“Cloven Kingdom,” “De Sueños Que Se Repiten,” “Esplanade”
Paul Taylor Dance Company
New York City Center
New York, NY
March 12, 2008
by Leigh Witchel
copyright © 2008 by Leigh Witchel
“De Sueños Que Se Repiten” (Spanish for “of recurring dreams”), the second premiere of the Taylor season, is both part of a diptych and autonomous – meant to be seen alone or with its companion work “De Sueños” in either order.
This new piece is one of Taylor’s that defies facile classification. It’s easier and always fun to put each new dance in boxes marked “Dark” and “Light” but this one keeps wriggling into and out of both boxes. Besides “De Sueños,” the closest relative to “De Sueños Que Se Repiten” is “Fiends Angelical” from 2000. They share musical performers; both dances were created to recordings by the Kronos Quartet.
The curtain opened on a smoky stage where Jennifer Tipton and Santo Loquasto have worked their usual magic for lighting and décor. A single gruesome face (Richard Chen See’s) was brightly lit at the front of the stage and made up with black eye sockets to look like the skull he carried. He wore a black frock coat and also carried a mirrored scimitar. The dance is a series of apparitions with Mexican themes reflecting the music – short pieces by Mexican composers. Laura Halzack tiptoed across the stage resplendently outfitted as a golden idol; Michael Trusnovec danced in antlers as a deer figure. Like a dream, things came and went. Eight Aztec warriors danced, a maiden (Amy Young) with a Mexican flag got ritually sacrificed by Chen See, but to whom?
The score for “Fiends Angelical”, George Crumb’s “Black Angels,” quotes Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” quartet; the Kronos recording for “De Sueños Que Se Repiten” quoted several melodic chestnuts that went by too fast for me to identify. In “Fiends,” there was a mock-comic episode where Lisa Viola and Patrick Corbin tried to strangle each other; this dance also has a mixed atmosphere of comedy and nightmare. Taylor was comic and coy about love and sex with little pungent vaudeville duets: first a man and a woman, then two men, a man and a vamp-y woman, a very pregnant woman who kept dropping babies to the distress of her hapless suitor, a man with two women and finally Annmaria Mazzini and Rob Kleinendorst in a duet of idealized harmony that recalled 1985’s “Roses” in miniature.
The dancers changed into white outfits. Chen See returned and they all fell to the floor, Halzack reappeared to cross the stage on tiptoe once more. The rest got up again as if nothing momentous had happened, conversed, shook hands and the curtain fell as abruptly as the buzzing of an alarm clock in the morning. Even though there’s much that we’ve seen before from Taylor, somehow it worked. Susan Reiter reports on its sibling “De Sueños.”
The new piece was bookended by two thirty year-old classics, “Cloven Kingdom” (1976) and “Esplanade” (1975). “Cloven” is Taylor’s wry take on socialization and civilization. Women in simple gowns and debonair men in white tie and tails alternate between the swaying and sinuous vocabulary Taylor uses for his Baroque pieces such as “Aureole,” and animalistic contractions or holding their hands in front of them like paws. The music superimposes 20th century percussion by Henry Cowell and Malloy Miller onto baroque Arcangelo Coralli. We already know that duality is Taylor’s biggest shtick, but he throws in a spicier one, John Rawlings’ inscrutable mirrored headdresses that are part Tudor and part Star Trek. The quartet of men danced a show-stopping quartet to percussion.
“Esplanade” is getting to be like “The Nutcracker” for me, something I love not only for its artistry, but for its yearly recurrence. This year’s model had a good performance. Viola is approaching the end of her performing career with calmness; she no longer sells her part to the audience with her Happy Feet solo and blended into the ensemble more. Halzack, the newest company member, performed Bettie de Jong’s central role in the adagio. She was probably cast because she is one of the tallest women in the company, but part of the role is the story behind the steps – de Jong’s role revolved around her position as senior member of the company, Halzack’s performance was a little blank without that behind it. In the daredevil finale, Mazzini did the solo crashing to the floor heroically. I’ve never seen any Taylor dancer miss a partnering move before, but Michael Trusnovec and Amy Young had one of those Sometimes-It-Happens bobbles. She was supposed to fall backwards without watching for him; she did, and he wasn’t able to get her. They ended up on the floor and rolled off as if that were the choreography. Better to take the risk and end up in a pile on the floor than wait, watch, and perform safely and dully.
copyright © 2008 by Leigh Witchel
Photo by Tom Caravaglia, Sean Mahoney and Julie Tice in “De Sueños Que Se Repiten”