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Reviews

Taylor Light and Dark

by Leigh Witchel
copyright © 2001 by Leigh Witchel
Summer 2001

Paul Taylor’s hallmark as a choreographer is his understanding of the duality and polarity of both art and life. Dark and Light, Taylor’s repertory has always been programmed to acknowledge both. If there are two premieres in a season, chances are one will be dark, the other light, but he also gives us dances that are light in darkness or darkness in light.

Fiends Angelical and Dandelion Wine got their New York premieres at the company’s City Center season in February and March. If you wish to box them, the former is dark and the latter is light, but as the name implies, Fiends Angelical is one of the fascinating works in Taylor’s canon that explores not only the polarity, but the murky territory between light and dark.

The work is set to George Crumb’s Black Angels, a fascinating score with a similar contradiction in titling; a reminder of the fact that Lucifer was a fallen angel often painted with a black face. People have been mystified by the inspiration of the costumes and décor by Santo Loquasto, seeing them as relating to African culture or the backdrop as looking like a tombstone carving. I saw them as central Asian, from the Aryan culture that gave rise to those of Persia and India. The costumes reminded me of Indian prints, the backdrop of batik or stone carving. If not what Loquasto or Taylor intended, it fits the worldview of the piece because of the way that Indian culture regards the duality of life as a partnership. Creation lives with Destruction, Darkness with Light. The relationship is equivocal, but they are necessary partners, not sworn enemies. Silvia Nevjinsky’s lead priestess figure wears a flowing print dress and a headdress with horns and braids, the unisex ensemble wears unitards that seem wrapped with bands of printed fabric and curly headpieces that have been changed slightly since their premiere. At first they were black, but that might easily have provoked unpleasant racial overtones. They are now speckled red and black, but still somehow manage to resemble a stalk of broccoli.

The piece opens with a screech and chattering in hot white light. A skittering crowd rushes out with dancers alternately falling out of it to the floor. This leads to an antic trio with leaps off the floor for Orion Duckstein, Annmaria Mazzini, and Michael Trusnovec. A trio rolls on, we think perhaps to dance, but only to disgorge Kristi Egtvedt for a solo as the rest of the group rolls and slouches out. A duet for Patrick Corbin and Lisa Viola has hints of comedy in its pompous posing. The comedy becomes overt as they try to strangle each other in slow motion and fall to the floor in a pile. As silly as it seems, it also recalls the Thugee cult, Hindu devotees who would strangle their victims in the name of Kali, a vicious devouring god, yet who offered her worshippers endless peace. Nevjinsky returns to make an incantation over their bodies; this mythic solo is done to a haunting and tortured distortion of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. The group comes in, separated by sex and the score becomes shouts, buzzing and counting. The two dancers are still in a pile. Nevjinsky draws yards of red tubing from them, which the others manipulate into a pentacle, a moment that struck me as obvious, and the only false step in the work. The group leaves, and Corbin and Viola reanimate for a long duet. The group reenters, pushing and pulling, and Nevjinsky has a solo wracked with spasms. The central woman’s dance of doubt or self-loathing is something we’ve seen before in Taylor; the solo has links to Miss Liberty in Danbury Mix or even the lone figure from the adagio in Esplanade. A group dance of shuffling and exchanging places with flapping arms that is reminiscent of Robbins’ Opus 19 surprises one as being the ending. Fiends Angelical recalls 1998’s The Word, also a dance of a cult-like mob. Both also contained a central, equivocal female figure, but in The Word, she’s not a leader or a priestess, but a catalyst that reminds one of some sort of minor reptilian deity. In both cases, what Taylor is driving at cannot be boiled down to a sentence.

Dandelion Wine, to a violin concerto by Pietro Locatelli, begins with what seems like an invocation for Richard Chen See in a vibrant yellow costume. Loquasto is the house designer for Taylor and he’s made an interesting choice as he has singled Chen See out by color, but Taylor avoided making him pivotal or central in the evenly matched pairings of the cast of four couples. A complete contrast from Fiends Angelical, this sunny work seems to be about etiquette and manners as it displays most of the newest company members to us. Egtvedt enters, then Robert Kleinen-dorst, inviting them to dance. Kleinendorst is paired with Trusnovec in this dance, and it’s an interesting choice. Contrary to stereotype, reddish-blond Trusnovec is a dancer who looks dark even in light roles; dark-haired Kleinendorst is naturally sunny. Julie Tice comes in beaming, she is Taylor’s new “runt”; what he has called the short women in his company who form a venerable lineage.

After a trio for Chen See, Egtvedt and Mazzini, Tice dances a solo and Duckstein and Amy Young enter in a duet. Tice observes them calmly as if an outsider, but then fascinatingly breaks into the duet and participates without conflict almost like a beloved cousin, ending leaning affectionately against Duckstein’s knee as Young is held aloft. The finale ends with a nod to both La Sonnambula and The Concert; an entanglement of bodies, played quite seriously and garnering laughs. It becomes the Gordian Knot Untied as the dancers weave out of it into a line and bow.

