By Elsa Johnson & Victor Lucas
The Ohio Theater was packed when we went to see Paul Taylor Dance Company last Saturday. PTDC comes through town every couple of years and people turn out in droves because Paul Taylor is different.
What’s different about Paul Taylor? Everything. Back in the 1950’s when Taylor was dancing for Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and briefly for George Balanchine, he was a big, tall, athletic guy dancing among the sylphs. Then, when Taylor began choreographing for his own company, his choreography was different from everybody else’s, even his own. As former PTDC company member Lisa Viola explained to us, “He just hits everything with his choreography, all emotions; he can do the pretty, he can do the dark, he can do the light.”
Saturday’s concert started off with Mercuric Tidings, which Company Manager Holden Kellerhals described in his pre-show talk as “just a dance dance.” Set as it was to excerpts from Franz Schubert’s Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2, the dancing got very fast in places, with feet flying allegro vivace and dancers spinning across the stage at improbable tempos. It was funny, but nervous laughter quickly gave way to fascinated silence. It wasn’t always pretty, but the strength and skill of the Taylor dancers was truly awesome to behold.
The 2nd movement of Mercuric Tidings provided slow movement of uncommon fluidity. A central couple gave way to an interesting canon for 4 couples. Dancers crouched low and rose slowly to beautiful attitudes and arabesques.
The 3rd movement of Mercuric Tidings brought more speed and an improbable dearth of accidental collisions. So, just a dance dance but the dancers on stage Saturday were following in the footsteps of giants, among them Clevelanders Susan McGuire and Tom Evert, dancers at the 1982 premiere of Mercuric Tidings. Read Anna Kisselgoff’s review of the premier of Mercuric Tidings here.
The next dance on Saturday’s concert, Gossamer Gallants, was one of Taylor’s bug dances. “Paul loves bugs, explained Kellerhals, “and this is the most buggy of his dances.”
To music from Bedřich Smetana’s Bartered Bride, 6 of the Taylor men (James Samson, Sean Mahoney, Francisco Graciano, Michael Apuzzo, Michael Novak, and George Smallwood) began running back and forth across the stage. Dressed in bug costumes — wings, antenae, and irridescent blue-black capes by Santo Loquasto — they portrayed male insects, quivering with lust and poking the air in front of them with impossibly fast alternating hand gestures.
For 7 minutes of the first movement the male insects, every one a doofus, elicited bright peals of laughter from the young women sitting near us.
A short 2nd movement showed us the 5 luscious female insects (Eran Bugge, Laura Halzack, Jamie Rae Walker, Heather McGinley, and Kristi Tornga) wigglingtheir hips and shoulders seductively, pushing and shoving for dominance.
The 3rd movement began with the males laying down their cloaks in the manner of Sir Walter Raleigh and the females walking indifferently past. But soon the females were in hot pursuit and the males were trembling with fear rather than lust.
The audience loved it, both lyrical and charming, things Taylor does so well. Every movement idea, though obvious and silly, was pursued with maniacal energy and persistence.
We found it interesting that Taylor avoided depicting actual insect copulation (and post-coital decapitation) in Gossamer Gallants. He didn’t shy away from graphic references to the varieties of human sexual congress in Private Domain (1969).
Cleveland dance audiences have long been familiar with the final dance in Saturday’s concert, Esplanade. Vic claims to have seen one of the first 8 performances at the Lyceum Theatre in New York in June of 1975. He remembers walking away after that concert discouraged rather than inspired by the extreme athleticism of the piece.
Lisa Viola was the de facto prima ballerina of PTDC for over a decade and now teaches in the Taylor school. When we asked her about Esplanade in our 2008 interview, she replied, “I teach some of the movement from Esplanade in classes and I think sometimes you just have to look at it and go for it. That’s actually the best way to attempt some of the stuff we do in Esplanade. If you break it down it’s just the simplest stuff, walking, running, jumping. It’s very pedestrian. You know, Esplanade was the first piece Paul made after he retired from the stage and he said, ‘Let’s go with the basics,’ so, simple as that, a perfect piece.”
Simple if you’re Paul Taylor and company. Satisfying if you’re the audience. Watch an earlier iteration of PTDC narrowly miss collisions in Esplanade Part 1 here.
DanceCleveland presented the Paul Taylor Dance Company at Ohio Theatre on 11/9/2013 with generous support from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture, the Ohio Arts Council, the Cleveland Foundation, the George W. Codrington Charitable Foundation, the George Gund Foundation, and the John P. Murphy Foundation.
Next up for DanceCleveland, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet Sat 1/25 and Sun 1/26. Learn more and get tickets at http://www.dancecleveland.org.
[Photo: Paul B. Goode
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From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.