Paul Taylor Contemporary Dance Company: Production Details

On the evening of October 3, the challenging dance begins with “Arden Court.”  This piece was a huge hit from its first performance in 1981 and is still a crowd pleaser.  The music by the Baroque composer William Boyce is as sumptuous as the score.  Brief, poignant gestures are embedded in the surging flow.  There are duets in which one person cannot stop dancing, and the other barely notices.  Individual dancers are left behind by hurting men and prancing women…

Five couples like ghosts move silently through the emotions of love, loss, and playfulness.  Mr. Taylor’s “Eventide,” set to music by composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, captures a moment in which these couples reminisce the innocence of youth, which everyone can identify with.  There is a sweetness to Eventide that is tempered by shyness, unabashed sentiment, ebullience and eventually sadness.  It qualifies as a masterpiece.  One critic called it ‘the work of someone who has refined a craft though years of experience…the work is like the paper cutouts of late-era Matisse, or brush paintings by Japanese calligraphers… shocking in its simplicity, the tone is smooth’.

Set to three keyboard works by Bach, richly orchestrated by Stokowski, “Promethean Fire” examines a kaleidoscope of emotional colors in the human condition.  All dancers, costumed in black, weave in and out of intricate patterns that mirror the way varied emotions weave themselves through life.  A central duet depicts conflict and resolution following a cataclysmic event.  But if destruction has been at the root of this dance, renewal of the spirit is its overriding message.

And on October 4, the evening starts with “Mercuric Tidings,” set to music by Franz Schubert.  No choreographer can capture the simple joy of being alive as Taylor does in Mercuric Tidings.  It begins and ends with lovely sculptural vision; in between are fleeting images, evanescent pairing, smiles.

In a dance with stunning movements, spectacular sets and a spiky score by 20th Century iconoclast Edgar Varese, Paul Taylor recalls the Byzantine Empire, an economic political and cultural ‘superpower’ whose thousand-year reign ended in the 15th Century.  “…Byzantium” begins with a quartet of holy figures performing a religious ceremony, after which a flagellant engages in repentance.  With the passage of time, morality decays and, with the dancers staggering as if from an earthquake, the empire collapses –as empires often do.

Last production is “Esplanade,” a pretty dance with complex pattern that spill joyfully over Bach violin concertos.  The stage is full of couples running and flinging themselves into one another’s arms.  Their reckless enthusiasm makes you want to cheer.