29. Temporal Domains: Paul Taylor reviewed by Cheryl S.
There is something exhausting about being fought over like a Thanksgiving wishbone. Louise Ebersdorf wants me. Now Liane Beach shops me for herself or in tandem with Louise. I become a little sleepy, perhaps in imitation of those small creatures who collapse in a faint defensively when threatened. But what do I have to fear? I suppose it’s the responsibility of living up to the expectations of both American Louise and French Liane toward new work. I’m international merchandise. And possibly keeping my sanity while making no new dances . . . for pay! After all, if we put my Nekomata video on further hold, don’t we play into the hands of the striking Albertine and Paco? How will Louise handle this? How will I?
What else do I have to worry about? Sandy is growing antsy. I owe him a lot personally and professionally, and he understandably wants to work even if I’m being shelved, however lucratively. (I’ll gladly pay him a retainer fee myself, of course.) Master Raro has proved impressive as Paco’s back-up, and suddenly Sandy says he must make a solo for our Master. Sandy just finished reading the love letters of John Cage to Merce Cunningham, and he now insists on calling his projected new piece Oestrus, to piano music by Cage. He says that if Nekomata is drenched in Thanatos, this new solo will be his tribute to Eros. Following a suggestion that Liane made, Sandy wants to present his dance in a hard-to-find gallery in Chelsea – a way of involving the audience in a treasure hunt for the performance site and creating need-to-see.
I suppose I’m concerned that Sandy may steal Master from me, in more ways than one. I’m suddenly jealous! But I must be generous. Sandy has done so much for me – and continues to be my helpmate this side of bed. Nothing is easy. I have heard nothing from Yakutsk for ever so long. Maybe I should contact Wonkov about the availability of his Denisovan ballerinas. Le Swing might employ them as exotic Siberian guest artists. Diaghilev used to snap his fingers and a ballet season would transpire. Now, in 2019, we sit and wait. They also serve . . . .
Off Sandy and I went to Paul Taylor American Modern Dance at the Koch Theater. During his life, Taylor was obviously a well-read choreographer. His wide range of literate references could be seen in the repertory works selected for this season. Sandy and I went four times and were impressed not only by the variety and grip of choreographic thought but by the new dancers that are arriving as veterans depart. The effect is to expand an audience’s sense of the possibilities in dance theater in both theme and formal design. This choreographer regularly compliments his audience for catching his references to topics literary, philosophical, and historical. Taylor is not necessarily going to appeal to dance specialists or intellectual stay-at-homes. He obviously wanted an audience of aesthetic adventurers, and his world-wide popularity demonstrates that such a viewership is out there. I noticed how the Taylor works either suggest various time periods or alter the viewer’s temporal sense.
Unfortunately, two new works by visiting choreographers Kyle Abraham and Pam Tanowitz were endless. The Abraham appears to be an attempted tribute to Taylor tropes and techniques but ends up looking like an exercice de style under the cover of references to gender fluidity, dear timid notions swallowed whole by the dimensions of the vast Koch Theater stage. Abraham reduces his dance to virtue-signaling. The Tanowitz, as usual, devolves through unconscious reflex into folk-dance accents perfectly isolated from a sophisticated accompanying musical score, in this case by Bach. Obviously, no one in the Taylor administration is counseling the invited guest choreographers. The chosen invitees are selected from newspaper puffery. Neither new work was ready to be shown to a paying audience or to so-called dance critics.
The revival of Taylor’s 1965 Post Meridian was the big event of the season. It is a witty exercise in existential entropy – the sense that everything P.M. is a winding down -- a theatrical version of the twentieth-century fascination with dissolution in the arts and life. (Read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow for a vast literary treatment of the entropic theme.) Taylor turns his spectacle of ordinary decadence into a series of secular rituals that are humorous and ominous by turns. The taped score by Evelyn Lohoeffer de Boeck includes a brief spoken text played backwards. Perhaps this is to introduce a note of the demonic – a nocturnal rite may be in progress leading toward a further damned A.M.
The celebrants on Taylor’s bald mountain are used to coping with low expectations. There’s a sense of inurement and post-partum ironies. The dance movement and the musical score make filtered references to jazz clubs from the 1940s and 1950s, but with 1960s “quote signs” suggesting an even deeper lived malaise. Somehow, without undue stress, this is very Pop Art. There are dance patterns that hint at an imminent resolution that never arrives. My favorite section is a sextet (two simultaneous trios of one man, two women) that achieves shifts into new plastic configurations out of tiny physical adjustments. The effect is to question the very idea of process when it is almost invisible and slow in coming.
Taylor’s coolest cats show their sophisticated unconcern even in the midst of general unease – that’s how deep disentitlement has penetrated. The lead dancers evince an ironic attitude toward acceptance of passing authority, even their own should they assume it. After all, where can all this lead? And, under the circumstances, how else to cope? (Very Merrie Melodies: a hepcat can look at a king.) Devon Louis dances the great solo at the end, originally performed by Taylor, a thorough if hapless protest against coming stagnation. An ironic attitude is almost transcended through individual passion? There are touches of this self-questioning in other Taylor dances, but P.M. sums up an evening skepticism. With only eight dancers, Taylor creates a sense of massive interrogation. I am told that Taylor toured this work around the world. He spread the word.
