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The Paul Taylor Dance Company in Doug Varone’s Half Life<\/em>. Photo: Paul B. Goode<\/p><\/div>\n I think I finally got it straight: Paul Taylor American Modern Dance is a presenting organization and the Paul Taylor Dance Company is one of the organizations it presents and for which it commissions new work. (There. That wasn\u2019t hard, was it?) During its ongoing season at Lincoln Center\u2019s former New York State Theater, PTAMD in collaboration with the American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina is presenting a program titled Icons. On it, Sara Mearns, a superb principal dancer with New York City Ballet, performs an assemblage of Isadora Duncan\u2019s solos; members of the Trisha Brown Dance Company appear in her 1983 Set and Reset<\/em>, and Taylor\u2019s own company dances his own iconic Esplanade <\/em>(1975). Doug Varone\u2019s new Half Life<\/em>, on the other hand, was commissioned for the Paul Taylor Dance Company, in part by the Harkness Foundation for Dance.<\/p>\n It\u2019s always fascinating to see Taylor dancers, grown wise in his style, attack another choreographer\u2019s work. In a program essay by Robert Johnson, Varone said his goal with the dancers was \u201cgetting them to be the energy, rather than be people creating the energy.\u201d Of course, they are<\/em> the people creating the energy, but the point, I think, is that you can\u2019t discern what they want. Where are they going when they race offstage, and coming from when they return?<\/p>\n Doug Varone’s Half Life<\/em>. Paul Taylor’s dancers (L to R): Sean Mahoney, Eran Bugge, Parisa Khobdeh, Heather McGinley, and George Smallwood. Photo: Paul B. Goode<\/p><\/div>\n The stage is their grim playground. They rush on and off, cluster, form an occasional line. They collapse, hurtle to the ground, roll, spring up. Collisions are inevitable. A few movements appear again and again: shrugging a shoulder, as if to get something off it, or raising palms in a manner that suggests, \u201cback off\u201d or \u201cleave me alone.\u201d This is indeed a half life\u2014an endless cycle of one person pushing another away in passing, or yanking another off the floor and maybe into an uncomfortable relationship, or shoving into a space within the group. These twelve people, dressed by Liz Prince in shades of blue and purple clothes that don\u2019t look \u201cdesigned,\u201d thrust their way through Varone\u2019s scrimmages, never finding an unobstructed way to live. They fall into a line stretching from the front of the stage to the back, as if sucked there, but within seconds, the line is fractured by their individual tantrums.<\/p>\n You can follow one dancer for a while. Parisa Khobdeh\u2019s long lashing black hair catches your attention, or Michael Trusnovec\u2019s expert way of avoiding collisions. Eran Bugge may be lifted high. Pauses occur. Julia Wolfe\u2019s score, played by the Orchestra of St. Luke\u2019s and conducted by David La Marche, batters against the performer, falls silent, rises in pitch, drops into a deep shaking. Lighting designer James F. Ingalls overhangs the stage with horizontal rows of lights\u2014one at first, the rest accumulating until they form a bright, harsh ceiling. In the end, the white backcloth slowly puddles down to the floor, and the rows of lights begin to descend too, flickering as they go.<\/p>\n Paul Taylor’s Mercuric Tidings<\/em>: Michael Trusnovec and Laura Halzack. Photo: Paul B. Goode<\/p><\/div>\n This program began with Taylor\u2019s gentle, fragrant 1985 Roses<\/em> and ended with his 1982 Mercuric Tidings. <\/em> Mercuric indeed! Jamie Rae Walker, Michael Apuzzo, Christina Lynch Markham, and Madelyn Ho got a rest after Roses<\/em>, but Michelle Fleet, Khobdeh, Michael Novak, Heather McGinley, George Smallwood, Lee Duveneck, and Alex Clayton spent intermission wiping off the sweat, fixing their hair, and getting into Gene Moore\u2019s pink outfits (the men bare-chested) for another kind of fray. James Samson replaced Trusnovec. I\u2019m telling you all their names, because Mercuric Tidings <\/em>is also a killer work, if a happier one. Excerpts from Franz Schubert\u2019s first and second symphonies set the valiant performers jumping, leaping, skittering, skipping, and hitting their legs together mid-air. Encyclopedias tell of the planet Mercury\u2019s eccentric orbit and the tidal forces that influence, and perhaps Taylor was once interested in such matters. I, however, cherish his way with what appear to be human eccentricities. Fleet, for instance, seems to be a kind of governess to the other women\u2014now joining them in their unison dances and hand-in-hand lines, now standing off to one side scrutinizing them, making sure they frame or orbit\u2014but don\u2019t bother\u2014 Halzack and Samson\u2019s exuberant lovemaking.