EXTREME TAYLOR

Extreme Taylor, hosted at The Joyce Theater showcased the Paul Taylor Dance Company’s most recently curated evening-length program, a tribute to seven seminal works spanning Paul Taylor’s illustrious 64-year career in crafting modern dance. The retrospective featured pieces from 1964-1988, split between two programs. Program A
included Private Domain (1969), Duet (1964), Big Bertha (1970), and Airs (1978), while Program B brought “Runes” (1975), “Post Meridian” (1965), and Brandenburgs (1988) back to life.

Runes, opening Program B, has been classified as “hauntingly beautiful.” The lone scenery, illuminated and traversing the background is a full moon, encouraging the illusion of the passing of time in this ritualistic, athletically ravenous piece. Lifts throughout defy dance partnering, bodies instead becoming extensions of the other. Wednesday night, New York was thunderstorm-stricken, though the sun had shone before the performance. Audience members were aware of the downpour by the middle of Runes, due to a profound hush. Each piano key struck, each motion’s abruptness, the follow-through of dancers’ hands, joined by a breath or two of silence— accentuated by the rain that lingered.

Following Runes, the dancers’ bodies, meticulously embodying the score, went from daunting, to spritely in Post Meridian all within the span of a 15 minute intermission. The stoicism of expression was present, but the vocabulary was no longer animalistic, it was comedic! It was the dancers impeccable dedication to the technique that allowed them to embody the quirks of the music, the eccentricity of the costuming, the avant-garde daring of the movement, without breaking their steadfast expression, even where play was invited. In early Taylor works, it was execution over emotion. It’s within this clarity and precision that emotional transcription and translation becomes unnecessary.

As explained by Carolyn Adams, Director of Education and Taylor alumna, in a post-show talk back, oftentimes the need to discern meaning from work is anxiety provoking for an audience. But Taylor approached work trusting the audience to make it become what they needed it to. It is the openness of the mind, and release of judgment, that allows for the dancing to do its job, where dancers and audience members can meet as collaborators creating a visceral experience.

The evening’s culmination, Brandenburgs, a joyous work that bridged Taylor’s classical beginnings with a contemporary spirit, invited a shift in digestibility. Overheard in audience conversation, executive Director John Tomlinson eloquently explained the abstraction and curiosity of Taylor works, and how special Extreme Taylor is in its dedication to showing dance audiences dance as Paul Taylor saw it. By bringing an all-Taylor show back to life, for the first time in a decade, Taylor fans and new fans alike are able to witness the brilliance and growth of a great artist. It is through the resurrection of older pieces, performed by newer dancers, that the blueprint is revealed.

In dance culture today, arguably a huge testament to the power of dancers is how far they can push their bodies. Looking back into an earlier American modern era, as Extreme Taylor invites the audience to do, the power comes instead from the control. And where this control could be held: in mind, like in Post Meridian; in structure and shape, like in Runes; in athleticism, like in Brandenburgs, The leg isn’t unfathomably extended, the foot outrageously pointed, the expression isn’t so profound that feeling is immediately perceived. The evidence of power comes from the immense control that every one of Paul Taylor’s dancers, from
1954-2024, has over the range of their body and spirit.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY –Emma Edy Morris