“Snow White,” “Profiles,” “Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder,” “Esplanade”
Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance: Paul Taylor Dance Company, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company
David H. Koch Theater
New York, New York
March 22, 2016
By Michael Popkin
Copyright © 2016 by Michael Popkin
Sam Cooke’s 1960 song might have told a generation “[t]hat’s the sound of the men working on the chain gang,” but the year before Cooke issued his top ten hit Donald McKayle gave America a boundlessly emotional experience of those men in the form of modern dance. That 1959 work, “Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder,” danced most powerfully on Tuesday night at Lincoln Center by the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company to beautifully rendered live music, felt like an enduring American classic. While (in addition to the Dayton ensemble) the Taylor Company itself also danced a trio of repertory works on the program (among which “Profiles” in particular got a fascinating rendition), “Rainbow” provided a high point, not just for the evening, but for the entire first eight days of Taylor’s Modern American season.
Photo © Paul B. Goode of Dayton Contemporary Dance Company in “Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder”
Michael McElroy and the Broadway Inspirational Voices provided the chorus, pulsing out the work’s West-African inspired rhythms that recall the swinging of a pickaxe. Meanwhile Destan Owens (backed by Gary Sieger on Guitar) added the solo vocals on top that alternated tones of defiance, nostalgia and finally elegiac loss. Domingo A. Rodruigez’s original costumes were reconstructed by Ayn Wood and John Rensel’s original lighting by Jennifer Tipton.
When the eight men of the company entered, tall and bare chested in soft and close fitting, flesh colored trousers, they kicked their way onto the stage in the work’s signature whiplash move in two lines, hitting their accents in counterpoint, as if their feet might have the force to break their figurative chains. Thereafter, the dance’s four-part structure sketched a bare narrative that resembled a work of folk art as three solo dancers – Alexis Britford (the sole woman in the cast), Michael Green and Quentin Apollo Vaughn Sledge – delineated individual characters in front of the ensemble.
Britford portrayed a lyrical feminine persona, at once memory, symbol and dream for the prisoners: sweetheart, mother and wife. A superbly trained and expressive dancer with a strongly grounded Martha Graham-like technique, she managed the paradox of being extraordinarily physical on stage and simultaneously ethereal and dream-like during the dance’s great lyrical moment. This is an early song of nostalgia that has the prisoners yearning for the homes they cannot possibly regain. They do not give up trying, but the theme of the dance is that this cannot be.
As the work progresses through its cycle of songs away from this moment of yearning, Green and Sledge escape. Shots ring out bringing a brief moment of silence and the two men fall. As the ensemble somberly chants “another black man dead” the female vision first reappears and the survivors then raise the bodies of their fallen.
At merely eighteen minutes long, the hard hitting scenario could have played as either sententious, overly moral or didactic. But so focused, hard edged, and truthful is the music (depression era chain gang songs originally preserved and curated by John and Alan Lomax) and so powerfully restrained the dance rendition here that the work instead gathered irresistible force. While “Rainbow” has been danced for years by the Ailey Company (which picked up the piece for its repertory in the late 1960s) the consensus in the theater Tuesday night was that it had never looked better or more moving. The difference was the crack Dayton ensemble, who justified at a stroke Taylor’s vision of creating for posterity a performing platform anchored in his own company but allowing other American Modern master works to endure under its umbrella even while performed by other companies; thus the company becomes a sort of mini American Dance Festival. Here American Modern looked like one of the world’s great dance styles.
Earlier in the evening, the revival of Taylor’s “Profiles” was also a particular treat. The relatively short dance for two couples proved to be as mysteriously hypnotic as anything the Taylor Company has done this season. Really a series of out takes from his better known “Le Sacre de Printemps (The Rehearsal),” Taylor made “Profiles” in 1979 when his work on choreographing “Sacre” temporarily stalled, leaving him with a series of what could have been scraps. But like the master he is, he instead commissioned some music from Jan Radzynski (a droning string composition like the humming of insects), had some faun-like speckled leotard costumes made by Gene Moore, and turned those scraps into an independent beast.
The result on stage Tuesday was a riveting series of duets for Michael Trusnovec and Laura Halzack as one couple and Eran Bugge with Michael Novak as another, full of freeze frame tension and slow and difficult lifts. It acquired a deeply meditative force as it went along, only to end in a particularly arresting moment of near silence and immobility. After a duet in diminuendo, the music faded as Halzack, leaning into Trusnovec, slowly unfurled her hand to rest it on his proffered arm as silence fell. The audience held its breath.
Opening the evening, “Snow White” to this viewer looked altered in tone with Parisa Khobdeh in the title role in place of the now retired Lisa Viola, who virtually owned the part in the company’s final City Center days. Where Viola was by nature deadpan, arch and incapable of ever looking like she was doing anything straight, Khobdeh is by nature the diametric opposite. While Kobdeh is a fabulous dancer (and has been proving it every night this season) she's so totally honest and openly raw that it’s hard to imagine anything remotely ironic. The change will take some getting used to.
Taylor’s ”Esplanade” closed the evening with another rousing performance, sending the audience out of the theater with a dance experience in total contrast to that of “Rainbow.” Such was the breadth of Modern Dance as Paul Taylor’s American Modern earned its title Tuesday night.
Additional Photo © Paul B. Goode of Alexis Britford in “Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder”