Recreating dances that have not been seen in fifty years can be a daunting challenge for a repertory company seeking to refresh its legacy repertoire. The Paul Taylor Dance Company’s summer residency at the Joyce Theater included curious historical recreations paired with more well-known works. The program I saw included two dance pieces, Tablet (1960) and Churchyard (1969), which have not been put on stage since the 1970s, as well as the more familiar Esplanade (1975), all by the choreographer Paul Taylor (1930-2018). The alternative program included two of his other pieces, Polaris (1976) and Cloven Kingdom (1976). Overall, the evening demonstrated Taylor’s ability to explore humanity through music and movement, but it suffered from the fact that the two lesser-known pieces were ill-matched to the more tried and tested ballet on the program.
Tablet featured the dancers Kristin Drauker and Devon Louis clad, respectively, in blue and yellow unitards against a backdrop by the minimalist painter Ellsworth Kelly, made up of glowing light-blue concentric semicircles curving away from the stage. The dance resembled a distilled and schematic courtship routine, the dancers performing stripped-down feats side by side and then with each other. It’s a challenging dance—at one point, Drauker, performing a solo and seemingly balanced on a forced arch, executed ronds de jambe with her other leg as she traveled slowly toward the edge of the stage, her supporting leg shaking as it balanced her.
The plastique of these performers, their faces adorned with colored circles, brown against Drauker’s pale skin and light against Louis’s dark skin, had a certain theatrical quality. The beginning port de bras resembled a mime reaching for the clear wall of his invisible box. This was no superficial exercise in hamming, however, but rather a self-aware abstraction. The designs of pale-blue semicircles by Kelly gave it a modern, almost futuristic look. This is an abstracted future still yet to come—defined by stoically clean lines.
Given Taylor’s choice to employ Kelly’s bright fusion of colors for the costumes and backdrop in Tablet, it’s not surprising that Taylor studied painting at Syracuse University before transferring to the Juilliard School for dance. A child of the Great Depression, Taylor was a quick study despite his late start in dance and in 1954, then only twenty-four years old, began to make his own. A year later, he joined the Martha Graham Dance Company, where he honed his command of dance vocabulary. This means that Tablet is a relatively youthful work for Taylor, as he choreographed it only six years later in 1960.
Taylor has a similar ability to Graham in terms of expressing complex human themes through movement, although all three pieces on this program steered clear of the psychoanalytic mumbo jumbo and lofty Greek themes that Graham was so fond of. George Balanchine, the father of American ballet, choreographed a solo on Taylor for his ballet Episodes, performed by New York City Ballet. Today, that would be unlikely to see these two stylistically distinct companies collaborate, but Taylor’s musicality, a quality Balanchine so prized, is evident in the intricate cannons in the second piece on the program, Churchyards.
A longer piece with music by Cosmos Savage, whose dissonant and sometimes tinny composition is based on medieval music, Churchyards was performed by nine dancers. Set against a pitch-black backdrop, the performers donned earthy brown pants and ocean blue unitards for the first movement. Like Tablet, it seems interested in mime, the dancers facing the audience much of the time, strangely stone-faced but now occasionally hunched and awkwardly turned in, self-consciously buglike, it seemed.
The dancers appeared more at ease during Esplanade, the third and final piece on the program, whose last movement consists of freewheeling tumbling. They didn’t simply fall and recover, but rather seemingly dove into the floor, the sides evidently skimming the shiny black surface. And yet, barely a sound was made, as if the bodies never actually made contact, but rather simply hovered just above the ground like electrons buzzing above a nucleus.
Esplanade is set to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Violin Concerto in E Major and Double Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor; this dance easily felt like the most human of the piece on the program. The first movement features motifs of complex running patterns, mirroring the falling motif in the third movement. The second movement is slower and consists of more lyrical pas de deux sequences, the couples alternating their turns in the spotlight. This section displays Taylor’s ability to imbue the slightest gesture with extra-textural meaning, the male dancer taking a woman’s arm or the delicate act of cradling her in his arms, and turn it into dance. Despite this piece’s being the most familiar to audiences today, it felt like the freshest on the program.
Leading the program with these two recreations was an admirable move, even if the results were uneven compared to the last third of the program. Recreations keep alive forgotten works that would otherwise be lost to history. An added urgency is that they need to be passed down while the original dancers are still alive to remember them. Even if a work does not represent a choreographer working at his best, there is something intrinsically valuable in presenting a piece that shows how geniuses experiment. Even Balanchine had pieces fall vastly short of expectations—most notably, his 1965 full-length version of Don Quixote is unlikely ever to be revisited. There are valuable aspects to both Tablet and Churchyard. Yet compared to the more holistically integrated Esplanade, they seemed more like exercises, however worthwhile, in choreography, musicality, and color. If they are to make up two-thirds of a program, a more experimental venue might have been better suited.
Nonetheless, one feels lucky to have a glimpse into Taylor’s choreographic mind and his ability to defy gravity through the stripped-down modern dance technique and convey the complexity of the human experience with simple gestures.