<\/p>\n I have no idea how Taylor chooses the works he extracts from the annals of modern dance, but Isadora Duncan\u2019s early solos and Trisha Brown\u2019s Set and Reset<\/em> share one quality: free flow. Although Duncan drew her imagery from Pre-Raphaelite paintings and ancient Greek statues, she moved through their poses\u2014a free spirit in her semi-transparent tunics. Her sense of nature and the natural were a surprise to dance audiences of the early twentieth century. The dancers in Set and Reset<\/em>, one of the works Brown categorized as \u201cunstable molecular structures,\u201d don\u2019t reassure your eyes with positions. Movement travels circuitously through their bodies and streams from their fingertips and softly flung up legs. Duncan is heroic, as well as a sensuous wanderer in imagined wind and water, with the music of Romantic composers to buoy her up. Those performing Brown\u2019s choreography execute extraordinary movement with everyday demeanor, taking pleasure in the task, but not dramatizing it.<\/p>\n Sara Mearns in Isadora Duncan’s “Narcissus” waltz. Photo: Darial Sneed<\/p><\/div>\n Lori Belilove, the director of the Isadora Dance Foundation and Company, created an anthology of Duncan solos and coached Mearns in them. She herself learned these from her early studies with two of Duncan\u2019s six adopted daughters, Anna and Irma, and from their immediate generation of pupils. Of the ten short dances in this suite, seven are set to piano pieces by Frederick Chopin, two to waltzes by Johannes Brahms, and one to Franz Lizst\u2019s Les Funerailles. <\/em>Belilove\u2019s choices, beginning with Chopin\u2019s Prelude, Op. 28, No. 4, move from a blissful anticipation to love and wilder or darker aspects of life.<\/p>\n The only things that marred the suite slightly for me were a less than graceful coral tunic that Mearns wore and an odd little platform on which she began and didn\u2019t use again. One musical selection was taken at a speed that I think Isadora would have avoided. However, these are minor quibbles. Mearns has always been able to endow her ballet roles with a certain earthiness when that is desirable, and channeling Duncan, she uses that pliant sense of weight with increasing confidence as the suite progresses. She has learned that Duncan\u2019s joyous skips often skimmed the earth rather than escaping its pull and that when she lifted her arms to the heavens, they seemed to hold a generous offering.<\/p>\n A gleaming grand piano sits at one side of the stage, and Cameron Grant, the New York City Ballet\u2019s masterful pianist, plays the music marvelously. Mearns occasionally alludes to him when the choreography brings her close to the piano. Occasionally, she exits, and he plays on, or the lights go out. The dances that she performs\u2014barefoot, of course\u2014may involve a scarf or a dark-colored overdress or rose petals grasped and scattered, and the moods shift subtly, as does Rob Brown\u2019s lighting design. At some point, a dark backcloth descends.<\/p>\n Mearns may perform seated, as she does in Chopin\u2019s \u201cNarcissus\u201d Waltz (Op. 64, No. 2), or reclining. Mazurkas bring out the boldness or the gaiety in her, especially the one subtitled \u201cGypsy\u201d (Op. 68, No. 2). Others are steeped in melancholy. True to Isadora\u2019s spirit, she seems sometimes to see something offstage or above her\u2014something to implore, cherish, or flee\u2014but Mearns performs these moments with admirable restraint. The two Brahms waltzes are particularly poignant, following, as they do, the deep, shuddering tones and somber mood of Les Funerailles. <\/em>They come from a period when Duncan was in love, and love\u2019s tempestuous aspect is expressed in Op. 13, No. 14 and its lulling sweetness in the familiar No. 15. Mearns, her long hair flying, her body in tune with the music and the style, deserves her standing ovation.<\/p>\n An earlier cast of Trisha Brown’s dancers in her Set and Reset. <\/em>Photo: Julieta Cervantes<\/p><\/div>\n Despite my words about flow, Set and Reset <\/em>begins with a sharply outlined image that I have always thought of as a witty goodbye to what Brown called her \u201cequipment pieces.