Paul Taylor: Grand Gestures, Grand Space
“It has always been a struggle,” says Taylor.
SPACE TO DANCE
One of the more recent struggles began in early 2008, when the Banana Republic store on the first floor of 552 Broadway where Taylor’s group had spent the last two decades, decided they wanted to expand upward into the dancers’ space.
Taylor’s company, however enmeshed in the fabric of dance history and the hearts of the public, could not begin to match the rent that Banana Republic could afford. Building owner Milton Steinberg agreed he would force the company out.
“How can we compare the money they paid?” Steinberg, 84, says in the October Times article announcing the company’s boot.
John Tomlinson, the Taylor Company general manager, had the job of bringing this news to Paul and the dancers. “It was very upsetting to everyone.”
The company was given notice that they would lose their lease, and they moved out Dec. 31, 2008.
“There were a lot of tears the last few days in the studio where great chunks of their lives were spent and committed and where their careers, as artists, were accomplished,” Tomlinson adds.
Photo by Richard Calmes
They are temporarily renting space from American Ballet Theatre.
Thanks to another New York Times article, the company was soon to receive one more unexpected gesture of grace. On the morning of Oct. 7, 2008, general manager of the East River Housing Corporation, Harold Jacob, heard that the company had lost its space on a news program covering the headlines of the day.
Jacob had an empty space available at 551 Grand Street in New York City’s Lower East Side he thought might be useful to the company. He rang them up to see if they wanted it.
In the midst of negotiations on a number of spaces, none of which was ideal, Tomlinson made an appointment to go to Grand Street. Asked whether he was surprised to receive the phone call, Tomlinson remarks, “It came totally out of the blue. We walked in and said, ‘It’s perfect. What’s wrong with it?’ It turned out that nothing was wrong with it.”
“How did we find the space? We didn’t. It found us,” he adds.
The company suddenly had a new home to dance in, a space better than the old. “It’s a fantastic space,” Tomlinson says. “It’s far better than what we were in. It’s bigger, and it has less columns to intrude on the performing space.”
Certainly, it helps that the Taylor company’s prominence is such that a Times article was written about the company’s woes. But, there is no getting around the fact that the group has managed to go on not only because of Taylor’s rare talent for arranging grace and muscle, but by the good graces (and muscle) of others, often strangers.
Currently reading page 2 of 5.