On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance TAYLOR-MADE AND FRIPPERY BY LAURA A. JACOBS PAul Taylor, our reigning modemdance choreographer, has cultivated one of the most impersonal movement vocabularies in the history of...
...Two George Balanchine ballets have been brought into the repertory, as well as Antony Tudor's Gala Performance and new works by Agnes de Mille and Mark Morris...
...On Dance TAYLOR-MADE AND FRIPPERY BY LAURA A. JACOBS PAul Taylor, our reigning modemdance choreographer, has cultivated one of the most impersonal movement vocabularies in the history of dance...
...Jennifer Tipton's deep-hued, gold-rimmed lighting is splendid and haunting, like the sun's corona during an eclipse...
...To the early 19th-century composer Heinrich Baermann's "Adagio for Clarinet and Strings" they dance a quieter version of what has gone before, restating its meaning in larger, purer terms...
...It's been an exciting spring for the American Ballet Theater (ABT...
...There is also a strong undercurrent of Martha Graham: Taylor first became famous dancing in her company, and though he took an emotional path entirely different from his mentor's, his dances exercise the same muscles as hers do...
...A lot of cabbage roses, crinolines and polka dots, that's for sure...
...At first you think it only amounts to plastique...
...Taylor is presenting creatures forever locked in combat, bred to kill...
...The purples are introduced first, then the reds...
...And they do, in giddy, lightningfast whooshes...
...the next she leaps over his upheld leg...
...indeed, alongside all the doomsday works we've seen lately from Taylor, Roses seems to be the choreographer's act of faith...
...The men, apparently attendant spirits, are deployed in jazzy diagonals and radial arrangements suggestive of naves and arcades...
...It is no wonder that when Paul Taylor choreographed for a ballet dancer, he chose to work with the impulsive, balance-be-damned Suzanne Farrell...
...One moment the performing partners gently lay their hands upon each other...
...Although Lacroix said he was "inspired by Toulouse-Lautrec," that is only evident in silhouette...
...Johnson has gorgeous thoroughbred legs, but the most amazing thing about her is her upper body...
...It's a high-tension structure, like a stallion's proud carriage, and it gives her a constant off-axis quality that makes for instant épaulement: She's always dancing on the volcano's edge...
...the moon was climbing, the dance wasn't...
...they hang in the air like horses, they veer like hawks in a windshear (Taylor arms are resonant but often stiff, suggesting rudimentary wings...
...they give the dance structure...
...The implication is there for the drawing...
...Now and then balletic zephyrs blow through his work...
...So far, however, fashion designer Christian Lacroix and his new costumes for the old Gaîté Parisienne have stolen the show...
...Yet nothing is really done with it...
...Commonplace though Taylor's steps may be, they are governed by an ideal both clear and rigorous...
...The work's larger structures are as straight for ward as those of Brandenburgs are complex...
...Choreographed by Leonid Massine in 1938, Gaîtéis a flirtatious and diverting little ballet at its best...
...It is apparently about two families of warring scorpions: One is dressed in purple, the other in red...
...By the last movement her colleagues have visibly tired, while Johnson is still growing stronger, her lucidity undiminished...
...Despite the balletic tone (there are heavy echoes of Balanchine's Apollo here), Taylor does not actually employ ballet technique...
...Lacroix, at least, remains rightly ensconced in the belle époque, but his nostalgia is grabby rather than loving...
...Set to the third and the sixth of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, the dance takes a ceremonial look at the gods on Mount Olympus...
...It begins with five couples dancing to Richard Wagner's "Siegfried Idyll...
...Counterswarms is also one of Taylor's scrap dances...
...In some of his creations—Nightshade, Big Bertha, Le Sacre—the shocks are psychic too...
...In the ABT's hands it is as top-heavy as Lacroix's hats...
...We imagine Wagnerian peaks and gorges, circling winds and twining spirits...
...Glamorous new scenery for the production has been provided by Zack Brown...
...Though deliciously executed, the Tower is a mistake...
...In fact, the majority of them come from the schoolyard—leaps, skips, dashes of the sort you might see in a game of tag, and an arm-pumping walk...
...If you crossed two bows you might get a sense of the taut convex curves that extend from shoulder to shoulder and from the back of her head down to the bottom of her spine...
...Instead, he shapes the movement along spherical lines, allowing his dancers to cut all the corners they want...
...The colors are powder pinks and blues, apricots, reds and fuschias, celadon greens...
...Its fine texture consists almost entirely of flicks of the forearm, darting legs, and stabbing, twitching and stinging gestures...
...They curl, lean, spring, coil...
