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Alexandra Tomalonis
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Paul Taylor, Still Out on the Edge

Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to The Washington Post
October 9, 2000; Page C5

Paul Taylor has as deft a craft as anyone making dances today, but it's his imagination--as quirky and wondering and infinite as any child's--that makes watching his works such fun. At 70, he's still an explorer, and the program the Paul Taylor Dance Company performed Friday night as part of the Kennedy Center's America Dancing series took the audience to three very different worlds, far away in time, place and emotion. "Company B," a Kennedy Center commission originally created for the Houston Ballet, uses World War II pop tunes of the Andrews Sisters to tell us about love, death, war and the disruption of the commonplace. The choreography is loosely based on popular dances of the time, sometimes juxtaposed with the company's men, in silhouette, falling and dying in the background. The men are depicted in life as well as death, bursting with youth and vitality in the "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (of Company B)," or being adorably irresistible to women ("Oh, Johnny").

The dancers capture the innocence of the era beautifully, and the ending is innocence betrayed. A man and a woman dance, intimately, lovingly; the man leaves to join the silhouetted line of marching men, and one realizes, perhaps for the first time, exactly what "There Will Never Be Another You" meant to those who first heard it. In the finale, the dancers hurtle onto the stage as though blown by a nuclear wind, the pretty social dance patterns of the opening blasted asunder: as good a metaphor as any to depict a world changed forever.

"Fiends Angelical" depicts a lost world that never existed and plays with a favorite Taylor theme, the animal-angel nature of human beings. Four men and four women--dressed nearly identically, their painted bodies and tufted, magenta hair making them look like an as-yet-undiscovered rain forest tribe--seem more pagan than demon. Taylor knows this world so precisely that its rituals seem real, as did its predecessors, "Runes" and "Images." A priestess (Sylvia Nevjinsky) presides over what could be a mating dance or a sacrifice between Patrick Corbin and Lisa Viola, now Taylor's senior dancers, but the two come back to life, and a red thread pulled from their bodies is wittily turned into a five-pointed star. This tribe is a fairly tame one, often moving in ordered lines, but sometimes twisted and knotted to match the demonic moments in George Crumb's score, their arms brought in close to the body, the hands becoming paws, the heads thrown back--in imitation of the animals they worship and consume, but also revealing the secret parts of their souls that are forever animal.

"Musical Offering," set to Anton Webern and Frank Michael Beyer's orchestration of Bach's "Requiem," also has ancient undertones, this time Grecian. It's a stern, complex and intensely moving work. There are moments reminiscent of "Esplanade," which also had grief as a subject, but here there is no final, explosive relief. In grief, the dancers--sometimes literally wracked with it, their bodies rocking back and forth--remain curiously impassive.

Maureen Mansfield is an exception. She seeks and gives comfort, dancing freely, a sort of celebrant, set apart from the others, who often echo her movements like a choros. The work uses many of Taylor's signature movements--runs, falls, small hops and sudden, crouched leaps. The curly line and scooped arms of the soloists contrast with the militaristic jumps-in-place and rocking of the choros.

The work uses only 14 dancers, but they seem like a battalion. Taylor's works have the texture of paintings. His dancers are all shapes and sizes, and when he arranges them to emphasize these differences, the stage is as pulsing and full as a grieving heart.