Paul Taylor (choreographer)
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Paul Taylor | |
---|---|
B.S. 1953) | |
Occupation | choreographer |
Years active | 1954–2018 |
Paul Belville Taylor Jr. (July 29, 1930 – August 29, 2018) was an American dancer and choreographer. He was one of the last living members of the third generation of America's modern dance artists.[1] He founded the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 1954 in New York City.
Early life and education
Taylor was born in
Career
In 1954 Taylor assembled a small company of dancers and began making his own works. A commanding performer despite his late start, he joined the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1955 for the first of seven seasons as soloist where he created the role of the evil Aegisthus in Graham's Clytemnestra, as well as other roles including in Acrobats of God and Alcestis, Visionary Recital, One More Gaudy Night, and Phaedra. All the while he was continuing to choreograph on his own small troupe. He also worked with the choreographers Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, José Limón and Jerome Robbins. In 1959 he was invited by George Balanchine to be a guest artist with New York City Ballet, performing his Episodes.[7]
Taylor's early choreographic projects have been noted as distinctly different from the modern, physical works he would come to be known for later, and have even invited comparison to the conceptual performances of the
After the debut of Taylor’s Seven New Dances, Taylor continued choreographing new works which led to the completion of two European tours and ten new dances, all while still dancing with the Graham company. The turning point in Taylor’s choreographic career came with the premier of his plotless work Aureole (1962), at the 1962 American Dance Festival, the success of which convinced him to finally leave the Graham company to pursue choreographic work with his group of dancers full time. With Aureole, he departed from such an avant-garde aesthetic. The performance was still intended to provoke dance critics, as he cheekily set his modern movements not to contemporary music but to a baroque score. A choreographer as concerned with subject matter as he was with form, many of Taylor's pieces and movements are pointedly about something. Some movements relate to his fascination with insects and the way they move. Other movements are influenced by his love of swimming. While he may propel his dancers through space for the sheer beauty of it, he has frequently used them to illuminate such profound issues as war, piety, spirituality, sexuality, morality and mortality. He is perhaps best known for his 1975 dance, Esplanade. In Esplanade Taylor was fascinated with the everyday movement that people enacted on a daily basis—from running to sliding, to walking, jumping and falling. The five-section work is set to movements from two of J.S. Bach's violin Concertos. Taylor’s fascination with pedestrian movement continued through and beyond Esplanade as he was obsessed with the differences in different dancers’ bodies, or how a simple change in timing, position, or facing, can transform the gesture of everyday movement into dance. For example, Taylor highlighted the nuances in performances of different dancers in his piece Polaris (1976), where the dance featured two sections with identical choreography but two completely different casts.[6]
Another well-known work of his is Private Domain (1969). Taylor was intrigued by the idea of perspective and the relationship of reality and appearance. In Private Domain, Taylor commissioned a set by renowned visual artist Alex Katz, whose rectangular panels obstructed the audience from seeing a portion of the stage depending on their vantage points. The seen and unseen relationship that the audience experienced was well received. In another work, Lost, Found, and Lost (1982) Taylor again showed his interest in pedestrian movement. In one section, dancers move one by one into the wing as they are waiting on a slow-moving line.
Taylor choreographed his own version of
Other well-known and highly regarded or controversial Taylor works include Big Bertha (1970), Airs (1978), Arden Court (1981), Sunset (1983), Last Look (1985), Speaking in Tongues (1988), Brandenburgs (1988), Company B (1991), Piazzolla Caldera (1997), Black Tuesday (2001), Promethean Fire (2002), and Beloved Renegade (2008). Some of these dances, performed by the Paul Taylor Dance Company, are also licensed by such companies as the Royal Danish Ballet, Miami City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
Many scholars and dance critics have established a categorization of Taylor's works and identified patterns surrounding his choreographic development. Following Taylor's first major success Aureole (1962), Taylor's next commission for the American Dance Festival was Scudorama (1963), which provided a stark contrast to Taylor's previous work. This prompted scholars to identify a light/dark pattern in Taylor's choreography due to Scudorama’s apparent representation of evil in comparison to Aureole’s lyrical, sunny nature. This categorization that arose due to the uncommon versatility of Taylor’s choreography continued with critics placing Taylor works Airs (1978), Esplanade (1975), Arden Court (1981), and Mercuric Tidings (1982) in the “light” category, and Big Bertha (1970), Last Look (1985), and Speaking in Tongues (1988) in the “dark” category. Some scholars have argued that Taylor's works cannot be confined to two distinct categories though as he has also created humorous and witty, romantic, and movement centered works with the pieces Piece Period (1962), Roses (1985), and Images (1977) respectively, while also in some cases diverging from his typical plotlessness and creating story centric pieces such as Snow White (1983).[10]
Taylor collaborated with artists such as
Recognition
Taylor was a recipient of the
Having been elected to knighthood by the French government as Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1969 and elevated to Officier in 1984 and Commandeur in 1990, Taylor was awarded France's highest honor, the Légion d'Honneur, for exceptional contributions to French culture, in 2000.
