Burning

 

Paul Taylor Dance Company

“Arden Court”, “Beloved Renegade”, “Promethean Fire”

Eisenhower Theater

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts 

Washington, DC

May 26, 2016

  

by George Jackson
© 2016 by George Jackson

 

Paul Taylor plays with the casual and the formal as if these were twin concepts and not opposite poles. His kaleidoscope of patterns, so decorative at first, so deliberately circumspect, can suddenly acquire meanings, suggest feelings, express moods that make one wonder about being, about life. Even so, having watched five of Taylor’s dances on the two programs shown in Washington, I wasn’t prepared for the sixth and last piece, “Promethean Fire”. Everyone in it, all seven men and eight women, is dressed in what the 1940s termed overalls. These overalls were are not just black but velvety black and marked with cresting lines that reflected a dull gold glow. That combination of simplicity and sumptuousness by designer Santo Loquasto matches Taylor’s choice of music – a toccata and fugue plus a prelude by Johann Sebastian Bach as orchestrated cinescopically, surrealistically by Leopold Stokowski. Bach wasn’t a totally new soundscape for Taylor when “Promethean Fire” was “first performed in 2002” but Stokowski’s arrangement preserves the music’s persistent pulse and gives it internal space for turmoil, struggle and triumph. Taylor leaves no doubt that Prometheus’s flame is the light of human love. He makes sure we get his point by quoting Shakespeare in the printed program. Then he illustrates the idea using as his materials motions and positions that depict agony, resolve and capacity. There is, too, placement that show the body surpassing itself, and yet the choreography’s economy is remarkable.

 

 

Men and women are brought on separately and join together. The animal nature of the mating process is displayed and found wanting. Dissatisfaction reigns. The Taylor patterns – trios, fivesomes, quartets - appear and vanish or transform. Figures feel pain. They fight with themselves, with their siblings, and with their mate. With experience come new capacities. To encompass another being seems possible. Taylor’s Prometheus is also Orpheus at the dawn of a new age. That’s how I read the story “Promethean Fire” tells. 

 

Not everything in the current run is danced to live music, but Donald York’s direction of the Kennedy Center’s Opera House Orchestra gave Thursday night’s rendition of ”Promethean Fire” a glow akin to that of the metallic lines on the overalls. The dancers’ delivery wasn’t wild, as opening night’s “Esplanade” had been, but at moments the leading pair – Michael Trusnovec and Parisa Khobdeh – opened our eyes to possibilities unlimited. The titanic thrust of his arm and the smooth sculptural surge of her stance became indelible in memory.

 

Neat, civilized, lightly historicized was “Arden Court”, which opened the second bill. York conducted its William Boyce excerpts with bounce and Gene Moore’s courtly painting of a rose in full blossom hovered over the stage-space. The program’s middle piece, “Beloved Renegade”, to French music - Poulenc’s “Gloria”, did not once again come alive for me. That was because of more than the use of a recording. The score sounds dry and seems alien for images from America’s Civil War. The suffering shown, and the persistence of life, ring hollow. Similar yet sharper images occur in other Taylor works. The pivotal role for Trusnovec is a duel one – as Walt Whitman he is both observer and protagonist. Taylor, though, doesn’t shape this binary function as persuasively as Leonide Massine did once upon a time for the hero narrators of his symphonic ballets. 

 

For the company’s dancing, whether disciplined as in “Arden Court” or beyond routine as in “Promethean Fire”, there can just be praise. Movement and placement, no matter how individual, suit each performer. This undoubtedly is due to rehearsal director Bettie de Jong (pictured at left).