Paul Taylor Dance Company

With a collection of 130 dances and counting, Paul Taylor is one of history’s most prolific choreographers – but what’s truly impressive is that his most recent work has been hailed by audiences and critics as among his best ever. These include a dance he created for the 2009 season – Beloved Renegade – that will be part of the 2010 repertoire, along with two new dances: Also Playing and Brief Encounters.

Last season dance critics described Mr. Taylor’s works as “ravishing,” “luminous” and “spellbinding” while hailing 16 of the most talented performers on the planet as “fearless, ferocious and brilliant.” As a result, many last-minute buyers could not purchase the seats they wanted. Don’t delay; order your seats to the 2010 season now, starting at just $10 in the orchestra. And be there as we celebrate… Paul Taylor – An American Icon at 80

“One of the world’s supreme dance makers… some of the grandest works produced in this country or anywhere else for that matter. Such masterpieces as Mr. Taylor’s Esplanade [and] Sunset are among the dance world’s most important treasures, and the chance to see works of this caliber from a living artist is too precious to miss.” – Jean Battey Lewis, Washington Times

Here’s a brief look at the works in the 2010 repertoire.

NEW YORK PREMIERES: ALSO PLAYING AND BRIEF ENCOUNTERS
Also Playing, set to ballet music from Gaetano Donizetti operas, is an affectionate tribute to Vaudeville and performers “who went on no matter what.” Among the artists in this comic revue are a tap-dancing horse (a true hoofer), a toreador whose sissy bulls are frightened of her, and a dying swan in her lengthy final throes, all admired by a star-struck stagehand who’s inspired to take a turn with his broom. “A madcap tribute to vaudeville [that] celebrates the sublime and the ridiculous aspects of the traveling theater families who brought entertainment to small-town America between the Civil War and the advent of radio…. It reminds us that… the Vaudeville performers of old, if perhaps technically flawed, were plucky and gave their all.” – Kristen Fountain, Valley News 

Mr. Taylor has often pushed the boundaries of modern dance through experimentation with movement and stillness, and music’s relationship to dance. In Brief Encounters, he returns to a score he first used more than 30 years ago in Images – but this time he’s using the orchestral version of Debussy’s Le Coin des Enfants as opposed to the original version for solo piano. The dance is about people more interested in momentary contacts than in ongoing relationships. 

MAJOR REVIVAL: PUBLIC DOMAIN 
A comic display of technical prowess set to a musical pastiche that includes Mahler’s 1st Symphony, Sibelius’s 3rd and 5th, Beethoven’s 9th, and Glazunov’s violin concerto. The dance returns to New York City Center for the first time in many years.  “Zany… irreverent whimsy… A series of kinetic jokes to a ragbag of a score. The dancers are ever more changeable, switching from acrobatics to solemnity that ends in flipness, to satiric barbs at other choreographers, to show-off technique.” – Frances Herridge, New York Post 

A TAYLOR CLASSIC: ESPLANADE 
Mr. Taylor’s landmark work from 1975 attained the rare status of a universally hailed classic of dance following its first performance. The dance brims with youthful exuberance yet contains astonishingly poignant and romantic moments as well. After exploring relationships among friends, lovers and a dysfunctional family using such “found” pedestrian movement as walking, running, skipping, sliding and jumping, the choreographer sends his dancers hurtling fearlessly across the stage in leaps and catches that never fail to elicit gasps from the delighted audience. “The most endlessly re-watchable and heart-catching work Mr. Taylor has ever made…. Esplanade, whose spontaneous joy creates so powerful an impression, has always contained sorrow. And if you examined and described all its fleeting human incidents, you’d have enough material to furnish a novel with multiple plots.” -- Alastair Macaulay, New York Times

A BAROQUE QUARTET: AIRS, BRANDENBURGS, CASCADE, DANDELION WINE 
In 1961, Mr. Taylor was one of the first modern dance choreographers to confound expectations by setting a work not to a contemporary score but to music composed more than 200 years earlier. Junction – and shortly after, Aureole – were the first dances in what has become a signature series of works set to the driving rhythms of baroque music. This season, in addition to Esplanade, audiences can enjoy an abundance of these dances, including Airs (1978) set to music by Handel; Brandenburgs (1988) set to the famed Bach concertos; Cascade (1999) set to Bach’s concertos for keyboard; and Dandelion Wine (2000) set to a Locatelli violin concerto. While telling no specific story, these dances – chock full of movement invention – refer unmistakably to and comment upon relationships, romance and spirituality.