Dandelion Wine is a placid and charming work, well-crafted but in this season not as interesting as Fiends Angelical. I think the reason for this may not lie in the choreography, but the current state of the company; all the dark works look better than the light ones. Taylor not only choreographs light and dark works, he has light and dark dancers. Right now, his most compelling dancers moving up in seniority (Nevjinsky) or newer (Trusnovec) are dark. Trusnovec is an interesting case; he’s very fine in the darker works. He’s also wonderful in Arabesque, a lyric work that demands a dark intensity but in the really light works like Dandelion Wine, Cascade or Esplanade, he’s out of his element, trying to fit in and unable to. Even his physiognomy fails him; when the work is pastoral, a look becomes a leer and his smile looks like a smirk. It’s just the wrong landscape for him at this point. Even so, out of the performers and dances in the season, it was Trusnovec’s best performances (and Arabesque and Fiends Angelical) that stayed with one the longest.

Esplanade was the closing dance at the opening night gala that also included Arden Court and Fiends Angelical; it was our only chance to see these older works. Arden Court, now celebrating its twentieth anniversary season, survived better than Esplanade, from 1975. The dark sections still work (Heather Berest did a good job in Bettie de Jong’s role in the adagio) but the present cast isn’t sure what to do with the light allegros. They haven’t found it in themselves to dance them with equanimity, so they act and smile and wink and look like blissed-out cultists instead of innocents at play. The subtext may be dated, but it was already dated by the time it was choreographed, and the choreography isn’t. If dancers can contextualize Swan Lake or Giselle, they can do it for Esplanade. Things improved in the final movements; the ballet survives on Taylor’s musicality, which was the bedrock of the entire season. Esplanade intersects with Concerto Barocco in musical choices in the final two movements. It’s fascinating to see what Taylor’s listening to as opposed to Balanchine. There was a section in the adagio of the double violin concerto where one sensed that Balanchine had choreographed to one violin’s melodic line, but Taylor to the other’s.

At the gala performance, Arden Court was also as much about Taylor’s musicality as a gentle celebration of virility. There’s a continued motif in the work of contrasting of a dancer moving allegro against one moving adagio. He’s listened to the Boyce symphonies and uses a dancer as continuo to make variations on a ground. It was also our first chance to view the company. Orion Duckstein has inherited Elie Chaib’s part in Arden Court from Andrew Asnes. Duckstein looks uncannily like Taylor, tall, gaunt and lanky with a dark hair and a long, thin face so the part now looks like it’s supposed to be for a Taylor surrogate this could be coincidence.

Cascade, danced to Glenn Gould’s wonderful recordings of Bach keyboard concertos, returned from the previous season. After a bouncy dance to the opening Allegro, there is a Largo that concentrates on torsion and touch. It is a double duet with gentle support of partners pulling off balance and movements of hand to hand or hand to shoulder. Viola dances a solo to the Largo from Concerto No. 5 that is very sophisticated musically, as if it were an extra melodic line. A leaping quintet follows and then a duet danced by Corbin and Maureen Mansfield that is the heart of the work. I was unable to reconcile the ornate dark embroidered costumes with the music or choreography until I saw Mansfield. Her Holbein looks made me see them as not originating with a Gypsy or Hungarian inspiration, but with the oak browns and exposed timbering of Germany and the ornate decoration of the German Baroque period of the music’s composition.

With Cascade, Taylor’s made a pure abstract music visualization like Mercuric Tidings. Like Mercuric Tidings, it’s strangely lacking in vitality. Taylor’s craft and musicality functions at such a high level that one can sense when impetus of composition seems dutiful rather than driven. At that level, you can tell when a genius is giving you their inspiration, or merely their expertise. At least, at these performances. On first viewing, Fiends Angelical seemed to be disjointed and a good work by a great choreographer. On the second it gained force and clarity and gelled into something of import. Cascade may have been more perfectly formed, but one could sense in that performance the need to create Fiends Angelical, and merely in that, it seems the better work. Taylor has stated about Cascade that it is an exercise in symmetry. Even so, it feels more like an assignment than an intellectual quest. The urgency of creative impulse even with opacity of meaning in Fiends Angelical feels more vital than Cascade’s clarity and simplicity of meaning and intellectual opacity. And yet, that could reside entirely in performance.

