Gotham Diary:
The Rite of Spring
15 March 2013
There are many great things about the Paul Taylor season in New York, and far from the least of them is its occurring in March. It is truly a rite of spring.
And now the season is bigger than ever, with three weeks at the State Theatre. I’m trying to remember how long we’ve been going. Five years? Last year, for the first time, we went to three shows. This year, we’ll have gone to four. I just bought a pair of tickets for next Friday’s program. Kathleen came out of the theatre last night dying to see Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal) again, and, when we got home, I saw that it would be given once more. We’ll also be going to both the afternoon and evening performances tomorrow (Sacre not included). “Do you think that anyone goes to everything?” Kathleen asked last night. There are certainly lots of people who go to more than four shows. We heard a guy tell his mom last night (they weren’t sitting together; he stopped by to say hi) that he’d already been four times and would be coming again the next night.
Every year, I try to get a little closer to explaining the greatness of Paul Taylor’s dances and the dancers whom he has trained to dance them. I realized last night, as I sat through Esplanade, that there is something eucharistic about this most beloved of Paul Taylor’s works. “Eucharistic” isn’t really the word; it signifies “thanksgiving.” But what’s supposed to happen in the Catholic Eucharist — that’s what happens to me in Esplanade. I am filled with the body and the spirit of youthfulness. My body might appear to remain seated in its age and bloat, but inside I am something else, and this is not a matter of imagining what it might be like to be young in a way that I myself never was. Nor do I imagine being able to leap and run with the élan of Michelle Fleet. I’m not imagining anything. Watching this dance allows me to participate in it on what, for lack of a better word, I’ll call a eucharistic footing.
The three works on the bill were Sacre, Last Look, and Esplanade. Last Look was new to us. We were both initially put off by the zombie note struck by the company of shaking and jerking dancers, but Kathleen later told me that she decided to attend to the “interesting moves” and ignore the intimations of Armageddon. I remained disturbed, not least because I thought that the dance might be upsetting her. Donald York’s score, composed for the dance, is lush and dreamlike, and I’d like to hear it on its own rather more than I’d like to see the dance again. Last Look seems to be Paul Taylor’s interpretation of the Masque of the Red Death trope. Although the men wear matching greenish shirts and trousers (and black shoes) that have the air of work clothes, the women are robed in satiny, jewel-toned dresses with wide sashes and ankle bracelets. The set, also by Alex Katz, is an assemblance of mirrored pillars. I took the setting to be the last redoubt of a doomed, self-destructive civilization: this is very much a dance for climate-change worriers. From the very beginning, the dancers appear to be dying horrible deaths. They rise from the floor, heave about wretchedly, and collapse. In lesser hands, it would be a bad joke of “modern dance.” But Taylor manages to pull a few coherent dances out of the shambles, even if the prospect of dying is never deflected. (In one duet, Amy Young and Michael Trusnovec become fixated with pulling their clothes away from their clavicles, as if they burned.) Even if not the sort of thing that I cross town to see, Last Look is unquestionably a powerful dance.
I’ve never seen anything like Le Sacre du Printempts (The Rehearsal). I’m tempted to throw up my hands and say that it has everything. It’s, I think, the most narrative Paul Taylor dance that I’ve seen, and yet it is wholly abstract. It moves so quickly that you have no time to wonder what’s going on or what’s going to happen. The use of the two-piano reduction of Stravinsky’s score (precisely what a ballet company would use to rehearse the work) prompted me to see that Paul Taylor is a chamber choreographer, not a symphonist. Limited to the sound of the pianos, moreover, the music’s more lurid and terrifying effects are canceled, leaving the extraordinary rhythmic complexity of this epochal composition to convey its distilled impact.
While a dance company rehearses over in one corner, a mother loses her baby to a gun moll in the other, and the wrong man is apprehended for the kidnapping and incarcerated. The crook who keeps the gun moll has a sidekick — a trouser role. The ballet company men double as cops. Silent movies, Nijinsky, Charlie Chan, and a sort of all-purpose obscure Greek mythiness combine — along with many other influences too glancing for me to have caught them — in a dance in which high and low forms of entertainment do not so much alternate as interpenetrate. The result is delightful, but too compelling to be amusing. I doubt that any stage work has held my attention so firmly, and by this I mean that my attention was held so firmly that it was not free to make judgments. Neurons flashed in my brain (“Charlie Chan!”), but there was no thinking. The bereft mother and the wrong man (Laura Halzack and Michael Trusnovec) have a lovely duet while he’s in jail — and who cares what that means. Later, when the baby, having been recovered, is stabbed in an offhand way by a sidekick (who has just stabbed herself), the audience actually laughs. It’s so jokey — and yet! The mother gives way to dance of mad grief that is at the same time astonishing and exactly what Ms Halzack will have led the seasoned attendee to expect. A very beautiful woman, slightly too elegant to be a femme fatale, Ms Halzack is nevertheless capable of such abandon that you fear she might turn out to be Coppélia, and start popping gears and springs all over the stage. I, too, and dying to see Taylor’s take on Sacre again.
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