylor event of the season. 

But what matters just now is the survival of Taylor’s own repertory. His company was invariably their best exponent during his lifetime. With other dance companies, the five-year point has often proved the moment. This 2023 season astonished. Taylor’s dances were pulsatingly alive.

@Financial Times 2023