by Leigh Witchel
The Paul Taylor Dance Company made up for lost time during the pandemic with a second New York season at The Joyce Theater only two months after their turn during New York City Center’s dance festival. While the City Center season made the company look as if it were adrift, this season showed more focus and interesting archival choices.
New works were another matter. Three programs were on offer, and Program B contained one premiere, “A Call for Softer Landings” by Peter Chu. The sound design by Daniel Moses Schreier used breathing noises and the lighting by Christopher Chambers featured yellow incandescent lights directed right at us: Clichés #1 and #2. The composite score picked up with a boom-chukka beat and the cast, all wearing loose shifts, grooved in unison: maybe the biggest cliché. Everyone fell to end the movement, except for the inevitable single person left standing to cross the stage. The next movement was more individual; to bird calls four men lifted another man, tossing him slowly upside down.
The women entered, crawling, flailing and staggering. Christina Lynch Markham used a brightly lit phone while crawling. Using cellphones in dances is our era’s newest cliché. After, she lipsynched to a peppy self-help yoga track. The piece went on, with frenetic movement and shaking, duets, a sound track of singing mixed with a beat, the women dancing together in smoke until a mildly witty conclusion: the soundtrack instructed, “repeat. . . repeat . . . repeat,” but instead, the curtain fell. “A Call for Softer Landings” was filled with things that might have been daring once, but were painfully familiar now.
All of the Taylor revivals felt fresher, even though the youngest of them was 43 years old. Artistic Director Michael Novak made a strong curatorial choice. The “Master of Light and Dark” shtick that we all end up falling into when writing on Taylor was still there: “Aureole” was the beginning of the Light track, “Profiles” was part of the Dark. But what was so interesting about “Events II” and “Tracer” was they were neither Light nor Dark. They just were.
“Events II” had not been performed since 1958, but Taylor had left detailed hand-written notes that enabled it to be revived. The short duet was from Taylor’s infamous “Seven New Dances” concert in 1957. Like Merce Cunningham, he questioned the idea of dance itself. Taylor was a founding member of Cunningham’s company in 1953; in 1955 he joined Martha Graham’s.
Taylor was in the thick of American modern dance’s major influences of the late 20th century, and his work showed it. In music, John Cage was composing; a companion piece to “Events II” in Taylor’s concert was based on Cage’s “4’33.” Robert Rauschenberg had been designing Merce Cunningham’s work since 1952. Rauschenberg’s designs here were not much beyond the mid-century dresses, but he did specify there would be an offstage breeze.
To ambient noises of a storm, Eran Bugge and Jada Pearman stood back to back. Nothing happened more than everyday, pedestrian motions. One knelt, the other turned round and crossed her arms. One moved her hand to her arm, the other walked in a small circle to the back. The wind in the women’s dresses provided as much motion as their own stillness. The curtain descended on them, still waiting.
That mood recalled Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” which was first performed on Broadway the year before. “Events II” didn’t show just a more radical side to Taylor, it was a taste of the 1950’s New York soup that, in the era of Eisenhower and McCarthy, was brewing the rebellious broth of the 60’s.
“Tracer,” from 1962, the same year as “Aureole,” was the last work Taylor did with Rauschenberg’s designs. It had been reconstructed in 2016, while Taylor was still alive, for Taylor 2 by dance scholar Kim Jones, assisted by Thomas Patrick and other Taylor dancers.
It’s another brief work, a quartet with one man and three women to musique concrète by James Tenney. Rauschenberg’s set element was a bicycle wheel (recreated by Jeff Crawford), mounted upended on a low platform on the stage.
A woman lay on the floor; a second woman entered in an angled, parallel plastique. Lee Duveneck came onstage in Taylor’s role, sliding, rotating, spinning, dropping into plié. He cradled and lifted Madelyn Ho, and took her offstage resting on his side. As the others cakewalked at a glacial pace, she raced in and jumped, then moved to the center rattling and turning in with quick foot motions. Everything in “Tracer” was a cryptic, terse utterance.
From 17 years later, “Profiles” echoed a motif we saw in “Tracer”: frieze-like poses in parallel, but “Profiles” turned the motif into the work’s subject. Jan Radzynski’s music, composed for the dance, was scored for strings, but there were buzzing sounds than moved to a crescendo, then dropped to a single violin.
The work was for two couples; John Harnage and Ho, as well as Alex Clayton and Bugge. Harnage flexed his arms; Ho shuffled and walked into him, knocking into one another in a duet. Clayton and Bugge shuffled and posed enigmatically. She knelt and put her hand in his for a last pose at the curtain.
In some ways, “Profiles” was a dark version of Nijinsky’s “Afternoon of a Faun,” but Nijinsky may have been on Taylor’s mind. The next dance he made, premiering a few months later at the start of 1980, was “Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal),” his take on Stravinsky and Nijinsky’s epochal work – and he used the motif in parallel all over it. “Profiles” could have been a run up to it.
“Aureole” was a lovely closer. It’s made of simple pieces; assemblés, sissonnes and the broad striding run that Taylor cribbed from Graham and used all the time. Still, the Arcadian atmosphere that Taylor pinched from ballet isn’t easy to sell, even from those to the manner born.
Pearman did several adagio leads in the City Center season, where she looked in over her head, but by this season in an allegro, she looked more at home stringing the phrases together. Austin Kelly, who joined the company last year, danced Dan Wagoner’s role as second banana and did a good job with his solo. He had the look of golden age Taylor men: broad shouldered, muscular, and with a gentle calmness that was Taylor’s equivalence of ballet’s nobility.
Taylor’s own solo, the man standing with arms en haut or slowly swaying, was a benediction of the space that connected the stage and the ground. He created his own kind of intimate partnering in a duet where he cradled the woman in his arms. Devon Louis had the weight but not the line. Taylor dancers don’t need ballet line, but any body type can dance with the shoulders down rather than up around the neck. A trio parodied ballet port de bras, and the cast streaked across the floor for the final diagonal.
The company looked much better than it did at City Center, more like Paul Taylor’s company instead of a generic modern dance troupe. Novak’s choices from the archive bin, however atypical, helped.
The commissions have the same problem that the Graham company had recently in its commissioning, where relevance was overweighted. Like this year’s “CAVE” for Graham, “A Call for Softer Landings” was a dance that did more for the viewer than it did for the company. New works are essential, but this was not a work that added anything substantial to Taylor’s repertory. The revivals did.
It’s hard to balance a desire to remain relevant (whatever that means) with a desire to be faithful to a founder’s aesthetic. It’s hard not to feel pulled in every direction. New is good. Old is good. Diverse is good. Traditional is good. Relatable is good. Radical is good. Cliché is not. In the end, the only thing that actually matters is quality.
copyright ©2022 by Leigh Witchel
“Tracer,” “Events II,” “A Call for Softer Landings,” “Profiles,” “Aureole” – Paul Taylor Dance Company
The Joyce Theater, New York, NY
June 15, 2022
Cover: Eran Bugge and Jada Pearman in “Events II.” Photo © Steven Pisano.
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