Paul Taylor: Grand Gestures, Grand Space
Another wonderful thing about the company’s movement is that even the smallest of his dancers (and there is almost always a tiny one) can travel like she has the legs of a giant. Perhaps, this is because Taylor has taught them to keep up with his long limbs.
Duckstein shares a hint on how he gets students in his Taylor classes to really travel. “I am not above having someone dance next to me and hold my hand to get them to relax and move bigger,” he says. “That’s one of the things that is fun about the Taylor style—introducing dancers to a new physicality.”
Another aspect of Taylor’s work that is important is the presence of contradictions within it. I have never seen a Taylor dance that is only one tone, and this multiplicity has been present from the beginning.
His first piece, “3 Epithets,” was meant to be “lyric and lovely,” as Taylor explains in his autobiography. “When it begins to look too pretty, however, I switch its Debussy music to some lugubrious Southern band pieces and change the lyrical movements to leaden ones.”
These contradictions would continue to be a trademark of his work and collide to create a world that is less heroic (and tragic) than Grahams’, but not abstract in the way that Cunningham’s or Balanchine’s are. He is somewhere in between, in a parallel universe that feels very much like our own – full of beauty, effort, contradiction and humor.
In his essay “Why I Make Dances,” Taylor explains, “I love tinkering with natural gesture and pedestrian movement to make them read from a distance and be recognizable as a revealing language that we all have in common. Of particular interest is the amorous coupling of men and women, as well as the other variations on this subject. In short, the remarkable range of our human condition.”
Photo by Richard Calmes
TEMPORARY SPACE
Cut back to the open rehearsal of Taylor’s new work – the dingy studio, the long black curtain, the beautiful, strong dancers before us.
There is a moment in “Changes” where three Taylor men – James Samson, Duckstein and Sean Mahoney – lift the elegant Laura Halzack into the air. I notice their eyes dart quickly upward, gauging their relationship to the space.
Then, like a beautiful bird going in for a landing, Halzack glides freely up into the air, arriving in a position precisely orchestrated so that her head soars into an open area between two large fluorescent lights.
The nonchalance of this maneuver seems to say something about this company. These dancers are not hindered by the restrictions of the space they currently inhabit. Rather than being limited by the studio, they appear to burst out of it.
Later this year, the company will be able to stretch out in their new home at 551 Grand Street. But, for now, they are temporarily scrunched into their rented space. For now, they dodge the lights and keep on dancing.
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