When Death (That Bowler-Hatted Gent) Comes Calling in Dreams
<First published online in the New York Times on March 6, 2008>
Back in 1992 I wrote in The New Yorker that it seemed the modern-dance master choreographer Paul Taylor had created his latest and probably worst work, “Oz,” in a deep sleep. Mr. Taylor wrote me a letter saying “Not bad. B+” and signed it “Paul zzz Taylor.”
Who knew then what dreams that zzz would bring? His current season at City Center is advertised as “The Dream Season,” principally because dreams are the subject of the two new works he is introducing to New York audiences. I reviewed the local premiere of the first, “De Sueños” (“Of Dreams”), last week. On Tuesday night Mr. Taylor began a gala with it, followed by, as the program’s centerpiece, the first New York performance of “De Sueños Que Se Repiten” (“Of Recurring Dreams”).
It’s evident they are intended as a pair. Both employ selections (different) from the Kronos Quartet’s recording of Latin American music and soundscapes, “Nuevo”; Santo Loquasto’s designs for both have strong features in common; and both carry program quotations from Jung. Principal characters in “De Sueños” recur in “De Sueños Que Se Repiten”: a bowler-hatted, black-spectacled death figure (Richard Chen See), a haloed golden goddess figure (Laura Halzack), an antlered stag-man (Michael Trusnovec), a flower-girl (Amy Young). “De Sueños Que Se Repiten” literally starts where “De Sueños” leaves off: with Mr. Death (as I have come to think of him) leaning his face forward into a sideways shaft of light and leering at us.
But the landscape has changed. The main backdrop for the first work depicts numerous skulls (as transformed by changing lighting) piled up against tree roots. For “De Sueños Que Se Repiten,” the backdrop shows three enlarged views - frontal, and left and right profiles - of a single human skull: the frontal view is close to the grin worn by Mr. Death at the start. The Jung quotation for the first is about the inscrutability of dreams, and for the second says, “Recurrent dreams ... it is hard to escape the impression that they mean something.”
Instead of the innocent-seeming group of white-clad supporting characters in “De Sueños,” the opening scene here gives us a more menacing and unrecognizable group dressed in black, masked and breastplated. In the first work, individual characters are threatened by a machete, and one is eventually shot down; in the second, we watch the public entrapment and official sacrifice of an apparently innocent woman we’ve hardly met, with Mr. Death as executioner.
In a second scene we see a series of lovelike duets (with most characters in different, though still black, attire), with one male-female couple following another, led by the goddess and the stag-man. This reaches a grotesque conclusion when a heavily “pregnant” woman, embracing a man, drops the baby-doll that has been padding her stomach; the man’s first impulse is to stuff the doll back into her dress, but his eventual decision is to kick it offstage. As the work nears its end, the supporting characters are seen wearing white, barefoot, the men bare chested: innocence is restored, but death still looms.
This description may make “De Sueños Que Se Repiten” sound more interesting than it is. “De Sueños” does not grow in the mind with a second viewing, and “De Sueños Que Se Repiten” is less memorable yet. They certainly aren’t the mess that “Oz” was, but they’re rewarding neither as drama nor as dance. I could try to analyze their meanings. The death-love and innocence-doom connections of the second work virtually beg for interpretation, and I suspect that it may be highly self-referential in its echoes of earlier Taylor choreography. In the theater, however, both works progress too ponderously to make their ambiguities appealing. Instead the mind tends to fend off these cumbersome dreamscapes.
Tuesday’s gala ended with the season’s first performance of a work that feels truly dreamlike in the unbroken fluency and unpredictable sequence of its images: Mr. Taylor’s “Esplanade.” Tom Stoppard said, apropos of his play “Arcadia,” that there were some works that made a playwright feel not so much proud as lucky, and I imagine that Mr. Taylor could never have felt luckier than in 1975 when he made “Esplanade.”
This miraculous dance to Bach (the Violin Concerto in E Major, followed by the final two movements of the Double Violin Concerto) pours forth images that abound in meaning but are also irresistible as movement. Running, walking, changing directions, stopping; the group, the male-female couple, the loner; the man, the woman, the androgyne; sliding, skipping, jumping; forward, backward ... . It is a river of connected contrasts, swept along on the music’s current, without one single academic dance step, and it is among the most constantly heart-catching works ever made in any art form.
@New York Times, 2008