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Inside the Wild Mind of Paul Taylor

The choreographer Paul Taylor at his Vandam Street townhouse in an undated photograph. “I don’t do autobiographical,” he once said. “I make up dreams.”Credit...Jack Mitchell/Getty Images

It was just a few minutes into Paul Taylor’s new dance, “Concertiana,” at his company’s Lincoln Center season in March. The dancer Michael Novak, standing at the back of the stage, snaked his arms above his head, then opened them and paused in silhouette: The sight of him was somehow both wistful and triumphant.

But then he advanced toward the stage lights with steady, almost predatory steps, and began to twist and bend his body into shapes — a stream of images from Mr. Taylor’s vast repertory. It was as if Mr. Novak had absorbed all of Mr. Taylor’s movement phrases into his body and was sending them out into the world, like a living flip book of dance history. At the same time, Mr. Taylor was relinquishing it and himself.

“Concertiana” was one of the most urgent and somber works that Mr. Taylor, who died last week at 88, had created in years. It seemed like the summation of his career; knowing that his health was failing, I had a feeling it would be his last dance. In May, Mr. Taylor decided to hand over his company’s artistic reins to Mr. Novak.

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Michael Novak in the premiere of “Concertiana” at Lincoln Center in March. The dance seemed like a summation of Mr. Taylor’s career.Credit...Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

I began interviewing Mr. Taylor in 1995, and talked with him (and his dancers) many times over the years. I realize I probably only scratched the surface of his singular, probing imagination, but that’s something. He would tease me relentlessly; that was fine. His amusement bought me time to ask another question. We talked about dance, of course, but we also talked about his life, his hobbies, his pets. I spent the most time in his drafty, nicotine-stained townhouse on Vandam Street, but I also visited him at his house in Mattituck, on Long Island, and in his sun-drenched apartment overlooking the East River, near his company’s studios.

He once told me that making dances was the only thing he was good at. I doubt that, but they taught me much: how not to get tricked by fashion, how not to turn away from the odd thing, how to watch more closely. He may have been a popular choreographer — all too rare in the modern dance world — but he never cared about making a trendy hit.

Mr. Taylor, who performed for Martha Graham and, briefly, for Merce Cunningham before forming his own company, was devoted to modern dance as an American art form. He embraced more sides of dance than his predecessors, and didn’t stick to creating any one kind. There were creepy pantomimes and pure-movement works with thrilling displays of petit allegro — sequences of small jumps — often performed at breakneck speed (and barefoot, no less), but his movement was never disjointed: It didn’t stop at the feet. Taylor dancers have the strongest, most supple backs in the business. They can also be funny or ugly, elegant or scary.

Mr. Taylor saw himself as an outsider. He lived in New York longer than anywhere else but told me — insistently — he never felt like a New Yorker. He woke each day at sunrise, had a pet pig for a time and smoked more cigarettes than a punk rocker. He loved “The Simpsons.” And he relished being alone. He seemed endlessly entertained by his own wild thoughts.

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Paul Taylor, top, and his company performing “Public Domain” in 1968.Credit...Jack Mitchell/Getty Images

Those thoughts and his vivid imagination translated to his choreography: Each Taylor program afforded a world of dance; if you didn’t like everything, well, that was just a reflection of the world. As dedicated as he was to form and structure, he was also a sharp social commentator, disdainful of the artificial. He wasn’t pretentious. He chose dancers that looked like people.

“I don’t do autobiographical,” he explained to me once.“I don’t really approve of that. I never thought about it until young people started getting onstage, and it’s supposed to be a dance concert and they kept telling us about their horrible mother or what a hard time they had and all of this true stuff, and I went: Oh, keep it to yourself. No, I don’t do that. I make up dreams.”

Dreaming was something he could do in Mattituck, where he owned an idyllic cottage on a cliff. Its living room overlooked the water, which, like one of Mr. Taylor’s dances, could create a dizzying multitude of sensations: tranquil, majestic, treacherous. When he described visiting the property in the 1970s for the first time, he said he didn’t so much as glance at the house, but headed down to the water and looked up and down the beach. He called it Robinson Crusoe land. The man who sold it to him, he said, did so because their astrology charts were in alignment.

Was it true? Maybe. Mr. Taylor liked to tell tales. His voice would take on a tone of deep assurance as he said things like, “No, really, I’m not pulling your leg,” but his stories were sometimes on the fishy side. He once told a journalist that he decided to make a dance to the Andrews Sisters after finding a record on the top of a trash can on the way to the studio. He tells the story in Matthew Diamond’s documentary, “Dancemaker” (1988), adding: “That’s a lie. I just said that to be funny. They printed it.”

A friend pointed out that you can’t mourn a man like Mr. Taylor because he left so much great work behind. You can miss him, though. The dances are one thing. His stories, like shared secrets, were glimpses of his mind; so were the art projects he did on the side. His Mattituck house was filled with them: handmade frames with mounted butterflies, crushed cans and footprints and handprints embellished with squashed bugs. I noted that in one you could still see all the bug’s guts. He gave me a wide-eyed “Yeah?” but looked immensely pleased.

My favorite of those art projects was one he called James, and described as “a trained circus mouse going through a hoop.” It was actually a petrified mouse jumping through a bracelet. He had found the mouse in the basement, “dead and frozen,” he said. “I didn’t have to stuff it or anything, it was, like, dry.”

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Mr. Taylor rehearsing his dancers in “Brief Encounters” in 2010.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Mr. Taylor frequently told me in a reassuring way — it always made me giggle — “I’m going to outlive everybody.” What drove him was his job, and that job was done in the studios with his handpicked dancers. I’m sure it wasn’t always easy for them, but the mere mention of their names always made his eyes light up. “They all have to do double duty — they do little parts and big parts, and it’s a very different kind of dancing, but good for them, and it’s necessary in this company,” he said. “We don’t have a star system. They’re all stars. That’s the way I think of them.”

In the many obituaries for Mr. Taylor, there is a line that keeps leaping out at me: He left no immediate survivors. That’s not true. He had more survivors than you could count on 15 hands. His dancers, more than 150 and counting — the company just held auditions — are his survivors.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Recalling a Dream Maker of Dance. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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