\u201d Three of the six dancers carry a fourth overhead. She\u2019s lying on her side, flat as a board, and appearing to walk along invisible walls. Her position and our view of her echo Brown\u2019s 1971 Walking on the Wall<\/em>, in which dancers mounted ladders, hooked themselves into halters on ropes, and, attached to tracks mounted on the ceiling of the Whitney Museum, journeyed along a gallery\u2019s two walls.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the piece’s most enduring stable image. Everything else in it flickers: the black-and-white newspaper images in the Robert Rauschenberg collages that are projected onto three three-dimensional structures; the fluttering, translucent Rauschenberg costumes imprinted with the same kind of images; and the tall, transparent curtains flanking the stage\u2019s wings, which occasionally billow in the wind of the entrances and exits. We see the dancers through a scrim as they cross from one side of the stage to another. Before the structures rise to hang above the dancing, their constantly shifting collages and the voices in Laurie Anderson\u2019s \u201cLong Time No See\u201d constitute an overture that wakes up our eyes for what is to come.<\/p>\n Rauschenberg also collaborated with Beverly Emmons in designing the lighting that illuminates the dancers who perform Set and Reset. <\/em>The fine current cast comprises Cecily Campbell, Marc Crousillat, Kimberly Fulmer, Leah Ives, Jamie Scott, and Sam Wentz. Their collisions and near collisions happen as if impelled by an uncertain breeze. Unison, as when Ives and Scott (as I recall), briefly dance the same steps, is rare. The organism that the dancer form and reconstitute is as flexible as their bodies and the complex ripples of movement that pass through them. Such beauty!<\/p>\n Paul Taylor’s Esplanade<\/em>. Michelle Fleet jumps over (L to R): James Sansom, Eran Bugge, Michael Apuzzo, Parisa Khobdeh, Robert Kleinendorst, and Jamie Rae Walker. Photo: Paul B. Goode<\/p><\/div>\n It seemed to me that some members of the current cast of Esplanade <\/em>perform it as if they loved it too much. But nothing can detract from the almost risky glee that Taylor built into this 1975 work, set to sections of two of J.S. Bach\u2019s violin concertos: women launching themselves into the air and across distances to be caught by partners at the last minute; people skidding across the floor and plunging down to it. If you look carefully, you may notice that most of the steps are smartened up versions of what we do every day: walk forward and backward at various speeds, crawl on our hands and knees, run, fall, roll over, jump to avoid a puddle. The dance is an icon in terms of Taylor\u2019s genius, but it touches something basic that we all understand in our own bodies, which is also true of Duncan\u2019s transformed simplicity.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Paul Taylor American Modern Dance at Lincoln Center through March 25th. I think I finally got it straight: Paul Taylor American Modern Dance is a presenting organization and the Paul Taylor Dance Company is one of the organizations it presents and for which it commissions new work. (There. That wasn\u2019t hard, was it?) During its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5656,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[275,109],"tags":[2936,475,1224,2582,2029,2473,1825,2032,688,617,2625,2766,1924,2935,1507,2943,1333,2580,2581,2031,2042,662,2575,1110,2030,111,2942,141,2764],"class_list":{"0":"post-5610","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-classic-modern-dance","8":"category-contemporary-dance","9":"tag-alex-clayton","10":"tag-beverly-emmons","11":"tag-cecily-campbell","12":"tag-george-smallwood","13":"tag-heather-mcginley","14":"tag-isadora-duncan","15":"tag-james-f-ingalls","16":"tag-james-samson","17":"tag-jamie-rae-walker","18":"tag-jamie-scott","19":"tag-julia-wolfe","20":"tag-kimberly-fulmer","21":"tag-leah-ives","22":"tag-lee-duveneck","23":"tag-liz-prince","24":"tag-lori-belilove","25":"tag-marc-crousillat","26":"tag-michael-apuzzo","27":"tag-michael-novak","28":"tag-michelle-fleet","29":"tag-orchestra-of-st-lukes","30":"tag-parisa-khobdeh","31":"tag-paul-taylor-american-modern-dance","32":"tag-paul-taylor-dance-company","33":"tag-robert-kleinendorst","34":"tag-robert-rauschenberg","35":"tag-sam-wentz","36":"tag-sara-mearns","37":"tag-trisha-brown-dance-company","38":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5610"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5712,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5610\/revisions\/5712"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/HalfLife_4057_print.jpg\")
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