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Paul Taylor Dance CompanyMarch 2004 San Francisco, Yerba Buena Theatre by Renee Renouf |
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Runes (1975)
Music: Gerald Busby
What Runes has going for it is a moon for a backdrop, a moon which changes location slowly, from stage left to right as the dancers weave their hand signals and perform the choreographic patterns before it. That moon never waxes or wanes,so we get full moon rites at their most cogent. The curtain rises on a prone body. Trios enter and approach it with identical postures, first one side and then the other of the body, a sextette with arms held in downward parallel fashion, a stylized version of a digging gesture. "Ah," you think to yourself, "The ritual for the dead." Except that the dead body gets up and joins a ceremonial circle. Even though there is a body on the floor again at the end, and you have seen secret signs with the hands throughout, what I mostly remember is the shadowy nature of the ensemble, that moon, and Taylor's gifted way of suggesting secret communication with gestures. Dante Variations (premiere)
Music: Gyorgy Ligeti
Lisa Viola; Silvia Nevjinsky; Michael Trusnovec; Annamaria Mazzini; Robert Kleinendorst; Julie Tice; James Samson; Michelle Fleet; Parisa Khobdeh; Sean Mahoney The curtain rises on a heap of people, a wonderful arrangement of postures, if emblematic of resignation, despair, the image of collective destitution. I don't know which layer of The Inferno it refers to, but Taylor with a few short, highly active variations conveys the repetitive fate of a few of it inhabitants. Loquasto has dressed them in the usual unitard, skillfully painted, the colors a range of broken pots, and Tipton has given them lighting with an appreciable murky quality. There is a single woman who is groping for human contact, butis perpetually alone or ignored. She goes prone with despair, only to be lifted by three men who place her body first on one man's back, then another man's chest, like one of those grotesque images of the sun with feet and hands at the end of its pointed rays. And so they proceed to bear her off stage. Another woman is destined to jump, roll and hop side to side with her hands tied behind her back. It was mesmerizing to see her skinny them so that they were in front of her, where she proceeded to hop over and back of the white tie, to find herself in the same dilemma once more. Then there was the man with a piece of toilet paper attached to the toe of his left foot, sufficiently long that it sent gutsy chortles from the balcony where I was sitting. He tries desperately to appear come il faut, with classic postures and noble attitudes, but there is always that streak of paper to mar the glacially correct facade. A woman in a group is persuaded to be blind-folded, and does she get the business for her trust! There is pushing and shoving between a downstage right group and another in the center, and, of course, when she reaches out, people elude her, heading for stage right exit, where she gropes to follow. It's enough to make you hate group dynamics. Then Lisa Viola comes on stage, the eternal frisky, enticing female prancing and moving around only as Viola can. She is joined on stage by Michael Trousnovec, a blond young man, slightly taller than Patric Corbin, who stands with an arm reaching out, the upper half clued to his side, like "I want you, but I don't dare." An amazing display of masculine energy follows, in turn replaced by the intriguing circles, feints and maneuvers before hand to hand contact occurs. But this contact, naturally for the location, is not a harmonious event, it is an attack, a contest, a battle, mostly against self by Trousnovec, and sassy self-defense by Viola, rough coupling indeed before they depart, in opposite direcitons. One of most telling is the trio with Silvia Nevjinsky, Michael Toursnovec and Julie Tice are the struggle alternates between two women against one man and two women fighting over one man, all like one of those precise hexagonal puzzles one tries to take apart or put back together. The fact that one is African American lent a further dimension to the labored contact, leading to a variety of speculations. Finally the stage is filled with all the characters in various locations, shivering their way through their obcessive habits, gradually collapsing into that heap once more. From heap to heap, using the Ligeti adaption of Musica ricercata for the barrel organ, the music supplied an aptly offbeat underpinning for the bizarre punishments performed in Dante's Inferno. Arden Court (1981)
Music: William Boyce
Richard Chen See; Andy LeBeau; Heather Berest; Michael Trusnovec; Annamaria Massini; Orioni Duckstein; Amy Young; Robert Kleinendorst; James Samson Dancing before an enormous pink rose, Taylor paid an additional tribute to the Baroque and the Age of Enlightenment where all the men were gallant and upright, eyes on the far horizon, shoulders squared, step purposeful and frequently ones of great panache, just occasionally tolerant of the women who hovered around them and even more rarely remarkably inclusive and aware of the feelings they generated.
Aided by two diagonal strips of light, stripped to the waist, and arms in what I call the salute to the sun, men executed jetes with a passe rising to greet the outstretched leg, a horrendously virtuosic step, running strides like a swimmer in contest with the water, darting little jetes - all a paean to the Western rational ideal of the masculine. Even with the clinging and circling of one woman, or the rapt expression of another, the lifts, the picture is delightful, definitely sly in spots, and very much an exposition of the formative conventions of Western male-female behavior and deportment.
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