Paul Taylor Dance Company

TAYLOR DISCUSSES HIS WORKS AND PROCESS

Paul Taylor was interviewed on three different occasions over the past few years by his biographer, Suzanne Carbonneau, as part of the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process Series. Below are his thoughts on some of the dances in the 2010-11 repertoire, culled from those discussions.

SC: You’ve covered every decade [of the 20th Century] in some form or other in your choreography. In Black Tuesday we’re in the Depression. Did you have to do any research to do this work?
PT: No, I grew up in the Depression so the subject came easy to me. I didn’t notice any struggling in my family, but it was hard financially. So much from the entertainment industry then was escapism; people wanted to forget their troubles for a while. And the lyrics of the songs we used were really signposts.

SC: You told me you were surprised at the number of happy songs…
PT: Most of them were, although the “anthem” of the Depression, “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime,” is not a happy song. Neither is “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams” – I like that one! The girl in that section of the dance is a streetwalker and she’s seen with two other working girls and their pimp.

SC: She’s mistreated but not down-and-out?
PT: Never!

SC: You said there’s something special about her spinning movement…
PT: Yes, Annmaria, who dances it, is a fantastic spinner, and usually it’s a nicety to come out of a spin neatly. In this particular solo I wanted her to fall out of them several times so there’s an awkward lack of control, and then she pulls herself together. I hoped that would have an emotional content to it.

SC: It’s a really sympathetic look at a person who’s usually ignored or caricatured.
PT: Yeah, we admire her strength. It’s a dance of anger.

SC: We see violence against her, but you stylize it.
PT: Rape on stage needs to be stylized.

SC: You’ve said that you’re a reporter, but we were talking about a New York Times interview with the novelist E.L. Doctorow, who said that novelists are not reporters, they’re fantasists, and you told me you rather like that description.
PT: Yes, it’s true, I’m not really a reporter either, I just like to say that. We all have our own views of things and mine sometimes creep into the pieces.

SC: You wrote in your autobiography that you like “anything that flies, crawls or slithers,” and I think that comes out in Cloven Kingdom, about man’s dual nature.
PT: The dancers are in formal wear and then you see these animal movements. You’ll notice something that looks like overturned beetles trying to get back on their feet. The dancers hold their hands like paws sometimes, and they run with their heels high off the ground and I always thought that looked like hooves.

SC: The “cloven kingdom” is the split in every human being, our highs and lows?
PT: Highs and lows; good and bad; animals and more sophisticated creatures.

SC: This was made shortly after you stopped dancing. Did things change for you as a choreographer when you stopped dancing?
PT: Yeah, the dances got better the minute I left! Until then I had made up movements on my own body and tried to transfer them to other people. We all move differently, and when I set movement directly on the dancers who would be doing the dance that seemed to produce better results.

SC: Company B is the first of your dances to use American popular music. What attracted you to work on this era—World War II?
PT: I’m always trying to open new doors for myself and the dancers and I hadn’t done pop music other than an early piece, 3 Epitaphs, which uses an ancestor of jazz. I just loved the Andrews Sisters – I remembered hearing them on a juke box when I was a little boy during the Second World War. I’ve done several war dances since, the most recent being Banquet of Vultures [and Beloved Renegade]. Company B grew out of the songs. The popular music of the time was mostly upbeat and happy as a release from the worries and the losses of the war. As a reflection of the era there are references to soldiers dying throughout the dance, moving as silhouettes in the back. In the beginning, the people at home are jitterbugging and suddenly there’s a body on the floor – you don’t see how it got there and you don’t see how it disappears – and that’s intended as a hint of what the piece is going to be about.

SC: Maxine Andrews was still alive when you made the dance.
PT: Yes, she was the one to the right when the three of them were lined up. She allowed us to use the music without paying royalties and she came to the dance’s premiere in Washington, DC. She told me stories of when she and her sisters were in Europe entertaining the troops during the war, and once, when they were in the middle of a song, a note was handed to them that said the war was over. They made the announcement to those soldiers. You can imagine the excitement. I got her to come up and take a bow at the premiere, and we jitterbugged a little.

SC: The Bugle Boy solo is a difficult one
PT: It’s a real marathon. I’ve never counted the leaps but there are a lot; he’s hardly on the ground at all. It’s brutally tiring and you really have to be in condition to be able to get through it. The Bugle Boy dies at the end of the solo and then he is seen lying on the floor for the next section. I sometimes have to ask him to keep from breathing so hard so we don’t see his stomach moving up and down. Dancers can be tired but they aren’t supposed to look tired! Women have more endurance, can go on longer; the guys have spurts of higher energy, and can often jump higher. Things balance out.

SC: The “Rum And Coca Cola” song was quite controversial in its day
PT: It’s about GIs going south of the border to be with “working” girls. The female role can be done young and Lolita-ish, as if playing; or like a real sex bomb; or comically like Carmen Miranda. I think Annmaria, who does it now, has found a very nice combination of innocence and experience.

