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This as costumed in vanilla hues and Taylor’s ability to convey the nuances of Debussy is another part of his trunk loads of choreographic abilities. Unlike the second and third works on the program, I need to see it a second time for it to register enough to comment upon.

Funny Papers (1994)
Music: Novelty Tunes
Choreography: Sandra Stone; Mary Cochran; Hernando Cortez; David Greenle: Andrew Ames; Patrick Corbin Amended and combined by Paul Taylor
Costumes: Santo Loquasto
Lighting: Jennifer Tipton

Seven years down the road and Patrick Corbin is not only a senior company member, but the survivor of this zany collaboration, dressed in black and white jogging costumes by Loquasto.

This is a wonderfully silly enactment of creatures like Popeye, the Sailor Man, and Alley Oop, standard newspaper fare when I was trucking towards majority. Add to it, “ I like Bananas Because They Have No Bones,”“Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”, “I am Woman” plus “ The Okeh Laughing Record” and it provided the perfect filling, sandwiched between Debussy and Bach, with the American staples of mustard, catsup and luncheon meats. While utterly energetic, the slight exaggeration of movement and its frequent visual contradiction to the lyrics makes humorous points of the youthful talent to horse around. The sub-text about patter songs, the obsession for stylish health regimens and most any other type of American extravagance you can think of at the dawn of technology rampant is here immortalized at its most memorable ephemeral. It’s a very different take on “Oh, say can you see?”

Popeye’s vocal assurances aside, Robert Kleinendorst was continuously clobbered by his adversaries.

The Bikini bit was presented with Lisa Viola and Julie Tice, the pint-sized dancers in the company mincing steps, flipping wrists, swinging their heads abruptly and flipping their legs across the stage with devastating wit. Contrary to the lyrics, they remained fully clothed.

Musical Offering (1986)
Music: J.S. Bach
Orchestrated by Anton Webern and
Choreography: Paul Taylor
Sets and Costumes: Gene Moore
Lighting: Jennifer Tipton

If dance lovers and critics like to label profundity as “dense”, I ‘ll line up behind them after seeing Musical Offering for the first time. The most intricate of Bach elicited a monumental achievement by Paul Taylor, making visual sense of the repetitive waves of fugal sound. If Bach wanted to emphasize the omnipresence and glory of God, he certainly succeeded.

For me Taylor managed to evoke the Middle Ages. The movement and the primitive, devotional postures convey the feeling of the trudging pilgrim, an endless patterning like countless rosaries recited on cut stone floors with light filtering through high set windows. I kept thinking of the figures stitched into the Bayeux Tapestry, the nature of the fabric and the awareness of the stitchers responsible for the visual dynamics in telling the tale of 1066 and the capture of Albion by William the Norman. Gene Moore’s costumes with semi-fig like skits and near cinnamon-hued union suits evoke statues on Romanesque cathedrals and images of The Green Man lurking in the niches of English cathedrals. The nearly undeviating posture and weaving movements, diagonals and circles, speak not only of faith and holiness, endurance necessitated by crude living conditions, but of the once apparently seamless collective. Taylor’s capacity to suggest the sublime embedded in the crude cohabiting to the strains of Bach is almost unbelievable in its impact. As I left the theater I felt as if I had visited a sanctuary and my friend and I could not muster speech for several minutes.