Could Taylor have consciously tried to capture the mood of a period (mid-century America), offering a testament to the future about the weight of present history itself? Perhaps such a Taylor work would best be viewed through the lens of the New Historicism in art theory. I also have to mention that Post Meridian looks right at home on the stage at Koch Theater, its Alex Katz costumes burnished in their colors under the recreated lighting design of William Ritman. Some Taylor works may still be adjusting to the big house, but this one fits perfectly. Those concluding tolling bells as the curtain falls are hard to forget.
If P.M. takes place on a mountain, Scudorama (1963) is set in the nighttime desert, with scudding Alex Katz clouds and handy American Indian blankets against the primal cold. Here is Taylor nightmare full force. We are lost somewhere between the cities of the plain. Ordinary Guy in shirt and tie encounters figments in leotards. Those civil uniforms we don for morning duties are of no use here. The movement language is a devastating parody of both Martha Graham’s idiom and Broadway flash. So insistent are these references, the dance spectacle reads as an exorcism. If ever dance parody could be said to be hilarious, poetic, and therapeutic, all simultaneously, here is the evidence. The musical score by Clarence Jackson is part of the stylistic clearance sale. The dance haunts, like the later Taylor Dante Variations (2004) to Ligeti. Scudorama also made it possible to say farewell to departing dancers Robert Kleinendorst and Sean Mahoney under the sign of high art.
Brief Encounters (2009) might be Taylor parodying or quoting himself. Against a darkling backdrop of a Romanesque arch (Nero’s Domus Aurea? A vast hall for orgiasts?), it is now the dancers who scud through nymph-and-faun encounters. We are in a dance world outside of ordinary time: All Times. The packed allusions to tableaux and movement motifs found throughout the Taylor canon create a fantasia, a capriccio, a handy glossary of the Taylor idiom. A young choreographer watches those shifting accents in the phrases, the high play with long and short metrical units, the subtle adjustments in musical response that the current company’s virtuoso dancers accomplish to Debussy.
In the 1983 Sunset, there are some accented aerial passages for the men, but the memorable moments emphasize movement flow. One young girl in a park setting is briefly adopted by a group of soldiers, who create elevated pathways for her play. Two friends among the men act out their own mild conflicts through legato movement in their dance to Elgar. When one of the soldiers has a vision of death’s possibility in coming conflict, another young woman becomes a kind of spirit-figure or guardian angel offering consolation to him and his fellows before they ship out. The concept has a D.W. Griffith force to it. (Griffith made a wonderful film about World War One: Hearts of the World.) There may also be a touch of J. D. Salinger’s Esme. I was shocked by the naiveté of the concept until I realized how much variety of inspiration Taylor allows himself in all of his work. He doesn’t deny himself the right to appropriation across times.
Time is very much the subject in Syzygy (1987). In the impassioned dance movement, the distance is reduced between the impulse in movement attack and the discharge of energies to the point where initiation and release seem one. Time stands still. We shudder into timelessness. The effect is powerful because an illusion is created that the dancers’ virtuoso movement has left far behind conventional metrical controls. I was reminded of Vladimir Nabokov’s passage on how in poetic inspiration time ceases to exist: “. . . it is a combined sensation of having the whole universe entering you and of yourself wholly dissolving in the universe surrounding you. It is the prison wall of the ego suddenly crumbling away with the non-ego rushing in from the outside to save the prisoner – who is already dancing in the open.” (I quote from “The Creative Writer” [1941], from Think, Write, Speak, edd. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, Knopf, 2019).
I have one question for the dance community. In Post Meridian and in various works by Graham and Cunningham, we see a forward use of straight arms that involves a scissoring movement, clip-clip, in what resembles an Assyrian pose, as though the two limbs are cutting the air or releasing some spectral force. (You also see it in Balanchine’s Serenade, where the port de bras has a hieratic suggestion of fate-cutting or destiny-changing. I have seen the move also in excerpts from Cunningham’s 1960 Crises in which the women were supposedly characterized as witches.) Is it possible that this is a generic mime gesture denoting spell-casting, placing a curse, magicking a charm? Could it originate from Ruth St. Denis’ Eastern evocations? (I must look at the Babylonian section of Intolerance again soon. It may occur there as well.) I am fascinated that so many serious choreographers felt it necessary to evoke a movement that lingers into twenty-first century stage repertories with little denotative specificity for the audience. Its dance poetry is connotative to a fault.
My only general criticism for the Taylor season would be a result of the shift to live music. When released from seasons of rote movement to recordings, some of the Taylor dancers have found a new dialogue with various musical scores. Other dancers are still making the transition into such spontaneity. What was impressive was the high level of musical intelligence to be found among new dancers joining the ranks. The future of the company looks bright.
Back to my season. Louise wants to keep the Chinese interested – but would the Chinese be at all intrigued by an all-female company made up of Parisian ballerinas? Pippa now knows about the widdershins ritual down on Floor 35. (Master spilled.) How will she deal? Will she keep the news from Louise? And I must have a screening of Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar. Does Liane think I channel Agnes de Mille? She mentioned something about setting our new ballet on a modern dude ranch. A Dancin’ Kid on pointe? I’m sure Paul Taylor would have had lots of ideas. I must read widely. Time will tell.
C.S.
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