"Brandenburgs", "Phantasmagoria", "Beloved Renegade"
Paul Taylor Dance Company
Filene Center
Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts
Vienna, Virginia
July 20, 2010
by George Jackson
copyright 2010 by George Jackson
Incredible to think of Paul Taylor turning 80! He was young and could pounce like a big cat when I first saw him - it was in George Balanchine's portion of "Episodes", the collaboration Lincoln Kirstein had arranged between his choreographer and Martha Graham. I don't remember the solo Taylor danced or to which Anton Webern music it took place, but following that joint performance by the Graham company and New York City Ballet, Taylor stepped out infront of City Center and proceeded to cartwheel down the sidewalk to where friends were waiting. There was strength but no strain in his body, his rebound from the concrete was cushioned and the amplitude of the circles he wrote on the air was astonishing. He ended upright at the side of his friends with a Lil' Abner grin on his face. Since that day in 1959, Taylor has sired lots of dances. He seems to love them all equally, the misbegotten and the masterpieces. There was no masterwork on the Taylor company's solitary Wolf Trap program this summer although "Brandeburgs" - a substitution for "Also Playing" - ranks just short of that. The new "Phantasmagoria", co-commissioned by Wolf Trap, is a dud. "Renegade" is too reverential. Ah, but "Brandenburgs" boasts treasures, both Apollonian and prankish.
It takes a tantalizing mind to make a Greek ballet to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Mozart or Stravinsky perhaps, but isn't Bach too Christian? What I mean by Greek isn't just pagan in the abstract but in the particular, in the flesh. "Brandenburgs" centers on an Apollo figure who might have been chiseled by Praxiteles. He is surrounded by 3 muses and backed by 5 fauns. Likely this is too literal a reading of the ballet's 9 figures, so let me switch to building blocks (steps), architecture (formations) and dynamics (the dance urge).
As "Brandenburgs" begins the dancers' groupings are prominent. These are handsome monuments, often fractionally off the symmetrical so as not to seem static. The way they form and the manner in which they are dispersed is almost like doing tricks with a deck of cards. It matches, though, the tensions and resolutions in the music. Taylor uses both steps (movement units) and non-step (diffuse) motion. His steps are carefully chosen but from a limited vocabulary, whereas his other motion seems to issue from an infinite supply. One of his favorite steps in this piece is a prance - one leg somewhat raised infront or to the side with the knee bent. The men tend to do it running fast, like fauns leaping. The women do it almost like a pose, drawing up into themselves, and also because they wear full skirts they give it a dignity.
There are rich solos for the women. It might be going too far to call this trio Calliope, Polyhymnia and Terpsichore but didn't Taylor guest for Balanchine? Adagio passages for the singular man are like walking around a classic sculpture in the gallery, except that you are stationary and it is the observed object's motion that displays the stretch and stance, the shape and spirit of the human form. Michael Trusnovec did not commit sacrilege by imitating Apollo.
As "Brandenburgs" evolves, one is less conscious of formations and steps than of the dance impetus emanating from and funneling through bodies, shaping them and liberating them. Taylor's classicism in this course of action differs from Balanchine's highly articulated ballet and from Graham's granite monumentality. Often the Taylor dancers steer close above the ground, voluminously and yet with rebound. I was reminded of those 55th Street cartwheels. "Brandenburgs" concludes with a restatement of its first grouping.
Too much diversity and too little development are the problems with "Phantasmagoria". Taylor hasn't a real score to temper him, just bits and pieces by Renaissance composers. His characters come from diverse corners of history and geography: Brueghel's's lusty villagers, a cabaret couple and their phallic Serpent from a Garden of Eden in the East Indies, an autoerotic nun supposedly from Byzantium, a Bowery Bum and so on. It is the Bum, in Robert Kleindorst's performance, who gives an inkling of what might have been made of these gargoyles. Needed by gargoyles is a solid structure on which to be mounted, and there is no architecture here. Couldn't the three Isadorables have served Taylor for a witty exploration of Isadora Duncan dancing? As it is, they don't even amount to a good joke. It is quite possible, Taylor being the prankster he is, that one or more of these critters will be recycled into another work prior to the choreographer's 90th birthday.
Ascending or descending on the street escalator of Washington, DC's Dupont Circle metro station there is for all to read a quotation from Walt Whitman carved into the cement of the surrounding shaft. It isn't Whitman at his terse best. Taylor's Whitman tribute, "Beloved Renegade", has many admirers. I find it inflated. The use of somersaults, piggyback and movement from other children's games to show the innocence of ordinary life doesn't effectively counterbalance the choreography's heroics. Soldiers slump and die not as effectively as in another Taylor, "Company B". Additional echoes from previous work also ring hollow and the amplification of Poulenc's "Gloria" sounded harsh. Trusnovec, as the Whitman figure, kept "Renegade" from falling apart.
Wolf Trap used to have substantial runs of dance, now it is down to single nights once in a while. Even so, and despite Paul Taylor having been a local boy, the Filene Center wasn't full. Pity, because the company's dancers are superbly trained and dynamically rehearsed (by Taylor and Bettie de Jong) and even one work as good as "Brandenburgs" is worth the price of admission.
