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The Paul Taylor Company Without Paul Taylor

The choreographer Paul Taylor rehearsing his company in 2008. Mr. Taylor laid the groundwork for how his company would proceed after his death.Credit...Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Paul Taylor, the modern dance visionary who died on Wednesday, had been carefully laying the groundwork for how his company would proceed without him.

Four years ago, Mr. Taylor broadened the mission of the company to include works created by outside choreographers, saying he hoped that would help guarantee performances for decades to come.

Then, in May, it was announced that Michael Novak, a 35-year-old dancer in the Taylor company, would become the artistic director-designate of the Paul Taylor Dance Foundation. The idea was that Mr. Novak would listen, watch and take notes until Mr. Taylor decided that he was ready to retire.

Now, following Mr. Taylor’s death from renal failure at 88, Mr. Novak is preparing — perhaps sooner than he expected — to take the reins of an organization that includes two dance companies, an archive and a school.

He will also have a significant role in preserving and interpreting the legacy of one of the most important American choreographers of the 20th century. Mr. Taylor was a towering figure whose career as a choreographer began in the 1950s, rooted in experimentalism. He went on to become known for striking musicality, accessibility, an often eccentric sense of humor and a refined, at times highly technical use of everyday movement. Over the decades, he created many works now regarded as modern classics.

[Read about the choice of Michael Novak to lead the company.]

Mr. Novak said in a telephone interview that he intended to be a responsible steward of Mr. Taylor’s work while bringing it to a younger audience, and acknowledged some of the challenges he expected to face.

“How do we take something that is a historical legacy,” he said, “how do we make it relevant and exciting and contextualize it for audiences now without diminishing the integrity of the history of the work?”

The steps Mr. Taylor took over the past few years stand in contrast with how other prominent modern choreographers prepared for what would come after their deaths. Each grappled with a central question: How can works invented by a master choreographer and interpreted by a dedicated company survive their creator?

Merce Cunningham, for one, took a radical approach, stating a month before his death in 2009 that his company would dissolve after a final, two-year tour. He had also prepared detailed records of his dances so they could be licensed and produced by other companies.

Something of a cautionary tale emerged from the events that followed Martha Graham’s death in 1991. Court battles over the ownership of her works lasted about a decade before a federal judge ruled that they belonged to the Martha Graham Dance Company rather than to Graham’s designated heir.

Mr. Taylor, who was a dancer in Graham’s company in the 1950s and early ’60s, was taken aback by the confusion and vitriol that followed her death, said John Tomlinson, the executive director of the Paul Taylor Dance Foundation. After the Graham litigation began, Mr. Taylor selected works he wanted to copyright in his name and the Taylor board formed an intellectual property committee to determine ownership and legacy.

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Michael Novak, 35, is taking the reins of an organization that includes two dance companies, an archive and a school.Credit...Ike Edeani for The New York Times

Mr. Tomlinson said that the foundation is the main beneficiary of Mr. Taylor’s estate.

Under the terms of Mr. Taylor’s will, the 147 dances he created are to become the property of the foundation, Mr. Tomlinson said, along with real estate and other assets, including works by artists like Jasper Johns and Alex Katz.

(Five Rauschenberg works that Mr. Taylor had owned were sold earlier for a total of $6.25 million to finance the operations of Paul Taylor American Modern Dance, an initiative to perform work by other choreographers that he announced in 2014.)

In many ways, Mr. Tomlinson said, the Taylor organization will proceed as usual, but some changes are possible. For instance, he said, Taylor dancers and other employees have traditionally worked without contracts. Now, Mr. Tomlinson said, the foundation may consider giving those people, including the 18 dancers in the Paul Taylor Dance Company and the six in the company known as Taylor 2, formal employment agreements.

Both companies are expected to remain largely intact, Mr. Tomlinson added. But even with that continuity, it remains to be seen how the company that bears Mr. Taylor’s his name will fare without the benefit of his presence and instruction.

“Once the master is gone things obviously change,” said Edward Villella, the New York City Ballet star who went on to become the founding artistic director of the Miami City Ballet. “A certain amount of trepidation is involved.”

Over the past couple of months, Mr. Novak said, he sought to soak up as much as he could from Mr. Taylor, making a series of early morning visits to his apartment on the Lower East Side to present and discuss his ideas for the 2019 and ’20 seasons.

In the future, he said, he plans to turn to other foundation veterans for assistance and guidance, including Bettie De Jong, the longtime rehearsal director and a former lead dancer; the associate rehearsal director, Michael Trusnovec, who just celebrated his 20th season as a dancer in the company; and the assistant to the artistic director, Andy LeBeau.

He will also be able to draw upon the Taylor organization’s Repertory Preservation Project. Mr. Tomlinson said Mr. Taylor began that effort in the early 1990s, using videotape and Labanotation, a method for recording dance movements on paper, to create an exacting record of how works were performed.

Since then, close to 100 dances have been videotaped, Mr. Tomlinson said, and many dozens described on paper. Mr. Novak will also be able to call upon past company members with experience in performing particular dances to help inform current members of the company.

Calling Mr. Taylor “a guide, a counselor, a rebel who wasn’t afraid to buck the trends and be different,” Mr. Novak said he had solicited his thoughts on programming and on running a company that maintains a sense of community.

During the morning meetings on the Lower East Side, he said, the two had discussed what outside choreographers the company might work with, how to create programs that combined dances with varying moods, and the importance of avoiding the expected.

About programming, Mr. Taylor told him “not to be too predictable and to keep the audience guessing,” Mr. Novak said. “He also told me to trust the dancers, and that they are much stronger and more resilient than people give them credit for.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Learning to Walk Without Paul Taylor. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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