Michael Trusnovec in Taylor’s Beloved Renegade. Photo by Wiley Price.
Beloved Renegade, which traces the experience of the American poet Walt Whitman from youth to death, was created last year by the American choreographer Paul Taylor, now almost 80. At its New York premiere, on the opening night of the Taylor company’s season at the City Center, which runs through March 15, it was impossible not to equate the poet with the choreographer. Here was a venerable man looking back on a long life in which he steadily went against the grain, revealed the myriad aspects of himself in his work, and found the world and the creatures living in it endlessly fascinating, each in his way offering proof of the idea that the body and soul are one. The serene meditative piece also happens to be extraordinarily beautiful.
Even with top-tier artists like Taylor, it’s common for the production of masterworks to taper off as he or she grows old. His world may narrow. As the decades pass, he may start to feel that the dancing life, to which he’s given nearly all of his, no longer animates his imagination as it did for so long. He’s seen it all before, he suspects, and may not care as much as he once did about making his visions concrete. Exhaustion, both mental and physical, can set in. Dance is a cruel mistress.
Choreographers who start their own companies, performing alongside their age peers, as is common in modern dance, see their own technique gradually unraveling over the years and witness their athletic prowess surpassed by the ever-new bevy of perky young things who can do “everything,” or so the world says. (Rarely can they provide the subtle textures and the theatrical wisdom that comes with experience.) Inexorably becoming a noticeably different generation from most of their company dancers, choreographers with long performing careers are also likely to miss the social camaraderie of a gang that feels they’re all in this impossibly taxing but ecstasy-infused trade together.
Sometimes, with luck, as the years pass, there’s “a sea change, into something rich and strange,” as happened with Balanchine’s choreography in late masterworks such as Davidsbündlertänze and Mozartiana. The art relaxes—say, abandoning certain rules of construction, or permits itself greater ambiguity—and yet deepens. As for Taylor, he is, indeed, producing fewer indispensable dances than he used to and yet every new work, even if it’s slight, is clearly stamped with his unique gift and his wry—often eerie—world view. Genius is genius after all and it doesn’t desert you.
To see how a concept can blossom late, take the season’s revival of the 1963 Scudorama. It was astonishing in its time, with its heaps of bodies felled by anomie, shrouded in what were once brightly patterned blankets. When the figures revive, it’s only to commit violence amidst pervading confusion and a sense of not being fully aware of or responsible for their acts. The piece embodies the dark view that is a central element in Taylor’s turn of mind, here couching it in terms of lost souls in Limbo.
The dance had been absent from the stage since 1969, because Taylor felt that he’d since recycled its elements, but a grant to revive important old works changed his mind. Actually, he did surpass Scudorama—with the stunning 1985 Last Look. The clothes of the participants, strikingly designed by Alex Katz (who also created the scenery and costumes for Scudorama), may be in neon-bright colors with tall rectangular mirrored columns mercilessly reflecting fragments of the ballet’s horrors, but here we are, once again and more intensely, witnessing the apocalyptic death throes of the world. If Scudorama offers a moment, towards its close, of faint hope, Last Look’s figures, pausing occasionally in their writhing, thrashing hysteria to examine their reflections close up, seem only to recall with increasing anguish that they were once human.
Annmaria Mazzini in Paul Taylor’s Changes. Photo by Tom Caravaglia.
Clever as it was to put Scudorama (of the ‘60s) back into the rep in the same season as the New York premiere of Changes (about the ‘60s), the latter is nothing much. A suite of mildly inventive dances by various pop composers of the day covered by The Mamas and The Papas, it only indicates that the transgressive fight for freedom seemed to be a lot more fun back then. Try as they obviously did, none of the Taylor dancers was stylistically convincing. The whole affair was too neat, too contrived, not spontaneous enough. Annmaria Mazzini fared best, as she often does.
By contrast, the 1969 Private Domain, set to an eerie score by Iannis Xenakis, was as meaningful and haunting as ever. It tackles another theme Taylor often dwells on: secrets. Again, Alex Katz was responsible for the design element. Slate grey pillars at the front of the stage partially block the public’s view of the dance, enticing the spectator’s eye and imagination to invent what he can’t see. Each patron also has a different view to ponder, too, depending on where he sits: balcony or orchestra, side or center. He or she will certainly see lots of well-honed flesh (Katz assigned the dancers skimpy unadorned bathing suits). And much of the movement—executed devoid of gratuitously added acting—is erotic, allowing viewers the guilty pleasure of blaming their own interpretations as having a streak of the voyeur.
Not once, not even on the curtain calls, does Taylor let the performers step out of their confining frame. This tactic suits the dance, of course; it also has myriad implications. Along similar lines, tension is a significant element in Private Domain (also the title of Taylor’s fascinating autobiography, itself full of reveal-and-conceal ploys). Tension in the choreography comes not from the dancing itself, which tends to flow freely, but from the fact that we can witness the action only in fragments. It provokes one to wonder, How much do I ever really see? Can anyone know another person completely?
As the ambitious season ran on, displaying choices from five decades of Taylor works, it became more and more obvious that this dance-maker’s genius, his range, and his appetite for new territory are extraordinary, as is his ability to conjure up the most diverse moods and feelings from a dance vocabulary he has not found it necessary to revise or augment much over the years.
Annmaria Mazzini and Michael Trusnovec in Taylor’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal). Photo by Tom Caravaglia.
Another Taylor masterwork, Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal), from 1980, is also top-notch and is my favorite latter-day response to the Stravinsky score that, with choreography by Nijinsky, caused such a furor at its 1913 premiere in Paris. Taylor’s version, with its black and white designs by John Rawlings, creates multiple levels of narrative, cleverly dovetailed; it deserves accolades simply for its construction.
The “plot” interweaves the daily hours of rehearsal required of dance professionals (here under a dictatorial supervisor) with a bemused take on the hardboiled detective story (a naive detective is hired to break up a crime ring and find the kidnapped infant of a lovely client with whom he falls in love); and with reference to the original story behind the music of the annual sacrifice of a virgin by her pagan community so that the crops will grow.
Taylor manages to make all this work seamlessly, with charming humor, no less; sarcasm through caricaturing perps (like the Anna Mae Wong lady) and cops alike; and tender moments just where they should be. As if to increase the challenges of the piece, its choreography uses the non-balletic stance—torso and pelvis facing the viewer, head and feet seen in profile—that Nijinsky himself favored and that we see in Egyptian friezes.
The young mother’s long, distraught solo when her babe is done to death — through one of those absurd accidents to which the human race and a life in the theater are prone — is a star turn in itself.
And of course there was the ingenious 1975 Esplanade, which is to the Taylor repertory what Serenade is to Balanchine’s and Revelations is to Ailey’s. It was the first piece Taylor made after retiring from the stage and a work that the public enjoys again and again. Taylor treats its enduring success with typical irony. Once, when Bettie de Jong, the choreographer’s long-time rehearsal mistress, asked his permission to put the dance on the rehearsal schedule for the next day, Taylor replied, exercising his disarming wry smile, “Sure. As long as I don’t have to watch it.”
