sarma

I still look back with awe and pleasure on the spectacle of Paul Taylor playing Paul Taylor in a ballet by George Balanchine. Actually, Episodes, when it was given its premiere in 1959, was an unlikely two-part collaboration between Balanchine and Martha Graham. And in the middle of Balanchine’s half of the ballet, Paul Taylor, then a member of the Graham company, walked onto the stage - dwarfing the exiting ballet dancers - and began, with great composure and the winsome deadpan he often affects, to bend his body into some astonishing knots.

Then, as now, he looked like an aberration of an Olympics Decathlon contender, velvet-gloving his strength for us. Balanchine seemed to have ferreted out all of Taylor’s most individual movements and strung them together with a speed and fervor habitual to Balanchine, but unusual for Taylor.

No one in the New York City Ballet could perform that solo; it was dropped after the first season (as was the entire Graham half of Episodes — a stylish, skeletal version of the tragedy of Mary of Scotland). Now that Taylor, acclaimed here and abroad for his own choreography, is about to offer New York his first full-evening work, American Genesis - on Thursday through Sunday, this week and next, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music - I think back to that solo, because Taylor, having started out in modern dance as a rebel, is now in his own way almost as much a classicist as Balanchine.

Taylor was, by all accounts, the most impeccable and studious of rebels. Shortly after his late start in dance - had almost finished college - he fell in with vanguardists like Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and John Cage. He was, as far as I know, the first choreographer to make a dance equivalent to Cage’s rigorous essay in silence, 4’33” in which the pianist sits at the keyboard, but plays not a single note. In Duet (1957), Taylor stood and his partner, Toby Glanternik, sat for three minutes, the duration of the dance.

This experiment obviously proved to Taylor that he preferred moving to standing still. During the next few years, he produced a series of brilliant, skewed works like Fibers, Meridian, Three Episodes, Insects and Heroes, Junction – works that were more ambiguous than modern dance at that time was supposed to be.

“Belligerently unintelligible,” critic John Martin called Taylor. Many of us loved those dances, loved, for instance, the way the mysterious insect in Insects and Heroes, a black creature with inefficient, but decorative spines, fumbled grandly around the other dancers - looking sometimes like an eager, untrained pet, instead of the expected menace.

Some of Taylor’s dances presented, still do present, a dire vision of humanity; this caused Louis Horst, the cantankerous guardian of modern dance morality, to rebuke Taylor in his magazine, Dance Observer, saying that he’d never get anywhere if he insisted on being so pessimistic.

In 1962, Taylor choreographed Aureole, and that should have mollified those who found him unintelligible and those who thought him pessimistic. Aureole is a blithe dance about people dancing to Handel music. With this work, Taylor’s idiosyncrasies, his light, loose handling of Martha Graham’s dance technique, seemed to have blossomed into a definite style, with a vocabulary of movements which he could employ - with necessary permutations and additions express a variety of themes.

Today, Aureole can almost be viewed as a primer of Taylor dancing: in it you can see the chains of ground-skimming leaps; the parallel feet (as opposed to the turned-out ones of ballet); the archaic Graham poses with jutting hips which give the dancers the look of frolicking satyrs; the flyaway hands; the swinging, twin-armed gestures; the fluent knots.

And, above all, the buoyancy.Taylor is a big man, but his style has a light, smooth, spongy quality, which all of his dancers acquire. How ever difficult the steps, however perverse the choreographic non sequiturs, the easy, almost tactful way the dancers exert their strength minimizes all effort and imparts a fluidity to whatever they do. With shifts of emphasis, the style can appear carefree, as in Aureole; pacific, as in Lento; neurotic and violent (Scudorama); mincingly elegant (Piece Period); hypocritical (Churchyard); or erotic (Private Domain).

But no matter what the mood of a particular work, the dancers perform with a sort of warm aloofness, surveying the dance and their roles in it from a certain emotional distance - with interest, but no alarm. Taylor himself often performs as if he were having sardonic second thoughts about art and life. The coolness tends to make funny dances funnier and lewd ones even more depraved.

So, by taking his idiosyncratic movement style and treating it as if it were neutral, by performing it dispassionately, by patterning it with grace and ingenuity, Taylor has arrived at his extremely odd brand of classicism. The dances that he’s made since 1966 might also be considered as classical art in that they’re neatly balanced, formal equations in which his inescapable quirks of thought are framed or resolved in images that have theatrical vividness and comprehensibility. (I’m not sure whether this sanely proportioned clarity is a product of Taylor’s ripening as an artist or the exigencies of the company’s increased performing schedule. Both maybe.)

Some recent works seem to have been made principally to display a gracious equilibrium, like Lento (1967) or Foreign Exchange (1970) or Orbs (1967), a heavy work so stately, and heavy with cosmic correspondences, that it all but stifled Taylor’s supple wit. However, Taylor’s quirky classicism also derives strength from his apparent view of evil as an active force - guiltlessly relished by those who perpetrate it. He’s a master of stylish lewdness.

In Agathe’s Tale (1967), for instance, a raunchy Satan, disguised as a monk, battles St. Raphael to a draw for a maiden’s favors, while she cleverly escapes with a third party. Churchyard (1969) formally op poses false virtue (priggishly genuflecting nuns and clerics) to gleeful vice (lascivious creatures deformed by outrageous carbuncles); the dance themes of the first part are literally turned widdershins in the second part, to conform to the structure of a Black Mass.

In Big Bertha (1971), one of Taylor’s most recent and bitter excursions into the heart of America, a grim, coin-gulping automaton on an old nickelodeon works a sinister spell on a typical “nice” American family, so that father rapes daughter, while uncaring mother strips down for the audience. Father (Taylor) ends up on the nickelodeon - presumably destined to be Big Bertha’s accomplice in the next chilling encounter with wholesome vacationers.

Paul Taylor’s dances don’t alarm or perplex people as much as they did. Aureole is in the repertory of the Royal Danish Ballet, and in 1971 Rudolph Nureyev appeared with Taylor’s company in London and in Mexico City - dancing Taylor’s own roles in Aureole and Book of Beasts - and performed an altered version of Big Bertha on television. Perhaps Taylor’s choreography strikes some of the ballet world, too, as an unconservative but comprehensible form of classicism - ballet in a foreign language.

Make no mistake, though, Taylor’s still an eccentric, and those of us who still occasionally mourn his lost intransigence are perhaps really lamenting the inevitable passing of our own astonishment that anyone could do such wickedly beautiful things to the art of dancing.

When I was writing the final draft of this article, I couldn‘t find the review by Louis Horst which I had unearthed some weeks earlier and intended to quote. I took a deep breath and paraphrased it anyway. Months later, I found the review: it was not by Louis Horst, but by Nik Krevitsky (a contributor to Horst’s Dance Observer), and the gist of it was that Paul Taylor was eschewing the “nihilism,” that afflicted many of his contemporaries. There ‘s a moral here that I’m sure I needn’t explain.