Airs: A new and distinctive vintage, of mellowness and classic finish that give it a sublime autumnal glow. Incredibly diversified and complex. The whole work is a treasure.” – Alan M. Kriegsman, The Washington Post  Brandenburgs: “The choreographer's great gift for simple-looking but intricate stage patterns is exhilaratingly evident… It also celebrates the differences between men and women, in part through different ways of moving… The ardently gracious women spin [and] the men lumber and thunder at breakneck speed like football-playing gods.” – Jennifer Dunning, New York Times  Cascade: “Glitters. The central section…is one of Mr. Taylor's most beautiful duets. The two bodies fold in and out of themselves…in choreography that pours out like thick cream. One can see, in this duet particularly, Mr. Taylor's gift for subtle emotional detail.” – Jennifer Dunning, New York Times  Dandelion Wine: “An instant winner, a joyous ode to the springtime of life… one of his most dazzling works.” – Anna Kisselgoff, New York Times

AN AMERICANA QUARTET: SCUDORAMA, A FIELD OF GRASS, DREAM GIRLS, CHANGES
Since early in his career, Mr. Taylor has held a mirror up to American society – and the reflection has not always been complimentary. This season presents four such dances. The 1960s began in a spirit of unbridled optimism with the election of the youngest President ever. That optimism was short-lived, dashed by assassinations, race riots and the nation’s tragic involvement in the Vietnam War.

With Scudorama (1963), set to a jazzy commissioned score, Mr. Taylor reacted to the anxiety of the era following the Cuban Missile Crisis, and expressed those unresolved tensions in a dance that recalls Dante: “What souls are these who run through this Black haze… These are the nearly soulless whose lives concluded neither blame nor praise.” “What a work it is. Made immediately after Taylor’s first great hit, the buoyant and sunlit Aureole, Scudorama – dark and desolate – was a deliberate rebuke to Aureole’s joyous optimism. It’s a view not of hell, though, but of purgatory; hell was to follow… It was a revelation – a blazing declaration of Taylor’s talent.” – Robert Gottlieb, New York Observer

In Changes (2009), set to songs sung by The Mamas and The Papas, the dance maker revisits the mid-‘60s, a time of “free love” and growing radicalization of young people as they defied authority and embraced liberation movements. The dance climaxes with an anthem of the era, “California Dreamin,’” that temporarily unites the disillusioned young. While we may remember the turbulent ’60s as unique, Mr. Taylor tells us, in fact they were not – 40 years later the country was again involved in an unpopular war amid demands for change. “A spellbinding time capsule of the Californian 1960s…. The dancers’ re-enactment of the ’60s is an extraordinary feat of acting. The costumes and wigs are deliciously period… It travels from episode to episode, each depicted and shaped with mastery, all vivid and different.” – Alastair Macaulay, New York Times

A Field of Grass (1993) uses songs sung by Harry Nilsson to focus on the latter part of the ‘60s and early ‘70s, when a group of friends experiments with hallucinogenics and exercises sexual freedom. “A kind of Woodstock revisited, a paean to the psychedelic youth culture of the ‘60s, an extended ‘high observed and conveyed by Taylor with a Mozartean wit… and though the ensemble includes pairings of woman with woman and man with man alluding to the burgeoning sexual freedoms of the period, there’s no hard sell here, just frisky affection.” – Alan M. Kriegsman, Washington Post

In Dream Girls (2002), Mr. Taylor uses Barbershop Quartet songs of the Buffalo Bills and a gaggle of dream girls (in reality, nightmare women) from the Wild West to lampoon both the ladies and their male suitors. “So politically incorrect in so many directions it almost seems to be tweaking earnest downtown dance, but spinning out with such complete mastery of the turn-of the-century vernacular – high vaudeville and low burlesque – it’s bliss” – Laura Jacobs, The New Criterion

THE GREAT WAR POET: SUNSET AND BELOVED RENEGADE
Mr. Taylor has often dealt with war, the power brokers who cause them, those who must fight them and the sweethearts left in their wake, in such celebrated works as Company B and Banquet of Vultures. This season presents the earliest of those works and the most recent.

