2 days ago
16
Paul Taylor is not a choreographer for the cynical. Then again, maybe he is exactly what a cynic needs. At the outset of his 1988 piece Brandenburgs, with the dancers in tight green velour beaming beatifically out at us, the hardened viewer may be thinking: this is a bit twee, a bit dated. Twenty-five minutes later, after a hurricane of leaping and spinning and tightly honed technique, you’re thinking how joyful it is to be alive.
Taylor was one of the most prominent and popular figures in American modern dance, leading his company for more than 60 years until his death in 2018. The company first visited the UK in 1964, but has not been to London in 20-odd years. (In this short run they’re also dancing a second programme, including Taylor’s final work Concertiana, from 2018.)
As it is in Brandenburgs, set to two of Bach’s eponymous concertos (No 3 and No 6), Taylor’s dance is often buoyant and bravura, clearly delineated in its sleek angles, and unafraid to entertain. It’s sprightly and full of postcard moments – a snapshot at any point would reveal dancers in lovely open positions, or leaping with huge expanses of air between their feet and the floor. Every step is recognisable, readable, digestible, musical. Despite the sprint speeds and a dizzying number of turns, this is dance that harks back to simpler, analogue times, not the current age’s onslaught of everything.
The women wear green Grecian-style dresses and it does feel a bit Olympean: there’s a scene that brings to mind Apollo and his muses, some Euclidean geometry at play. The dancers look like the athletes of the gods, to slightly misquote Martha Graham, although the god to whom they are in thrall may be Bach.
The company now has resident choreographers making new work, as well as preserving Taylor’s archive. The newest of them is Robert Battle, former artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. His piece Under the Rhythm is intended as a tribute to Battle’s mother and the power of dance to see us through life; it feels like a toast to the glories of African American jazz and modern dance, from the riotous rhythm of a Harlem dancefloor, to two dancers in red tailcoats, a little like the Nicholas Brothers, hamming it up to Ella Fitzgerald’s scat. You could infer a nod to Ailey, and is it just me or was that Carlton’s dance from The Fresh Prince? There is an undercurrent of some of the pain and prejudice that lies beneath those stories, but there is also pure virtuosity and showmanship.
There are no smiles in Taylor’s Piazzolla Caldera (1997), only seriously smouldering looks. It’s a feisty tango-inspired piece that plays into expectations of Buenos Aires’s seedy underworld. All those sexily furrowed brows indicating the heights of ecstasy start to look rather effortful, yet it’s never not easy to watch. This is dance that wants its audience to enjoy themselves, and it would be hard not to.
