Paul Taylor Dance Company

Angela Kane: I first read Clive Barnes’s reviews as a dance student in England in the 1970s, but in the last years I’ve been reading a range of his writing on Paul’s work for a forthcoming book of mine. Absolutely invaluable – particularly for getting a real picture of some of the early dances that have yet to be revived. Clive said he met Paul before he saw him dance. I’d like to tease him out on those first impressions of Paul Taylor. Clive Barnes: I’m not sure if I was introduced to him by Edwin Denby or Lincoln Kirstein. I think it was probably 1963. I went to a rehearsal of the Company, and he was very, very courteous, very sweet. He was this tall, kind of gangly young man. Well he wasn’t that young – he was my age or a bit younger. But he was terribly amiable. Very “un-artist” like, very agreeable. At that time he probably only had about 10 or 11 dancers. They were rehearsing to Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” I thought ‘Well, he’s going to do a "Rite of Spring." He did a "Rite of Spring" about 20 years later, but this dance turned out to be Scudorama, which he had rehearsed to “Rite of Spring” and then had someone write music to the same rhythms. I got a valuable lesson into his work methods and the way he “felt” music. And it was fascinating to talk to him. Kirstein was a great fan of his, an enormous fan. So was Edwin Denby, who was one of his first critical advocates. I don’t quite remember when I saw the Taylor Company. It must have been 1964 when he came to Europe. I think I saw him first in Spoleto, when he did The Red Room. I actually had the pleasure of introducing him to Nureyev in Spoleto; they later collaborated. Then he came to Sadler’s Wells and had a great success. It was a time in England when we knew absolutely nothing whatsoever about modern dance; it was ballet all the way. Except for Kurt Jooss and The Green Table – German expressionism – although Kurt Jooss had fled the Nazis and his company, Ballet Jooss, had become virtually an English company. We were very suspicious of modern dance. In fact, if you read Ninette de Valois’ first book, Invitation to the Dance, you read an absolutely damning criticism of Doris Humphrey’s With My Red Fires. Not that she had ever seen the work; that didn’t stop her. It was an absolutely damning criticism. I’ve often thought that’s really the way to go: it makes things so much simpler to criticize if you haven’t actually seen it! We had seen Martha Graham, of course, but we had not seen Merce – and then we were immersed in Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and Alvin Ailey at more or less the same time. It was a wonderful time for the English to see modern dance. We saw more of Taylor and Cunningham in particular than anyone could have seen in New York. Cunningham played five weeks in London and if you put all of the time they played in New York end to end they wouldn’t have played five weeks, because they only played two or three days at a time. It was a wonderful experience. And the experience of getting acquainted with Taylor’s first company was absolutely wonderful.

AK: In 1964 they did a three-week season at the Shaftsbury. Prior to that they had performed Aureole as part of the Royal Academy of Dancing Gala. Nureyev saw Paul’s work in the summer of ’64 and was blown away by it. Paul talks about watching Nureyev trying to learn Paul’s solo in Aureole from the wings in Spoleto. And I think it was he who persuaded Margot Fonteyn, who was the President of the Royal Academy of Dance at that time, to include the Taylor Company in this ballet gala. Paul talks about how they were the only dancers in bare feet. They were doing very classical pointe shoes and tutu pieces, and there was Aureole. Could you say something about Paul in Aureole in those early days? CB: Taylor was a dancer of the most incredible quality. He had a kind of movement that I can only describe as kind of shy. It’s like his personality; you know how when he comes on to take a bow, he kind of shambles on and he has this wide grin. And in a way, that’s how he danced. There was a kind of innate modesty; incredible technique. You can see from the solos he did for himself in Aureole, better than anything else, that he was a dancer of incredible skill right from the beginning. He started not all that young. He was a champion swimmer when he started. That seemed to have stood him in good stead. His dancing had this angular, loping, very off-beat quality. You can see it in works like Scudorama and Orbs. Very often he was the outsider, standing away, watching. This is particularly true in Scudorama where he was literally a watcher, a kind of presenter of everything that was bad with America. Scudorama was just about the nastiest – everything at that time had “orama” at the ending – in Paul’s view this was a disaster and that’s what he was getting at in Scudorama. But his presence was quite remarkable – wonderful elevation, an ability to move from the ground up without any visible preparation. It was nothing of the classic dancer’s plié: he was just – Boop! You can see what Taylor was like as a dancer by looking at his present Company. He was the essence of the way his Company now performs.

