Gotham Diary:
The Company in 2013
18 March 2013

Head shots of the sixteen members of the Paul Taylor Dance Company appear at the head of every program, arranged in order of seniority. Without ever appearing to prevail over the demands of art, seniority is honored by the company, so that, after a dance such as To Make the Crops Grow, in which there are no leading roles, the curtain call unfolds in reverse seniority, with the most senior dancer appearing last. It is very much in the nature of things that the senior dancers are virtuosos who have bent themselves over the years to the company’s aesthetic; it follows that they take most of the leads until it is time to retire. The junior dancers occupy a more provisional plane, and provide the company with its corps. Star power varies widely, and at least one junior dancer, Laura Halzack, has been a company star for years. (She is not much of a junior anymore, at tenth in seniority.)

This year, when the curtain went up, I found that I knew who everybody was. Even Robert Kleinendorst’s name was ready on my tongue; I no longer stumbled along with Kleindorst, Kleinendorf, Kleinfuhrt, whatnot. I have admired this dancer for a long time, but only now can I say his name without thinking. This puts me in the all-but-outermost ring of Taylor aficionados.

I even knew who George Smallwood was, because I’d never seen him before and that made him unique. Mr Smallwood seems stout for a member of the company, but he is very strong and very, very fast. He shone excitingly in the two Bach ballets that we saw on Saturday, Cascade and Brandenburgs. Heather McGinley had a lovely pas de deux (with James Samson) in To Make the Crops Grow, and was striking in Cascade as well, although it may be that I was simply captivated by her coppery hair. (Someone who knows something about dancing I am not.) As the Rehearsal Mistress in Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal), she was dressed like a cossack out of Nutcracker and hardly got to dance at all, but she was adept at playing Amy Young’s mirror image. I never see enough of Michael Novak, probably because he reminds me of the dancer at the top of the roster (we’ll get to him in due course) and I like to look for differences. One thing that he shares is the ability to define his position as the correct one. He radiates an inner authority that explains his outer comportment. Aileen Roehl is one of the company’s two blondes, both of them among the shorter dancers; she has yet to make a strong impression on me — which, let me hasten to say, simply attests to my ignorance. Michael Apuzzo hardly appeared last Thursday night but was much in evidence on Saturday, a strong and enthusiastic member of the corps as well as a convincing actor in one of Crops’s unattractive roles. As The Stooge in Sacre Thursday night, Jamie Rae Walker stepped out of the obscurity in which (for me) Ms Roehl still languishes; the Stooge is a great part, calling for much fancy footlery and comic timing, and Ms Walker’s performance made me squeal (inwardly) with delight.

With Laura Halzack, I come to the dancers who have been with the company as long as I’ve been going to performances. I’m not going to blather on about Ms Hazlack’s talent as a dancer (which is obviously amazing); it’s her skill as a fascinator that fascinates me. I said the other day that she is slightly too elegant to be femme fatale; there is a regal reserve about her person even when she is in the throes of a dance of madness. But she makes a grand diva, managing to poke fun at herself with a perfectly straight face, as her performance in Gossamer Gallants reminded me. “I wonder what she is really like,” and I would be tonguetied if I were in a position to ask her to go out on a date. Or even to autograph my program. Francisco Graciano, the shortest of the men, jumps higher, perhaps for this reason, than anyone else, and I wish I could remember the number (one of the Cascade dances?) in which he was allowed to show this off, to delightful effect. Eran Bugge always surprises me by the depth of grace with which she responds to the spotlight, which for some reason or other doesn’t seem to fall on her as often as it might. Sean Mahoney clearly gave up working on a pirate ship in order to become a dancer — perhaps he had a miraculous way of walking the plank. He is the company’s wild man, master of a dangerous-looking simian lope that the choreographer takes full advantage of. Mr Mahoney is a kind of counterweight to Mr Novak (not to mention the guy at the top), because, even if nothing that he does is ever wrong, he makes it seem dubious. Parisa Khodeh is growing on me; I no longer grouse when she takes a part that I’d have liked to see Laura Halzack dance. Michelle Fleet is easily dealt with: she owns Esplanade at the moment; she also danced a lovely, highly classical pas de deux in Cascade. Everything that she and Ms Khobdeh do is lovely and wonderful.

With the retirement of Annamaria Mazzini two years ago, James Samson‘s photograph moved to the top row in the program. Mr Samson is tall and athletic, and he projects an air of having developed his chops as a dancer as a fluke. And yet no one is more earnest. Robert Kleinendorst is the dancer who intrigues me the most, because he seems to be as wild as Mr Mahoney, and yet he also seems to have bottled his wildness up, so that it is under pressure and about to burst forth. Consider the startling death by gunfire t the end of the solo in Company B, which I’m sorry we didn’t get to see this season. I’m not sure that we should have seen Mr Kleinendorst if we had, however, because he never danced everything that he was billed to do. In two of the programs, there were substitution notes — in Cascade, Michael Novak took over one of his dances (but only the one); on Saturday night, he appeared, as listed, at the beginning of Brandenburgs but was replaced by Francisco Graciano in the remainder. I hope that he has not injured himself! Amy Young, like Ms Mazzini before her, dances as if she were simply the expression of Paul Taylor’s will. More than any other dancer in the company, she embodies the Taylor dedication to representing utterly carefree play.

Michael Trusnovec, who has been with the company since 1998 — an astonishing fifteen years after which he seems none the worse for wear (speaking of miracles!) — can do anything, but the thing that only he can do is to become Apollo himself onstage. I don’t mean that he impersonates Apollo; he simply is the god himself. I would never want to suggest that there is anything remotely niggardly about Mr Trusnovec’s deployment of resources, but Kathleen and I agree that he moves with a perfectly measured and atomically minute understanding of the requirements of his part. On Thursday evening, he covered for Mr Kleinendorst in Esplanade, so that for the first time ever we saw him dance three leads in a row. He was Ms Fleet’s partner in the Cascade pas de deux, and she became for the moment a goddess.

***

We’ll be going back on Friday night to see Sacre again; I’ve seriously considered going on Tuesday as well, to see Lost, Found and Lost again. I was in love with this dance before anybody even moved. The curtain went up on a bright box of light, peopled with black-clad dancers in comfortable tops and trousers — and shoes — and everybody, even the men, was coiffed with jeweled net, which conveyed the impression of a hood ornament on some fantastical old limousine. The dancers were arranged about the stage in attitudes of fashion, and that is what they moved in and out of as the dance progressed. Nonchalant elegance alternated with brusque boredom and the occasional tantrum as these incarnations of stylish mid-century Manhattan swam through the extraordinary music, a soup of a score listed as “Elevator music orchestrated by Donald York.” To me, it was simply Mantovani, whom I, much to my shame, was wild about at the age of eleven; for the moment, I know what I’m talking about. Donald York evidently took a great deal of trouble to counterfeit the old maestro’s shimmering layers of violin, and he knew precisely when to throw in a solo on the muted brass. Imagine the biggest Fifth Avenue shopwindow ever, dressed by someone as smart as Simon Doonan in a retro mode. Lost, Found and Lost is the most delicious fun that I’ve ever had at Paul Taylor.