by Leigh Witchel
The collaborations between Paul Taylor and Alex Katz produced some of Taylor’s best work. The 95-year-old artist was the subject of a retrospective last year at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and during the Taylor company’s season it showcased a quartet of the 14 ballets Katz designed. His concepts were simple but apt.
From 1976, “Polaris” was built around a conceptual gimmick: the same choreography is danced twice, but with changes of music, lighting and casting. The work is set to a commissioned score by Donald York, in a simple set by Katz: a bare Escher-ish cube of piping. He also contributed simple costumes; graphic black and white bikini tops and shorts in large black and white color blocks.
Kristin Draucker stood inside the cube, with a quartet of dancers surrounding her, pacing slowly and changing their places. The music was lush; the dancing rich but calm. Moving from being bounded by the cube, suddenly Maria Ambrose broke the space to dance a solo outside the box – literally.
The other four knelt or moved inside the cube. But that didn’t feel like a metaphorical prison; it was no more than a spatial design choice. When Ambrose’s solo ended, they all headed out of the bounded area. They did a dopey Taylor walk with head waggles, but didn’t turn that into The Point. There’s always something dopey in Taylor, but his work from this era kept that in control. Shawn Lesniak inverted Jada Pearman on his shoulders, then took her round as she posed in a stag leap.
The lights dimmed as the dancers paced the perimeter, leading into a solo for Draucker threading through the poles of the cube. She wound up in the center, and one or two at a time, five new dancers replaced the first quintet. Jennifer Tipton’s lights went from dark blue to black. Eran Bugge walked to the center and the new dancers began the same steps. York’s music for the repeat was very different in tone, tense and nervous, but worked seamlessly.
Lisa Borres danced the solo Ambrose did, and leaving the square that time took on the idea of breaking a boundary. The others were also imprisoned, then everyone broke free. York’s tempos felt faster, and the head waggle seemed less friendly and more mechanical.
John Harnage danced the duet with Madelyn Ho, and again, it acquired a nervous quality. Bugge’s last solo became a sharp dance with and without the cube, ending with a thud on the ground as the others reentered.
The sky went blue and the first dancers came back in as if this could repeat over and over, but that was the end. Taylor made a dance, but also a theatrical exercise. Like a joke from the same year, it’s a floor wax and a dessert topping.
The standard joke about Taylor was that he only knew seven steps. Here, his retort might be that steps don’t have intrinsic meaning, or mean as much as we think they do. But he cheated a bit: the steps may not have changed, but their speed and accenting did. So if the choreography in “Polaris” is “exactly” the same, it’s been reshaded. Interestingly, there still was an essential quality to the shapes; sharper or softer didn’t change everything.
Another constant in both versions was Katz’s designs. The cube formed a simple, neutral ground and his color-blocked costumes discreetly emphasized the quality the work has like a photographic pair: positive and negative.
1963’s “Scudorama,” has an epigraph from Dante about the nearly soulless whose lives concluded with neither blame nor praise. Even without reading it, you can sense that Hell isn’t far. The work is a Bosch or Breughel vision of people so busy with pointless activity they barely realize their situation.
Clarence Jackson’s thudding music was a commission. Katz contributed a backdrop of strange dark clouds and quotidian outfits: blue unitards for the women with wide white boat collars. Others crawled round in what looked like beach towels. Taylor’s original role was danced by Devon Louis in a Mad Men suit. That wasn’t “period,” it was what was worn.
Like many of Taylor’s Dantean visions, “Scudorama” is a procession of apparitions. The women in the unitards, Pearman, Draucker and Jessica Ferretti, jumped under themselves repeatedly, while another woman dragged herself across the back. The movement was primitive, but the women were dressed as if they worked for Pan Am: The Rite of Stewardesses.
A secondary man, Kenny Corrigan, also wore a suit, but Louis returned in a burgundy unitard, jumping and striding to music that was almost a Charleston. The beach towel creatures continued crawling; but Louis grabbed a towel and slammed it around.
The others raced about, and there was a whistle in the score; for a moment it seemed to turn into “Gee, Officer Krupke.” Corrigan came out with Ho and draped a beach towel over the other women. Then he got beach toweled himself. It looked as if it were going to be a magic trick of transformation, only when revealed again he hadn’t changed into Louis. Instead he posed as others crawled at the back.
Louis and Ambrose danced, and Corrigan returned, now also stripped of his suit and in a green unitard. Dragging Pearman, they formed a pile. The pile started to move, and they left it with a similar shocked quality. Twenty two years later, this became another Katz collaboration: “Last Look.”
Ambrose reentered; also changed into a unitard, but this time red, as a solo, lamenting figure the others danced round. Louis jumped out threatening her, and she collapsed. He did a handstand, and threw Ambrose around like a rag doll, tossing her round and round, eventually forcing her to dance. Picking her up over and over, he finally dropped her as she crawled away. The beach-towel creatures crawled to the center, and crouched low as the piece didn’t really end, but it stopped.
Cryptic and totemic, “Scudorama” was created a year after “Aureole,” both are Taylor’s early visions of Paradise and Purgatory. Both the crime and the punishment seemed to be living a pointless life.