Sunset (1983) – to music by Elgar bridged by recordings of plaintive loon calls – is a poignant look at camaraderie among soldiers and relationships that are changed forever. “Taylor’s deeply moving meditation on war, on men with women, on men with men, on loss, on memory is one of the few great dance works of the past quarter-century…Delicately presented, achingly sad…I’m always startled to meet people who aren’t moved to tears by it.” – Robert Gottlieb, New York Observer

Beloved Renegade (2008), set to Poulenc’s choral “Gloria,” was inspired by the life and work of 19th Century American writer Walt Whitman, who revered the body and soul as one and who famously loved all with equal ardor. Scenes from the life of a poet include tending to the afflicted just as Whitman nursed wounded soldiers during the Civil War. After his own mortality is foretold, the poet bids poignant farewell to those who love him, and is embraced by a benevolent feminine spirit with “the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.”  “The best new choreography I saw in 2008. Deeply moving… a work of philosophic as well as dramatic power… A perfect idea: Mr. Taylor, in a few works (Sunset, above all) ranks among the great war poets… One of the great achievements of Mr. Taylor’s long career and one of the most eloquently textured feats of his singular imagination.” – Alastair Macaulay, New York Times

FOUR SOCIETIES: RUNES, SYZYGY, SPINDRIFT, PIAZZOLLA CALDERA
Mr. Taylor has always displayed a keen interest in the interaction among members of a society – whether they be insect or humans, primitives or contemporary men and women.

In Runes (1975), set to a spiky commissioned score, he looks at tribal rites of what may be a primitive community. “A major creation… The enormous pathos that arises in the final moments of [this striking heroic poem], when all the elements of the piece are combined and restated and still the momentum leaps ahead – this pathos comes from the unstoppable energy of what Taylor has set in motion.” – Arlene Croce, The New Yorker

In Syzygy (1987), with its urgent score by Mr. Taylor’s longtime music director, Donald York, dancers hurtle across the stage like so many celestial bodies orbiting and eclipsing each other. “Full of utterly brilliant and seemingly disconnected shards of choreography. A full-throttle exercise in physicality, loose-limbed and speedy… It simply continues to increase its velocity, its sense of elfin delight, as the dance goes by. Leaves the audience gasping for more.” – Barry Johnson, The Oregonian

In Spindrift (1993) set to Schoenberg’s version of a Handel Concerto Grosso, an outsider is first resisted by, and then accepted into, a community, demonstrating Donne’s observation that "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main...." “A quietly resounding success. Sensuously but deliberately understated… and suffused with the very lyricism (a gift Taylor enjoys with Balanchine and precious few others…) which had always marked him out like some special child of the gods.” – Clive Barnes, New York Post

Piazzolla Caldera (1997) uses music by one of Tango’s greatest composers, Astor Piazzolla, to illuminate the culture of the predatory dance that originated in the brothels of Buenos Aires at the turn of the 20th Century. In a dimly lit dive, working class men and women confront each other in sizzling sexual duets and trios: men with women, men with men and women with women. A woman who has searched desperately for a partner but failed to find one, collapses – as if mortally wounded by a night without passion. “Stunning. Taylor looks at the attitudes implicit in the tango as sexual game, as social identity -- and reshapes them. The couplings, the pursuits and provocations, find the essence of a tango culture without descending into mimicry. The dance seethes and flares with sexuality and...develops a huge erotic charge. One of Taylor's most astonishing (even for him) creations.” – Clement Crisp, Financial Times