Along with Cascade the two other nearly new pieces were performed. Arabesque is delicious and Oh, You Kid! is about as jaw dropping as any dance that has a number with happy high-kicking folks in Klan hoods would be. Arabesque refers to the Debussy music that accompanies it, to the inspiration for the costumes, to everything but the dance position; there is only one arabesque in the entire work. It opens with four men and one woman (Nevjinsky). She’s borne aloft and then three other women rush on to form even couplings. The work continues, fauve and fleet with dancers scampering on and off to the pizzicato accompaniment of the scherzo from the composer’s string quartet. Towards the end of the movement, Nevjinsky comes up behind Trusnovec and covers his eyes, but it’s as if she hid a noxious ointment in her palms, he’s blinded and stumbles to the back of the stage, feeling his way in front of him. The effects wear off in time for him to join a male quartet to the Reverie as the women recline like odalisques. Berest skips on to the Arabesque #2 along and it continues as a dance for smaller groups. The stage darkens and the tone changes to a solo for Nevjinsky to Syrinx that is more feral than fauve. The scherzo reprises and the ballet repeats—almost. Everything is somehow harsher and faster even though it’s to the same music. This time it’s Trusnovec who “blinds” Nevjinsky and the men pose reclining as the piece ends. Besides an excellent performance by the entire cast, the work has a wonderful solidity of conception and atmosphere, a dark lyricism that is illuminated from within.

Taylor has done vaudeville revues like Oh, You Kid! before, and he’s thrown monkey wrenches in them just so we don’t think he’s getting soft on us. The piece opens on the boardwalk with a dance for five couples in bathing suits in black, beige and white. A waltz follows for a “courtin’ time” duet for Trusnovec and Nevjinsky, and then Some Jazz Blues, with Egtvedt in a black veil plopped on a chair and miserable while three women tumble her about. When Berest flounces in and coquettishly adjusts the ribbons holding her Klan hood, you simply don’t know what to do. When four more hooded men enter, you’re even more befuddled. I’ve decided not to assign any meaning to the fact that the only black member of the cast isn’t in that section (two of the men under the hoods are Asian). Danced with incredible high spirits, I can only explain it as being like the Klan joke with Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles; a faux pas so massive and intentional you ascribe it to naughtiness. After stupefied clapping from the audience, Taylor moves right into An Operatic Nightmare. Every silent movie stereotype from the damsel in distress and mustachio’d villain to the milksop suitor and his harridan fiancée are thrown at us. Viola has a show stopping turn to That Hindu Rag in a hilariously unerotic Exotic Dance. Creaky and autistic, it owes to her performance in Offenbach Overtures and to Colleen the Vegetable Child from Saturday Night Live. Viola is unafraid to go way over the top and has a unique role in the company as a comedienne. What’s as nice is to watch her drop it all to participate in the finale as a beautiful dancer, and only Taylor could have provided as sweet an ending to this grab bag of a dance.

Moving backwards in time, Eventide and Piazzolla Caldera (both from 1997) were in repertory. Ted Thomas took on Asnes’ role in Eventide and put an interesting spin on it; he was more tender in his sensuality. Piazzolla Caldera got a crackling performance. It’s a tango work, and one that should look trite by the third viewing, but grows more interesting with each viewing instead. If anything, the work is tauter than it was in its first season. Taylor’s drunken duet for Trusnovec and Chen See that morphs into a quartet with Nevjinsky and Thomas was even more richly contradictory in sexual impulse than on previous viewing. Like all tangos, the movement leads with the pelvis. Fascinating how many ways that leading with the pelvis can be done. Trusnovec does it insinuatingly, like a snake. Thomas looks addicted, he isn’t leading with his pelvis, it’s leading him. Most subversively, Corbin dropped the weight in his body not for sexual gravity but to indicate pure thuggishness. He dances brusquely and brilliantly in his duet with Viola and the rest of the work.

Funny Papers is a goofy work from 1994 that’s a collaboration between Taylor and company members of the time. Taylor took individual sequences from already made dances of that period and “amended and combined” them; one can sense his hand guiding it even though the vocabulary (including the “Roger Rabbit”) is of a vernacular that he would never use. It’s a silly romp to novelty tunes, most hideously a version of I am Woman that sounds like it was sung by Dame Edna. The costumes, in newsprint black and white, are divided front to back (one color on one side for the women, the other for the men) seem plain until the dancers are set turning, then they become an addition to the choreography. The anarchic ending (to Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On the Bedpost Overnight) symbolizes the group effort, everyone did their favorite step as the curtain came down.

A Musical Offering (1986) was once subtitled “A Requiem for Gentle Primates” and is now just described as a requiem. The Stone Age costumes and Les Noces-like archaisms set the tone for the work, with the long, demanding solo originally done by Kate Johnson now done by Mansfield. Like Esplanade, it intersects with Balanchine’s musical choices (Taylor uses Webern’s orchestration of the Ricercata that Balanchine used as the finale to Episodes, the ballet where Taylor guested with the NYCB in a solo made for him by Balanchine.) Where Taylor gives us a requiem, Balanchine gave us a benediction.

The company has had turnover and we’ve lost some beloved faces, but Taylor hasn’t altered the concept of the company. He replaces types with types, and it hasn’t become a ballet company like many other modern companies. Now in his fourth decade of creating dances, Taylor is the senior American master choreographer after Cunningham. Unlike Balanchine or Graham, because he wasn’t the first on the landscape it’s easy to assign his position to age and endurance; Taylor’s direct approach as a choreographer makes him easy to underestimate. One almost feels foolish when confronted with just how good his work is. His sophisticated craftsmanship and musicality are what makes him manage popular without pop.