...And in the performance I saw, it was Kate Johnson who was queen of the repertory...
...Counterswarms, the Taylor company's other premiere this spring, can be counted among the choreographer's anthropomorphizing dances (along with Cloven Kingdom, a signature work inspired by Spinoza's dictum "Man is a social animal...
...To these Taylor adds jerks, lurches, spasms, and other kinetic scraps when it suits him—as in Private Domain and Last Look...
...What has Gaîté gotten...
...There are lowlit body-builder solos, followed by pas de deux that include some nasty looking acrobatics...
...For the first half they move in stately processionals, their unearthly gravity set off by the spry, incisive vigor of a quintet of men who accompany them...
...Each does a separate duet characterizing the different relationships between the lovers, ranging from high seriousness to cherubic exuberance...
...In a seeming nod to Cecil Beaton's Ascot Races-creation for Audrey Hepburn's Eliza Doolittle, he has made liberal use of black-and-white stripes as well...
...The backdrop is royal blue, and the four lead dancers—Johnson, Christopher Gillis, Cathy McCann, and Susan McGuire—are arrayed in white with gold trim...
...Certainly Susan Jaffe's characterless Glove-seller and the sheepish can-can dancers do not convince us that there is any life left in it...
...you practically see the word...
...Because of the fluid tension Taylor creates between the four and the five, it is all the more momentous when, suddenly, the leads shift gear and begin circling, spinning and showing off at high speed...
...It sets the time too late, too much on the threshold of modernity (after all, Jacques Offenbach, who composed the music, died in 1880...
...Taylor pushes muscle, bone and nerve to the limit, and revels in the physical shocks that flesh is heir to...
...The couples who aren't dancing nestle in pairs on the ground, putti in their own romantic allegory...
...Taylor's great dances—Esplanade, Musical Offering, Roses—are the ones that develop out of a premise to which he has given a distinctive slant...
...Musical Offering, a masterful contemplation of Bach's music by Taylor that uses Samoan sculpture as a visual motif, begins with a solo for Johnson that opens on variations involving ever-greater numbers of dancers...
...There's nary a stringy calf or poorly sprung torso among them...
...Upon the conclusion of these five duets, a sixth couple enters, dressed in blinding white—a pair of doves in a forest of jubilant blackbirds...
...You would have to be living in a cave not to have heard about this or seen the photos by now...
...Taking consummation as its theme, the work has a distinctly religious aura...
...Roses becomes not only a bridal celebration but a coronation...
...The ABT has gotten plenty of free publicity off the Lacroix connection (not that the costumes didn't cost a pretty penny...
...The steps he uses—resorts to, one is tempted to say—are not pulled out of his own body or soul...
...Johnson doesn't just state the theme, she «the theme, the tip on which this inverted pyramid of a dance balances...
...All in all the dancers are breathtakingly overdressed...
...Watch closely, however, and you will soon discern the beveling technique that is the essence of Taylor's choreography...
...Whenever she appeared this season Johnson clarified and extended what is most precious in Taylor's choreography...
...If so, it is the only sign in the entire production that dance still matters...
...The café is creamy vanilla accented in brick-red, and its grand swoon of a staircase is flanked by art nouveau windows through which we see the Eiffel Tower...
...In contrast to ballet dancers who emphasize a vertical thrust and imperturbable center, Taylor's people manifest a keen animal intuition in motion...
...In the end, Counterswarms is spoiled by the same shortcoming that marred the ponderous Runes and the pretty but bland Equinox: Instead of taking us somewhere, the choreographer simply keeps switching directions...
...In Runes, I wondered more about how they got the moon to move sideways-and-up across the backdrop than I did about the arbitrary and unconnected steps...
...When the dancers all throw themselves backward in Esplanade, Johnson does it with a special Batman POW...
...Diana-like with her leather headdress and girded hips, she circles around herself, shoulder leading...
...The women's flowing black dresses, designed by William Ivey Long, suggest not mourning but ritual—the ritual of play and ecstatic courtship...
...both sport exotic battlewear...
...The dancers are so full-bodied and multidimensional they seem to be modeled from soft brown clay (you can imagine Taylor's thumb deftly giving solidity to the men or planing the women's waists, and drawing a flourish down everyone's spine...
...Johnson also stood out in Brandenburgs, a season premiere...
...Did Lacroix purposely shape La Lionne's hat-feather into a lyre, the symbol of Terpsichore...
...Last month at New York's City Center, Paul Taylor's company performed R oses, a dance he composed three years ago...
Vol. 71 • May 1988 • No. 8
