“Dichotomous Being: An Evening of Taylor Stanley”
Henry J. Leir Stage
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival
Becket, Massachusetts
Saturday, July 30, 2022
by Gay Morris
copyright ©2022 by Gay Morris
Taylor Stanley projects a sense of mystery that seems an intrinsic part of his personality. It is as if his dancing is a means of self-exploration, a search for answers that may not yet be fully available. A principal with New York City Ballet since 2016, Stanley’s classical technique is pristine but never solely the point. His dancing, like his race and gender (he is bi-racial and refers to himself as “they”), is not singular but plural, a point made in his concert, “Dichotomous Being: An Evening of Taylor Stanley,” presented last week in performances at the Henry J. Leir outdoor stage at Jacob’s Pillow.
Taylor Stanley in "Redness," choreographed by Shamel Pitts. Photo by Danica Paulos.
The program’s title is something of a misnomer, since the five dances by five different choreographers didn’t deal in oppositions so much as in a range of elements that are part of a whole. The concert began with a solo from George Balanchine’s “Square Dance,” an acknowledgement of Stanley’s roots and his place in the ballet world. “Square Dance” (created in 1957) may have been Balanchine’s bow to his adopted American homeland, but it was couched in the form of an abstract neoclassical work with music of Corelli and Vivaldi. In his solo, Stanley somehow merged clarity with dreaminess, each movement etched with precision but delivered as if it held a secret only partially revealed.
From there the program moved on to “Mango,” commissioned by the Pillow. It is an adaptation of Andrea Miller’s “Sky to Hold,” an ensemble piece she created for New York City Ballet in 2021. It had originally starred Stanley and Sara Mearns, and served to show Stanley moving beyond a strict ballet vocabulary. Miller, whose background is in modern dance and Ohad Naharin’s Gaga form, continued the tradition, standard at City Ballet, of challenging dancers with new directions set within a classically compatible base. Stanley invited guests Ashton Edwards, Nouhoum Koita and Sebastian Villarini-Velez to join him in the work. Although there were no program notes at Jacob’s Pillow, the original City Ballet version had a theme centering on a seed, carried through a storm, in search of heat and light.
The adaptation focused on Stanley, in his original role, and Edwards (dancing Mearns’ role on pointe, and who also uses the gender signifier “they”). This adapted version, minus the earlier narrative, became an abstract dance centered on Stanley and Edwards, in the company of other dancers. Miller’s movement is full of steps, perhaps too full. It gave the work a slightly frenzied quality, as if Miller, generally a confident choreographer, had not been altogether sure of herself in a ballet environment. Nevertheless, Stanley’s performance was immaculate and he partnered Edwards in what became, essentially, a love duet.
From ballet, Stanley then reached into the history of modern dance for a reconstructed version of Talley Beatty’s iconic solo, “Mourner’s Bench.” Premiered in 1947, Beatty danced it at Jacob’s Pillow the following year. It is set to the spiritual, “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” and in it Beatty constructed a powerful work in which movement grows out of the relationship between dancer and object. You can see a film of Beatty in the piece on YouTube that looks as if it had been shot at Jacob’s Pillow. Stanley holds his own in the solo, his performance polished and heartfelt, but it’s hard to beat Beatty, who even in an old and scratched black and white film, makes you feel the mourning of an entire people for what has been lost.
I was not familiar with Shamel Pitts’ choreography before seeing the solo he made for Stanley at the Pillow with associate choreographer Tushrik Fredericks. Entitled “Redness,” it was a world premiere. Pitts’ background is similar to Millar’s in that both are Juilliard graduates and have been influenced by Gaga. Pitts danced for seven years with Naharin’s Batsheva Dance Company and is a certified Gaga teacher. However, despite their shared experiences, the choreographers’ dances at the Pillow were very different in feeling and in approach to movement.
“Redness” appeared plotless, but I was reminded of a raw, tormented creature, its movement harsh and full of struggle. Dressed in a costume of dull gold and brown by Studio Obectra Berlin, Stanley rose from lying on the stage into what in yoga is called a downward dog position with his body forming a sharp inverted “V”, hands and feet on the ground. In that cramped position he moved about painfully, then rose, jerking, shaking and scratching, as if trying to rid himself of some terrible affliction. He eventually began to run and jump in circles as if gaining a degree of relief and freedom. Then he simply stopped, walked forward and bowed. In all, the dance was both strange and compelling, and it added a further dimension to the evening’s sense of journey and discovery.
Jodi Melnick’s “These Five” was a group work for Stanley and guests Allysen Hooks, Marcella Lewis, Ned Sturgis and Cemiyon Barber. Here Stanley merged with the group without any starring role. Melnick has gotten a good deal of publicity lately, collaborating on works for a variety of dancers. Her background lies in postmodernism, having worked with Twyla Tharp and Trisha Brown, among others. “These Five,” with music by James Lo, looked like a postmodern dance, circa 1980. It included all the familiar postmodern movements and gestures, from swinging arms and loose limbed extensions, to neutral expression. These were elements that, in early postmodernism of the ‘60s, derived from daily life and acted as an extension of it. Then, over time, these movements became the ingredients of set choreography, a vocabulary used to express a choreographer’s larger vision. Today, the vision and purpose behind postmodernism have, for the most part, been lost, and what remains resembles words without grammar or syntax, movement strung together without meaning. Even the title of the work, “These Five,” for five dancers, lacks a sense of invention, invested effort, or larger vision.
Fortunately the rest of the program showed Stanley to better effect. The audience was made aware not only of his breadth of interest in, but the depth of his commitment to, unfamiliar means of movement expression. Stanley is never going to look like a modern or postmodern dancer. He has spent a lifetime training his body into a highly refined form, one that is as specific to itself as Japanese Noh or Javanese court dance. What he brings to modern and postmodern works is curiosity and honest endeavor. There is also, in all his dance, that sense of mystery that is his own personal hallmark, not something purposefully withheld, but a self-searching that doesn’t immediately reveal every aspect of itself. It is a journey of expanding discovery that makes him always interesting to watch.