PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY

REVIEW By CELIA IPIOTIS

Earlier this year at the 92Y, the Paul Taylor Dance Company reached back into its archives to reframe the Taylor oeuvre during the 92Y 150th anniversary festivities. From the 1950’s, Paul Taylor’s experimentations with pedestrian movement presaged the famed postmodern Judson Dance Theater. More about content than performance, one of the most infamous works, Seven New Dances performed in 1957 at the 92 Street Y (now the 92Y) garnered a legendary review by Louis Horst in The Dance Observer Journal: Four inches of blank space.

Taylor and Toby Glanternick , audaciously planted themselves on the stage, not moving, for the duration of John Cage’s composition 4′ 33′ (4 minutes and 33 seconds) of silence. Damian Woetzel and Alicia Graf gamely assumed the roles of the two still figures: One standing, one reclining sideways.

Compounding the pleasure of seeing this historic work was actor Alan Cumming relaying excerpts from Taylor’s autobiography Private Domain describing his feelings during the making of Seven New Dances and the subsequent aftershocks.

It would be wonderful to keep Cumming (totally unlikely, although they could produce an audio recording) as the narrator of Taylor’s works for all of the company’s performances because these stories offer crucial insight into Taylor’s mindset.

Esplanade (1975), a whirlwind of motion exemplified by the women’s fearless runs and jumps into men’s waiting arms pointed to Taylor’s subsequent love affair with athletically bold, musical choreography.

The Taylor Company opened even more historic veins at the Joyce Theater with a collection of Taylor’s dances produced between1965 and 1978. Performed on a stage smaller than the company’s usual City Center or Lincoln Center Theater locations, the more intimate setting re-framed many of Taylor’s early works drawn together in a program called Extreme Taylor.

Of all the works presented in Program A, Big Bertha retains its original shock and awe. Choreographed in 1970, Taylor tackles the harrowing underside of a family’s descent into sexual and physical abuse. Progressively darker and darker, Big Bertha finds a mother, father and daughter at the fairgrounds. 

Ultimately seduced by the oversized, garishly dressed and made-up mechanical doll (convincingly performed by Christina Lynch Markham in her final company performance), every time Big Bertha is given a coin, she cranks up into a slightly spasmodic, robotic dance. With each coin, Bertha becomes more threatening and the family’s interactions disintegrate. 

Proving Anna Sokolow’s conviction that dance is as potent and expressive a medium as theater, Big Bertha’s exquisite, compact design, and psychological daring  remains unnerving.

The collection of works reference different aspects of Taylor’s choreographic mind, from Private Domain’s (1969) abstracted views of dancers appearing and disappearing behind a series of panels, to Duet’s (1969)  frolicking warmth and Airs’ (1978) flowing, balletic form tweaked by gymnastic asides.

Moving with vigor into the next epoch, The Paul Taylor Dance Company is unabashedly embracing Taylor’s bold, witty, romantic, satiric, inscrutable, sometimes dubious, controversial and brilliant legacy while stepping valiantly into the future.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Celia Ipiotis