© John Ross 'Airs' reviews 'In The Beginning' reviews 'Piazzolla Caldera' reviews Nevjinsky in reviews LeBeau in reviews recent Paul Taylor reviews more Eric Taub reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months)

Airs is one of Taylor's sunnier works, as opposed to his delightfully darker ones. While much of the dancing is rollicking, high-energy gambolling and frolicking, Airs is nevertheless shaped by Taylor's adagio imagery: men sinking slowly to their knee, offering up a hand to their partners, or the calm pacing of the ensemble behind Nevjinsky's radiant solo. The lovely score sundry and familiar Bach excerpts, and Gene Moore's timeless costumes short, ribbed skirts for the women, tights and bare chests for the men, and, especially, the soft luminosity of Jennifer Tipton's lighting, create a place of timeless, ethereal calm not unlike that of, say, Symphonic Variations, although the scale is less Olympian: not gods, but godly people exploring a sacred grove.

And these real dancers are stunning. While some recent incarnations of this company have left me wistful for the magnificent group Taylor fielded in Seventies, not this one. The men, in this case Richard Chen See, Andy LeBeau, and Orion Duckstein, are all muscular if not beefy in the finest Taylor tradition, and move with that mixture of great strength and energy seasoned with an inimitable, muscle-bound artlessness which sometimes borders on clumsiness (except it's not at all; just another of Taylor's magic contradictions). The women, in addition to Nevjinsky, the distant yet perky Lisa Viola, Amy Young and Paris Khobdeh, come in various sizes and shapes, but they're all fearless and unfettered. They don't just jump, they fly. I've never seen Airs performed with such bravura in the fast (and even some of the slow) bits. Khobdeh and Chen See played their fiendish gliding and leaping duet, in which each playfully tries to out-do the other, as a kind of barefoot Tarantella (I mean Balanchine's sizzling and puffy romp, not an actual folk dance). Taylor's playful approach to tempi, and time, was never more apparent than in Viola's and Duckstein's rendition of their double duet, in which Duckstein repeatedly scoops up Viola after she plummets backwards to the stage like a peripatetic limbo dancer, finishing with Viola literally standing on his hips, cantilevered outward as he clutches one of her arms, the other stretching into space. They do this first allegro, and it's breathtaking, and then, immediately after, as an adagio, and it's even more so.
 

Paul Taylor's In the Beginning
© John Ross

I'd always thought it would be a Good Thing to declare a moratorium on dances which use Carl Orff's Carmina Burana (they're almost always unwatchable), and had some misgivings seeing that Taylor used parts of that, as well as Orff's Der Mond, in the new (to New York) In the Beginning. Although this could easily be taken as little more than a witty and irreverent look at Adam and Eve's loss of innocence, and banishment from the Garden of Eden, as with many of Taylor's ostensibly comic and light works, there's a darker side just below the surface. Here, Jehovah, danced by Andy LeBeau, in vaguely biblical black robes and headgear (by Santo Loquasto), creates the world, and summons forth Adam and Eve (first danced by Nevjinsky and Kleinendorst, with more and more dancers to come, all listed in the program as Adam and Eve) with peremptory flicks of his fingers. There's no need for a snake in Taylor's garden Eve has no trouble procuring her own apple, tempting and teasing Kleinendorst with it, until she presents it to him with herself as the table. After a happy interlude ("Naked and Not Ashamed") led by the remarkable Annmaria Mazzini (more of her in a bit), the various Adams and Eves discover their nakedness is indeed shameworthy. There's an amusing patch of begetting which brings to mind the old joke about how there's a woman giving birth every minute ("I wouldn't want to be her!"), then they're driven from the Garden of Eden by Jehovah. The utter terror with which they cower before him is at once comic (Jehovah is rather fond of a remonstrative wagging of his finger) and disturbing (the dancers shrink from his gaze as if cut by a scythe, and tremble in paroxysms of fear). Despite Taylor's winking at the predicatments of his protagonists, something of the awful and terrifying nature of the Old Testament's God nonetheless peeks through. The flight from Eden, in which the mourning men protect and comfort the grieving women, literally carrying them on their backs offstage in procession recalling the westward march of the settlers in Eugene Loring's Billy the Kid, except, here, in reverse. That it came after so much humor and terror made this quiet poignancy all the more moving. Finally, in a section called "Unto Dust Returned," a somewhat less confrontational Jehovah (now in white) welcomes the contrite mortals to, well, it's not quite clear, but I left wondering why Jehovah had been so eager to banish these poor folk, only to relent after their (assumed) deaths? It's one of the points I think Taylor could have been making, and I much prefer his delicate presentation of ideas (so delicate you think you've thought of them yourself) to the more heavy-handed and authoritarian approach of, say, Neumeier's recent Nijinsky on this same stage. (I wonder, does Sylvia Nevjinsky get tired of saying, "No, it's spelled differently, and, besides, he was a ballet dancer?")

Taylor's crowd-pleasing and mesmerizing Piazzolla Caldera closed the program. I've always admired how brilliantly Taylor creates an appropriately smoldering sensuality here, reflecting the same in Astor Piazzolla's hypnotic tangos, without using tango steps (other than a few very generic ballroom positions). The twining limbs, dramatic lifts and tosses and melodramatic poses scream "tango," even when they're not. It's like his Offenbach Overtures, in which he prefers to create his own Ruritanian folk dances, rather than anything as familiar as a mazurka. Fokine would have been proud. Piazzolla has become a staple of the Taylor repertory, and I've seen it several times, but never with the sizzling and seamy energy of last night. It's not just the spectacular dancing which creates Piazzolla's atmosphere of "lilies and urine," (as the program note quotes Pablo Neruda), but also Santo Loquasto's ultra-macho costumes for the men, tight trousers and vests over bare chests (has any modern-dance company been so buff?), or the women's flowery and blowzy dresses, seamed stockings and heels (you can almost smell the cheap perfume). Loquasto's set, a maze of hanging, bare-bulbed lights completes the low-rent atmosphere that this is a place where only the slight civilization of dancing keeps animal passions at bay, and only partially. Here, Annmaria Mazzini, a comparative newcomer to the company, shone. Blonde and compact, she's got the weightiness of many Taylor dancers, and her luxuriant sensuality and exuberance drag your eye to her, wherever she is onstage. Lisa Viola was deadpan and death-defying in a short, acrobatic duet with Robert Kleinendorst, and the obligatory mano-a-mano tango, seething with testosterone and hostility, was perhaps never better delivered than by Richard Chen See and Andy LeBeau, especially the surprise kick to the groin. Ouch! This section sometimes drags, but not this time! Looking very much like Patrick Corbin, Taylor's current lead dancer (who didn't appear Sunday night), Michael Trusnovec tried gamely to tame Nevjinsky, or was it the other way around? It's not unfitting that this dance ends with the ensemble collapsed onstage I felt the need to light up afterwards, and I don't even smoke.

I honestly did not expect to be so completely blown away by the dancing Sunday night. Not being the sort to let any silver lining pass without an attendant cloud, my great joy was leavened with sadness at again noting that this greatest living choreographer could no longer afford live music (he'd once had quite a talented, if small, orchestra), and that the young, smart, artsy crowd was, for the most part, staying away in droves. The audience was respectable, but rather gray-haired. Well, kids today, they just don't know what they're missing.