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Paul Taylor: America's Dance Wizard
| Article
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10069 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1993 |
1,868 Words |
| Author
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Camille Hardy
Camille Hardy is a New York-based critic who publishes and
broadcasts on the arts internationally. |
When Paul Taylor was among the recipients of the 1992 Kennedy Center Honors--the highest award made by the United States to its artists--it seemed that this masterful choreographer had received nearly every possible tribute to a creative career that has spanned more than four decades. At sixty-three, he's barely warming to middle age in the long-lived pattern of the modern dance world. Many more gems are, no doubt, still yet to be born in the rich and quirky imagination that places him among the four or five greatest living choreographers in the world.
Eye On America
What sets him apart, even in that rarefied echelon is an unflagging ability to make dances that scrutinize the tapestry of American life, with all its glories and glitches. This, among with unabashed originality and skill, is the essential quality that endears his work to domestic audiences and increases the appetite for the repertory abroad.
Last fall's New York season by the Paul Taylor Company at City Center (October 27-November 8) presented the premiere of Oz, an episodic assemblage of L. Frank Baum characters who let the choreographer explore a provocative realm of fantasy and drama. Not at all vintage Taylor, Oz mingles uncharacteristic amiability with cunning puns and a bittersweet finale. As Dorothy, Caryn Heilman is delivered by train to a delightful landscape where Santo Loquasto's sets and costumes provide the visual context for the series of wacky solos and duets that ensue to Wayne Horvitz's commissioned score. Basically, this is a series of variations structured a la The Nutcracker, with an apotheosis at the end.
Praised for fashioning dances that are layered with meaning and yet also are appealing to a broad, popular audience, Taylor is a superb showman. This flair is the springboard for what is not an easy artistic vision. His view--like the national mix, of which he is a shrewd observer--is, focused on the tension between opposites: light and darkness, good and evil, order and chaos, beauty and the grotesque. Even the Taylor technique is something of a dichotomy, mixing modern and classical attributes into a singular style. With wry humor and as irrepressible curiosity, he delves into some of the knottiest corners of the human psyche as grist for dancing. Using fine-tuned human bodies as his medium, Taylor makes art that questions, challenges, reveals, delights, but never merely titillates.
The Taylor canon, encompassing around one hundred dances, is both
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