AK: I came across a review that was written as early as 1967-68 called “The Cold War in Modern Dance.” You made a really good distinction between Cunningham and Taylor. You described Paul as rather “Apollonian” and Cunningham as “Dionysian.” CB: I think most dancers can generally be bracketed under those two items. You can say that Rudolph Nureyev was “Dionysian” and Mikhail Baryshnikov or Erik Bruhn, as a better example, was “Apollonian.” [Editor’s note: Mr. Barnes later explained, “‘Apollonian’ is something very noble, very gracious, while ‘Dionysian’ is more diabolical. They represent a kind of Janus-faced aspect of art. ‘Apolonian’: dignity. ‘Dionysian’: naughty but nice.”] I think there is a very big difference between the two. When they started, Taylor danced with Cunningham, and they were both at different times members of Martha Graham’s company, so there was the basic Graham technique behind so much of what they did. Cunningham was more towards the classical in his technique and more towards the avant garde; he became an equal partner with John Cage. I never saw it but the famous first Taylor concert – Seven New Dances – showed Taylor perhaps much more in the Cunningham camp than he would later be. They soon diverged as the two leaders in modern dance, which they still are. It’s amazing – they’re still there more or less in exactly the same position as they were 50 years ago.

AK: You have written across a range of publications and across the arts, and that’s what makes you particularly unique in looking at Paul’s work – you come from a solid background in music, opera, Broadway theater and film. And it’s that range you also see in Paul’s work. CB: I think it’s a range that most people bring to Paul’s work. This audience here could just as well be at a play or an opera; most people have a range of interests. And audience members have a much wider scope than most dance critics.

AK: In 1982 you said this about Paul’s musicality: “Few, if any, choreographers are so adept at what might be called ‘dance orchestration’ – that perfect blending of dance with music so that the dance not merely reflects the music’s moods and matches its rhythms but actually mirrors its very structure.” Your analysis of Paul’s musicality goes far deeper than you would get from a lot of critics. CB: I don’t know that that’s true but it’s nice of you to say so. What’s interesting about his musicality is that it’s absolutely innate. He doesn’t hit the nail on the head all the time; he doesn’t feel it’s necessary to mirror every beat in the music. He goes beyond the simplistics of the music and gets to the heart of it. I was reading something I wrote about the Brahms piece – Equinox. With every piece of music, whether it’s modern or pop or the very best “trashy” music, Paul somehow seems to channel the composer in a most remarkable way. If you look at the choreography he does to Bach, it’s very different from the choreography he did to Wagner in Roses. He seems to take every composer on his own terms, which is unusual. Most choreographers want to take composers on their terms. It’s a pity that he’s collaborated so rarely with living composers; I think that has been a great loss to our dance community. It’s expensive and difficult to work with living composers but it would have been marvelous to have done that. Just look at today’s program and the various types of music, from George Crumb to Astor Piazzolla. I’ve always had slightly mixed feelings about Piazzolla Caldera but the way he absorbs the tango style and its theatrical possibilities is something we hardly ever knew about. Some of it is slightly satirical, but he grabs the music to his heart and you understand the spirit of the tango much better than you would in a lot of “authentic” tango shows. He seems to have wrought the “caldera” around the tango.

AK: What about the range of his theatricality? CB: There is a great theatricality about Paul. He obviously could have made a lot of money on Broadway if he’d wanted to. He’s never done a Broadway show. He, Twyla Tharp and Jerry Robbins all had a theatricality that would have adapted to Broadway very easily. He feels the theater; he breathes the air of the theater as if it were oxygen. In some of his prominent works like From Sea to Shining Sea he had a terrific theatricality. And he was very apt to use subject matter that was hardly usual for dance. The range of his work is so remarkable. It’s a very brave choreographer who can cheerfully put on a program entirely of his own works. Robbins tried it once but it didn’t really work. Balanchine never tried it. Graham, of course. Modern dance choreographers almost always start as dancers and they get a few friends around them and before they know where they are, they’ve got a company. When modern dancers have to give up, it’s a very tricky moment for them. The interesting thing about Taylor when he gave up – he was absolutely convinced that not only was he finished as a dancer, he thought he was finished as a choreographer. Actually, what happened was he found a completely new life as a choreographer and in fact if you look at his major works, you’ll probably find that he’d done more important work since he gave up dancing than he did before. Certainly both he and Cunningham found a new life when they gave up dancing.