Private Domain, originally published by Alfred A. Knopf and re-released by North Point Press and later by the University of Pittsburgh Press, was nominated by the National Book Critics Circle as the most distinguished biography of 1987. Dancemaker, Matthew Diamond's award-winning feature-length film about Taylor, was hailed by Time as "perhaps the best dance documentary ever."[12] Taylor's Facts and Fancies: Essays Written Mostly for Fun, was published by Delphinium in 2013.
The 2019 American Dance Festival's season, its 86th, was dedicated to Paul Taylor.
Paul Taylor Dance Company
The choreographer's works, totaling 147, are performed by the 16-member Paul Taylor Dance Company and dance companies throughout the world.
Of his works, 50 are documented in Labanotation. In each completed score there is a section "Introductory Material," which includes topics such as: Casts, Stylistic Notes, as well as other Production information.
In 1992, the Paul Taylor Dance Company in conjunction with the National Endowment for the Arts launched the Repertory Preservation Project which was centered around the documentation of thirty of Taylor's dances, including lost works such as from Seven New Dances. This was made possible with the grant of $850,000 that was awarded to Taylor's company, and the project led to the birth of the company Taylor 2, a junior company to the main Paul Taylor Dance Company, which allowed these dancers to preserve Taylor's works through performance.[6]
A 2015 documentary titled
Paul Taylor American Modern Dance
In 2015, Taylor began a new program, called Paul Taylor American Modern Dance,
Death
Taylor died of renal failure on August 29, 2018, at a Manhattan hospital at the age of 88.[15]
Selected works
- Circus Polka (1955)
- 3 Epitaphs (1956)
- Seven New Dances (1957)
- Rebus (1958)
- Tablet (1960)
- Fibers (1961)
- Junction (1961)
- Aureole (1962)
- La Negra (1963)
- Scudorama (1963)
- Party Mix (1963)
- The Red Room (1964)
- Duet (1964)
- Post Meridian (1965)
- Orbs (1966)
- Lento (1967)
- Public Domain (1968)
- Private Domain (1969)
- Churchyard (1969)
- Big Bertha (1970)
- Fetes (1971)
- So Long Eden (1972)
- Noah's Minstrels (1973)
- American Genesis (1973)
- Sports and Follies (1974)
- Esplanade (1975)
- Runes (1975)
- Cloven Kingdom (1976)
- Polaris (1976)
- Images (1977)
- Dust (1977)
- Airs (1978)
- Nightshade (1979)
- Profiles (1979)
- Le Sacre Du Printemps (1980)
- Arden Court (1981)
- House of Cards (1981)
- Mercuric Tidings (1982)
- Sunset (1983)
- Equinox (1983)
- Roses (1985)
- Musical Offering (1986)
- Counterswarm (1988)
- Danbury Mix (1988)
- The Sorcerer's Sofa (1989)
- Fact & Fancy (1991)
- Company B (199
- Spindrift (1993)
- Prim Numbers (1997)
- Eventide (1997)
- Piazzola Caldera (1997)
- The Word (1998)
- Oh, You Kid! (1999)
- Cascade (1999)
- Dandelion Wine (2000)
- Black Tuesday (2001)
- Antique Valentine (2001)
- In The Beginning (2003)
- Le Grand Puppetier (2004)
- Spring Rounds (2004)
- Troilus and Cressida (2006)
- Lines Of Loss (2007)
- De Suenos Que Se Repiten (2007)
- Changes (2008)
- Also Playing (2009)
- Three Dubious Memories (2010)
- The Uncommitted (2011)
- To Make Crops Grow (2012)
- Perpetual Dawn (2013)
- Sea Lark (2014)
- Death and the Damsel (2015)
See also
- Modern dance
- Postmodern dance
- 20th century concert dance
- List of dance companies
- Dancemaker
References
- ^ The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. "Modern Dance - Later Dancers", Retrieved 28 February 2016.
- ^ Berkeley, University of California (30 August 2018). "Register ...: With announcements". The University Press – via Google Books.
- ^ MacAulay, Alastair (30 August 2018). "Paul Taylor Dies at 88; Brought Poetry and Lyricism to Modern Dance". The New York Times.
- ^ Taylor, Paul (1988). Private Domain. San Francisco: North Print Pages.
- ^ "Current and New Donors Offer Generous Support". Juilliard Journal. Juilliard School. April 2010.
- ^ )
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-01-14.
- JSTOR 1290838.
- ^ Kriegsman, Alan (January 13, 1980). "The Washington Post". Retrieved January 16, 2019.
- ISSN 0264-2875.
- ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2019-01-14.
- ^ Dance Maker. Matthew Diamond. Docu Rama, 1999. Video
- ^ "Paul Taylor: Creative Domain: Film Review". The Hollywood Reporter. 12 September 2015. Retrieved 29 December 2015.
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-01-19.
- ^ "Paul Taylor, a Giant of Modern Dance, Is Dead at 88". The New York Times. 30 August 2018. Retrieved 30 August 2018.
External links
- Official website Paul Taylor Dance Company
- PBS:American Masters biography
- Kennedy Center biography
- American Ballet Theatre biography
- Paul Taylor at IMDb
- Paul Taylor at the Internet Broadway Database
- The Paul Taylor Dance Company Comes to Israel
- Paul Taylor interviewed on Conversations from Penn State
- Brooklyn Rail In Conversation: Paul Taylor with Nancy Dalva