by Leigh Witchel
An all-Paul-Taylor triple bill that his company danced during its Lincoln Center season went for baroque – and its derivations.
From 1981, Arden Court, to well-known symphonies by William Boyce, is one of Taylor’s beautifully wrought pieces. When Taylor wanted tension, he often built it into the casting, for instance putting five women with seven men into Piazzolla Caldera. Here, he used a mirror proportion to one of Balanchine’s favorite ratios to build order: six men for three women. Each section was joined tongue and groove to the next; at the transitions, a few dancers for the next part entered or remained.
Seniority matters in this company, and Devon Louis, who’s been there six years, is getting plenty of parts, including Elie Chaib’s role that grounded Arden Court. Yet Louis turned in an unfocused performance, not maintaining control over his lines or transitions. It was as if someone turned off a switch, then turned it back on when he got to a pose.
Taylor used to call the shortest girl in the company the “runt,” but she got plum roles in the repertory. Current Artistic Director Michael Novak has spread out her roles, but most often now they have gone to Lisa Borres Casey. She has focus. And though she gets most of the comic roles, she didn’t have to play for laughs here. John Harnage buzzed around her in a solo; all she did was change position occasionally. Still, you might not have noticed him until he was halfway done.
Austin Kelly and Alex Clayton did the comic part in Arden Court: an antic duo they repeated in double time. Arden Court had all its ingredients in the right mix; that duo moved into an adagio where the men carried the women in like planets slowly orbiting in the music of the spheres.
Taylor gave the longest adagio to the sextet of men. Barechested, they moved slowly in gymnastics, almost as fanservice for the masculine body beautiful. Almost. In a line of standing men, Kenny Corrigan did a handstand, the moment of aysmmetry that proved the rules. Corrigan also never has a problem with focus.
In the finale, Taylor gave us a move at once unexpectedly and stereotypically Taylor: everyone left by shooting across the stage in a different leap, except the last man who rolled. José Limón’s company was playing at The Joyce Theater the same week as Taylor, and the contrast of two contemporaries was illuminating. Taylor was never as sincere, nor as direct, but he was as American as the ending of Arden Court: playing to the crowd in the Peaceable Kingdom.
Dust, like paintings by Hieronymus Bosch come to life, worked in threes: three couples, three graces, three grotesques. Made in 1977 to Francis Poulenc’s acid Concert champêtre for harpsichord, the dancers wore leotards with appliques that looked like pretty floral lesions. Some of the cast had black cloths that were used as cloaks and sledges. The harpsichord sped into an allegro as the grotesques turned in and out, and ended with dancers being carried off in the cloths.
People sped across the stage, scratching and itching, and Kristin Draucker mimed pulling out fistfuls of hair. She collapsed, and three others pulled strings from her gut like entrails. And yet the work was so cheery as once again the dancers turned in, turned out and sped up as they went round. Seeing the stage, with a knotted rope heading upwards, this time into the lofty reaches of Lincoln Center, Dust had much more air round it than it might at City Center or The Joyce.
Madelyn Ho danced the big solo that started as a spacious waltz. She encountered at first four, then a fifth person afflicted by blindness, but moved round the stage, creamy, big and seemingly uncaring as they felt their ways about. But the community was communicable. Soon after they touched her, she also could no longer see. In another Taylor-made moment of ambivalence, she still maintained her waltz and its spaciousness.
The black cloth returned, now as a belt holding two dancers somersaulting over one another. The cast looked out before the stage flooded with light, and the dancers leaped madly around before finally assembling to a diagonal with Ho at its crest. With all the jokes, including mine, about Taylor using exactly seven steps, you never minded seeing something from him you had seen before in another form. Taylor’s assemblages of dancers often turned into piles of bodies. This time, it was more constructive.
Taylor had always been drawn to the jolly and the macabre, and one of his alums, David Parsons, made his own similar plague dance, Ring Around the Rosie, in 1995. But midway between Dust and Ring, Taylor chose the greatest and most daunting of Baroque composers, Bach, for a requiem in 1986’s A Musical Offering.
AIDS hit the company hard. In the 1998 documentary Dancemaker, Taylor fought off tears talking about Christopher Gillis, who died in 1993. Working in 1977, there was no way for Taylor’s neo-Baroque totentanz to have been more than coincidental, but in 2024, Dust felt like a strange premonition of AIDS.
A long time ago, when I was at college in Boston, the Harvard Coop had the best record department in town. In the classical records department, they had a section for Bach, and then a separate bin, where they kept the synthesizer versions and modern orchestrations: “Schlock Bach.” Leopold Stokowski’s arrangements of Bach that Taylor used for Promethean Fire take themselves very seriously.
At one of the first pounding organ chords, Shawn Lesniak pressed Borres Casey overhead in Promethean defiance, but weirdly enough, the two were not featured after. The big duet went to Ho and Louis. Taylor marked the transition from the toccata to the fugue by having the men haul the women in. He built a massive edifice, almost like an old Hollywood musical. Swirling round, assembling into diagonals, coalescing, when the dancers fell in seriatim, Taylor was making one of his body piles, but it also looked like Busby Berkeley.
Everyone crawled off leaving Ho and Louis. Though Ho threw herself fearlessly across the stage into his arms, Louis looked overloaded doing two major pas de deux. His partnering was strong, but line and focus were a struggle, and he wasn’t holding the stage.
I may blame the Harvard Coop for my inability to take Promethean Fire seriously. And yet, the music was still Bach. It was also 2002, and loss was on everyone’s mind. The final movement of Promethean recalled A Musical Offering, and as with that, or the slow movement of Esplanade, Taylor turned to Bach for some of his most profound statements. His connection to his source music wasn’t baroque-an.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Arden Court, Dust, Promethean Fire – Paul Taylor Dance Company
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
November 9, 2024
Cover: Lee Duveneck, Kristin Draucker (on floor), Lisa Borres Casey and Jake Vincent in Dust. Photo © Whitney Browne.
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