AK: One of your headlines from the late ‘70s was, “Taylor on a Creative Binge,” because of the huge amount of work that poured out when he stopped dancing, and one of the first works he created immediately after he retired from the stage was Esplanade. CB: A most incredible work. Apart from Aureole – perhaps even more than Aureole – Esplanade is the proto-Taylor work. That would be most people’s choice, I suspect.

AK: In 1977 you wrote, “There’s black humor that runs crooked straight down Mr. Taylor’s artistic backbone. It’s ghoulish, misanthropic, and yet somehow funny; occasionally it’s funny peculiar, and often, funny uncomfortable.” One of today’s pieces, Fiends Angelical, fits that latter description… CB: Funny ballets are very rare, because once you’ve slipped on the banana skin there isn’t too much to say, and you can’t keep on slipping on banana skins; you run out of bananas. Where I think Taylor is funny is that he takes something like the hoochie-koochie dance and makes it objective. He takes the subjectivity out of so much of the scenes, stands aside and says, Look at this. He has this wonderful sense of humor. People will be standing on line and one person will move from the front to the back and you say, yes, that’s how people behave and yet it’s really funny when Paul puts it into a ballet. A ballet he didn’t create – he only edited Funny Papers – shows so much what Paul finds funny. The dancers were asked to do little dances that he would assemble and edit, and because they all strived to do something that he would find funny, it provides a wonderful commentary on his humor. Every season nowadays, at least half the works will not have been seen for 10 or 15 years; they’re trying to keep as much in revolving repertory as possible so the Taylor heritage survives. So that someone will be sitting on this stage talking about Taylor in 50 years, which is no small feat in dance; you have to work at it. It’s interesting that these last few seasons he has been using almost a completely different repertory. There are a few standards like Esplanade and Arden Court, but most of the works being done haven’t been done for some seasons, so you have to keep on coming back to Taylor. The number of works done in any one season is remarkable. I can’t imagine their rehearsal schedule; it must be horrendous.

AK: In our last few minutes, has anybody got a question? Audience member: How much have we lost as fewer and fewer choreographers are able to use live music? CB: I think a great deal is lost with the inability of companies to use live music. It’s not so much works that are being lost, it’s the reality of the work. The reality of a work that has live music compared to that of a work that has canned music is infinitely different. It’s the difference of a dancer knowing what the music is going to do and a dancer having just a slight doubt. And when a dancer changes something the conductor, who is the conduit between the orchestra and the stage, can change slightly during a performance. Ballet dancers who are accustomed to dancing to live music find it extraordinarily difficult to dance to canned music. An enormous amount is lost, but it’s lost on a day-to-day basis rather than year to year.

AK: The question is a comparison between Paul Taylor’s response to music and that of George Balanchine. CB: It’s a good question. I think there is a great similarity between the two. Neither slavishly follows the music and certainly neither ignores it to any extent at all. Balanchine and Taylor – and most major choreographers – try to go for the jugular of the music, they try to get to the heart of it and make the music evident on the stage to some extent. Dance is not just music visualization, it’s much more than that, but the link between music and dance that you see in Balanchine, Taylor and most major choreographers is the thing that separates the okay choreographers from the great ones.

AK: Would you comment further on Paul’s background as a swimmer before he came to dance. CB: As a matter of fact, classical dancers are encouraged not to swim. My wife was a member of the Royal Ballet and Ninette de Valois was always very hot on them not to ride horses, ski or swim – there was very little they could do but walk. Paul was a fine athlete – some people would say he was a pre-Olympian athlete. Many modern dancers, particularly male dancers, go to modern dance comparatively late. In classical dance a male dancer should have begun training by eight or nine; with modern dance, where you’re not dependent on a perfect turnout and things like that, if you are truly athletic you can take it up comparatively late in life. So his background as an athlete is the thing that made it possible for him to dance, which he took up comparatively late.

AK: Thank you so much, Clive.