by Leigh Witchel
The triple bill closing the Paul Taylor Dance Company’s Extreme Taylor season at The Joyce Theater was a sandwich with a big slice of baroque in the middle and two baffling works as the bread. It was all tasty, but the most easily comprehensible thing about the program was that the order was shuffled to accommodate a happy fare-thee-well.
The program opened on a mystery, Post Meridian, from 1965, which was an ant farm of a dance, filled with activity that its participants understand, or act as if they do. We certainly didn’t. On a rumble, two women wearing long-sleeved unitards with gloves, designed by Alex Katz, entered in an almost funereal dragging shuffle.
There was a weird, sampled voice – was it speaking a foreign language, or just played backwards? The cast of two men and four women were jumping, assembling, running to formation, all absolutely deadpan. The recorded score by Evelyn Lohoefer de Boeck became pizzicato strings and everyone moved their arms side to side.
To distant, jovial carnival music, the women slinked across the front as if they were dancing Jack Cole, only on tranquilizers. And then back to carnival music.
It was completely inscrutable.
Kristin Draucker arrived in a unitard that had yellow arms. She greeted the others to a cacophony of prepared piano, and the two trios merged together to form an inscrutable sextet. The score moved through what sounded like cascading bells mixed with glass for a section with Eran Bugge and the men, then cool-ish jazz on bass as Devon Louis arrived in a purple leotard.
Louis has a powerful core, which made him most interesting in the contractions that brought him in. You could see the energy at his center before he suddenly started leaping, his arms circling in a frenzy. He left doing the same contractions.
To close the concise work, everyone walked forward in a slow procession. Bugge paused as the others left, to come forward and bow before rejoining the line to exit.
We’re not supposed to understand Post Meridian. Sometimes Taylor didn’t care if we understood what he was doing. He was cagey enough to know that often made his work more interesting.
Brandenburgs, from 1988, is too scrutable. Like Airs, Aureole or Arden Court, it happened in another peaceable kingdom, but this one is in a higher rent district. Five men in emerald velvet adorned with gold trim posed with three women, plus John Harnage in the center. Everyone was smiling, smiling, smiling. By 1988, Taylor had done a lot in this genre, transposing the ballet divertissement to modern dance. By that point, he didn’t have much to add.
The men circled and leaped. Like the Three Graces or the Judgment of Paris, each woman danced, Maria Ambrose with tall elegance, Lisa Borres with luxuriant but quicksilver mischief, Bugge with calm warmth. Suddenly the men saluted the women and crashed to the floor before rebounding. Harnage, bare-chested and cut, joined the women for the adagio.
Harnage’s relationship to the three women dancing for him was strangely chaste. He wasn’t the planet they revolved around. When he bowed or went to the floor to promenade on his knees, he was echoing them.
The men raced in, greeting us with a jump, and raced back out. Ambrose danced for Harnage, spinning and fanning her leg as he smiled benevolently. But what did he want from her, and what did she want from him?
Then Bugge danced for him. Again, why? His innocent smile didn’t give any clue. Basically, he stood there looking good. Harnage is not a dancer who generates tension; he’s harmonious. Brandenburgs needs tension or it’s dull.
The movement accumulated to the full group. More than Aureole, more like Robbins’ ballet to the same family of Bach concertos, Brandenburgs felt very like a danse bien fait. The movement ended with the dancers doing a line of jetés.
Harnage is likely one of the most technically impressive Taylor dancers to come down the pike in a while, particularly in line and carriage. Trained at the Miami City Ballet School, then The Juilliard School, he’s clean, elegant and light. You could drop him into a ballet company and he’d fit in.
Paradoxically, that isn’t what this part called for.
The original in the role was Christopher Gillis, who was stereotypical of the men Taylor liked: big, broad, butch. In conception, the part was likely similar to Elie Chaib’s in Arden Court: about weight and anchoring the space. The short solo Harnage did in Jennifer Tipton’s sidelighting echoed Chaib’s slow cross of the stage from that work, which could be a clue as to Taylor’s intentions.
What we got was a beautiful Taylor version of the adagio solo from Square Dance with impeccable lines and control. Harnage didn’t ground the stage.
The final movement was a call and response for the men and women before a final return to the opening. Harnage wasn’t enough of a philanderer to make it interesting when he was called on to dance with multiple women. The man’s a lovely dancer; the part didn’t use his gifts gratefully. If Harnage is going to grow in or into this role, he needs something to help him provide the needed contrast.
We headed back to inscrutable with Runes. The piece is from 1975, with music by Gerald Busby and Ice Age costumes featuring what look like fur pelts designed by Taylor under his pseudonym George Tacet, PhD. Taylor made his own, unorthodox, version of The Rite of Spring in 1980, but this is his real Rite, a ritual that didn’t give up its mysteries.
The curtain rose on Austin Kelly lying immobile on the ground, as the rest of the cast ran in and out, spinning and crossing on the stage to the piano chords picked out faintly in Busby’s score. Four men picked Kelly up; the women crossed arms as they moved.
The cast gathered in a line, with Bugge in front, covering herself with her hands as if she were Botticelli’s Venus. The others split off to reveal Lee Duveneck in the same pose. The two began a duet where she pointed as he shadowed her.
The action continued like a nervous incantation for a spell nobody understood. At the back, Lesniak paraded across the back with a woman pressed high overhead. Later, women were carried in at the side by the men, one, two or three at a time.
A series of solos anchor the work, first Devon Louis making slow poses in front of a semi-circle of women. The next, for Christina Lynch Markham, was her final dance with the company, an intense solo that had echoes of the Chosen One in Rite. At the end of the matinee, she got a solo call where the rest of the company was quite literally throwing roses at her from offstage. It was a lovely way to bid farewell, though Markham’s amazing performance in Big Bertha a few days prior made you wish they had not just swapped order, but programs, to let that be her last hurrah.
One last very scrutable thing. It’s great to see these earlier Taylor dances, and it was a great use of The Joyce season to get a closer look.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Post Meridian, Brandenburgs, Runes – Paul Taylor Dance Company
The Joyce Theater, New York, NY
June 30, 2024
Cover: Eran Bugge and the Paul Taylor Dance Company in Runes. Photo © Steven Pisano.
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