Twenty years after “Scudorama,” Katz and Taylor teamed up for one of Taylor’s most poignant dances, “Sunset.” Of the quartet making up the program, it’s the one most performed, and danced by other companies as well. It’s a peaceful moment of youth; soldiers and ladies in summer dresses, interrupted by dreamlike hints of the realities the men would face.
Katz’s contribution was a simple, but very effective set: a wall with a rail like a barre, and a green backdrop with barely contrasting dabs as leaves and dark long soft lines as branches.
Where the set was an abstraction, the costumes were closer to recognizable clothing: the men wore military khakis and red berets, headgear worn by soldiers of many countries, including England, which is where Taylor’s music is from, two works for strings by Edward Elgar. The women wore nearly identical pale summer dresses.
“Sunset” was also a chance to see more of the company. Alex Clayton took the part Elie Chaib originally did, performing with tight, explosive jumps, and a comic moment where he dropped his head in disappointment with a big, Muppet sigh.
The pivotal male duet was danced by Harnage and Lee Duveneck. When he was next to Duveneck, Harnage seemed smaller, which set up a dynamic. He became the mascot of the group. The duet is a sponge for the subtext each cast gives it. This time the actions – pushing away from one another, adjusting a uniform or shoes, even staring at one another – seemed to be less about affection or desire than awkwardness. There was a kinship with another soldier buddy dance: Robbins’ “Fancy Free.”
Bugge entered alone, and a lone woman changed the dynamic. The men carried her, putting her on their shoulders, and extended themselves into a long, kneeling position to salute her at the end.
Madelyn Ho did a section with the men that could be looked at as a riposte to “Fancy Free.” Ho was lifted and manipulated by all the men, but this was a delight for her. She was something to be adored, and Lesniak and the others held her above them, as she walked from man to man or rolled on their bodies. They tossed her, but like a trapeze artist, it was a thrill more than a danger. She was safe and luxuriating in the adoration.
She joked with Duveneck about taking her hand as she walked down the other men’s backs. After she backed offstage the men leapt and exited after her. It’s a convention we question today, but amidst the nostalgia, Taylor presented a soubrette and her swains without hazard or irony.
Taylor paused the Elgar in favor of recorded loon calls for a dream sequence, as the women ministered to the men as they fell or crawled. Eight years later in “Company B” he was much less veiled about the awful fates of some of them. Here, he let us draw our own conclusions, and instead reversed the action, with a man tending to a woman lying down.
The women touched the men’s hearts, and when the music resumes, all six men hinged to the floor in a moment of longing, and lay down in two lines. You didn’t need to see more than that to know what might await any of them. In its awful tranquility, “Sunset” makes as powerful an argument about the losses of war as “The Green Table.”
Katz took center stage in “Diggity” with a bevy of metal canine cut-outs, but even there he didn’t make dancing impossible. The dogs were placed so the stage looked full but several pathways were clear. Here, the artist moved the farthest from costume and closest to clothing. The dancers all wore what could be street clothing. The men wore sand-colored polos, the women, white V-neck dresses.
Bugge began skittering amidst the dogs. The music, again by York, became expansive and pastoral as couples lay down (a moment Taylor liked enough to repeat in “Roses” a few years later) and the men took Bugge and lifted her up in a split as they shuffled.
Both Katz and Taylor were given to the bizarre; in “Scudorama,” it was threatening. Here it was pure whimsy. What goes great with dogs? Why, cabbages, of course! The dancers came in with an enormous cabbage cut-out and the women hid behind it.
When Borres appeared from behind it to dance, she mugged for all she was worth. Her face is a great stage face, with big features made for mugging. Harnage and Austin Kelly put her on their shoulders, then at the end flipped the cabbage round to reveal a sunflower.
After a big, almost Calypso number, Draucker danced a duet with Harnage. Well, it’s not a duet. There were those dogs. It was the pas de deux from “101 Dalmatians.” Draucker and Harnage shuffled and changed hands, and after a brief salute and they left on opposite sides. They quickly returned for a coda, and York provided a big Copland-ish tune with a touch of commercial jingle as well.
Taylor sent us home happy with a big finale with shuffles, jetés and all the dancers barking, everyone assembled for jumping jacks to a split with a wave.
When the company had its first post-lockdown New York season in March, 2022, it looked at sixes and sevens. That was likely pandemic fatigue, and three New York seasons was the most effective therapy.
Now, it has to tend to the past and look to the future. There’s been a clear effort not to neglect either (the company’s website’s section devoted to “The Taylor Collection” isn’t a bad way to think of a precious, but now fixed, repertory) and they seem to recognize there’s awful lot of good Taylor to mine into beyond the Top 10.
copyright © 2023 by Leigh Witchel
“Polaris,” “Scudorama,” “Sunset,” “Diggity” – Paul Taylor Dance Company
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
November 9, 2022
Cover: (L to R) Maria Ambrose, John Harnage, Shawn Lesniak, Jada Pearman and Kristin Draucker in “Polaris.” Photo © Ani Collier.
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