SC: You were familiar with Stokowski’s orchestrations of Bach as a boy.
PT: Yes, I had seen Disney’s “Fantasia.”

SC: You began making Promethean Fire in 2002 – did you have the idea to make a big dance?
PT: Yes, I thought the rep needed something with everybody in it.

SC: Many people have read into the dance a response to the World Trade Center disaster. There’s no topical reference to that in the dance but there are those “holes” for interpretation – what do you think of the topical reference people have made?
PT: I think it’s fine. It can be seen that way, but I hope that years from now when 9/11 isn’t as close to us, the dance will seem more universal.

SC: The relationship between the lead couple is not that of young love that you see in most ballets; it comes after we’ve seen something big happen.
PT: A catastrophe of some kind, and a terrible pile of bodies. Two figures emerge from the pile, a couple who’ve been together for some time and know each other very well, and they’re under pressure – maybe they’ve lost trust in each other. Their relationship becomes strained but then resolves by the end. There are a couple of lifts that are intentionally a little awkward; the relationship has a little friction. They’re not intended to be pretty – but everything doesn’t have to be pretty if you want to say something.

SC: Speaking in Tongues was created in 1988; you received an unsolicited score from composer Matthew Patton…
PT: Yes, and I happened to have been thinking along the lines of a small religious community with a Jimmy Swaggart-type leader. Patton’s music seemed just right.

SC: The characters are archetypes, including the Odd Man Out.
PT: It’s a tight little community led by a religious figure called A Man of the Cloth who’s in total control, and the townspeople are like sheep. There’s one newcomer that the community doesn’t approve of for one reason or other and they kind of steer clear of him. He’s not a bad guy, he’s just different. He and a young girl have established a friendship from a distance, so there’s been one person in the town who’s liked him, but the girl’s mother does not approve and disciplines her. And he’s roughed up by the community. He runs to the Man of the Cloth to beg forgiveness although he’s done nothing wrong.

SC: We see stigmata on his forehead.
PT: That’s a perfect example of the relationship of the mind and the body, where, in a person who has strong religious feelings, their body forms marks in the palm or forehead. They have to be very religious to believe so strongly that their body speaks back.

SC: Arden Court has been a perennial audience favorite since it was made in 1981. You use various movements from symphonies by William Boyce – how do you edit the music you choose as accompaniment for your choreography?
PT: I picture certain things happening during certain times, and sometimes the way a piece is written doesn’t quite do it for me so I paste different pieces together. You have to be aware of things like key changes. I do that by ear because I don’t read music.

SC: This dance was designed by Gene Moore, and you asked him for a backdrop that featured a large rose.
PT: I wanted a huge rose covering the back of the stage. I foolishly hoped that it would make the dancers look like rose beetles. I love bugs. The rose was my mother’s favorite flower, and she was going to see the dance performed.

SC: Gene Moore was famous for designing store windows, first at Bonwit Teller and then at Tiffany’s.
PT: I met him because Bob Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were designing some of these window displays. Gene would hire young struggling artists to work there, and Bob and Jap had just come to New York. They paid me by the hour to help them make the displays. I assumed Gene had wonderful taste because Bob and Jap said so. What did I know about taste? Bob went on to design for my dances. Gene volunteered to design quite a few of them too.

SC: At one point in Arden the men are lined up standing in second position with their arms spread but one man is upside down…
PT: This was a steal from Gene. I’m not above stealing, but only from the best and only if I think I can improve it. Gene did a window display of silverware with a row of spoons, and one of them was upside down.

SC: Like many of your titles, this is a play on words…
PT: “Arden” refers to the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. “Arden” is often mistaken for “ardent,” which seems appropriate. "Court" is both a noun and a verb – men courting women.

SC: I vividly remember that when this dance was first performed it really changed the way we think about male dancing in several ways. You have big men in your Company and they move very quickly, but also really slowly in this dance.
PT: The men’s adagio was unusual at that time, maybe still. You don’t usually see men moving very slowly, it’s usually the women who do, at least in ballet, so this was an experiment. These guys are rather static at times except for changing position. Of course the fact that they don’t have shirts means there’s something to look at. In other sections, it was a little unusual for modern dancers to move this big, this quickly at that time. The dancers love to eat up space; they want to cover as much ground as they can with as much energy as possible, so I took advantage of that.

SC: There’s a risky movement in the duet that reminds me that these dancers are incredibly heroic…
PT: Amy sits on Orion’s hip while he’s doing a penchée arabesque; it’s a real balancing problem. We hope he pulls it off; if he doesn’t, that’s okay, we’re all human.

SC: But your dancers always seem more than human to me…
PT: Dancers in general need to be gods and goddesses.

SC: You have some of the best dancers in the world.
PT: You’re telling me! I wish you all knew them as well as I do. They’re so sweet-natured, smart, brave, patient with me, good sports and quick to learn. They’re just wonderful. But their touring life is tough, let me tell you. I get to see them dance all the time. I’m the luckiest guy in the world.