From giddy heights, to depraved lows
NEW YORK Paul Taylor, a towering figure in American modern dance who, in a career that spanned more than six decades, created a vast body of work that reflected both the giddy highs and the depraved lows of the human condition, has died. He was 88.
Spokeswoman Lisa Labrado said Taylor died Wednesday at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. Labrado said Taylor was in hospice care and died of renal failure.
Taylor kept working well into his 80s, venturing into his company’s Manhattan studios from his Long Island home to choreograph two new pieces a year, and 147 in all.
“The works that satisfy me the most? They’re the ones I’m working on,” he said in a 2011 interview, while rehearsing To Make Crops Grow, his 137th dance.
“It’s the work process that I like. Once it’s done, I want to put everything out of my mind. I’d rather forget it.”
The Paul Taylor Dance Company is one of the world’s most successful contemporary troupes, touring the globe year-round and able to pull off an annual three-week season at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater.
Audiences often appreciated Taylor’s newer pieces, but his signature work surely remained Esplanade, from 1975, an explosion of joy and athleticism, with Taylor’s limber dancers running, skipping, hurling themselves into each other’s arms like missiles and tumbling to the floor with abandon, all to two Bach concertos.
The pairing of classical music — especially 18th-century Baroque — with a very modern style of dance was one of Taylor’s hallmarks. But he also went far and wide with his musical choices, scoring his works not only with symphonies and concertos but ragtime, tango, barbershop quartet and even elevator music. In Big Bertha (1970), set in an amusement park, he used music from a band machine acquired from a St. Louis museum. “That gave me the idea for the dance,” he said.
Big Bertha, though, was most notable for its disturbing content, reflecting Taylor’s penchant for giving equal time to the darkest depths of human nature. Bertha is a robotic carnival creature. A wholesome 1950s family — a couple and their daughter — comes out to the fun fair to play, but after feeding coins into Bertha’s slot, slips into depravity; by the end, the father has raped and killed his pigtailed young daughter.
Even a lighter work, Company B, a set of jaunty dances like the jitterbug to the music of the Andrews Sisters, has its dark elements: Look closely amid the joyful dances and you see young men as soldiers, shot and crumpling to the ground.
Paul Belleville Taylor, Jr. was born July 29, 1930, and spent much of his youth in the Washington, D.C. area.
Taylor’s own dancing career ended abruptly in 1974, after he collapsed onstage from illness and exhaustion during a performance in Brooklyn. But as a choreographer, he was just getting going: A year later came Esplanade, later celebrated as one of the most wondrous works of dance anywhere.