Dancer explored psychological extremes but often laced his work with humour

Paul Taylor, who has died in New York aged 88, was the last of the titans of early modern American dance, developing a new art form that tended to swing between radical experimentalism and psychological extremity.

A muscular swimmer turned choreographer, Taylor created 147 dances over six decades. They ranged from experimental work where nothing happened at all to dances, set to Bach, Handel and Stravinsky, packed with athletic grace, lyricism and sometimes comic capers.

Love, ambiguous sexuality, family dysfunction, religious intolerance, the bitterness of war, and even insects were subjects, demonstrating new possibilities for modern dance, with musical response and natural human behaviour claiming equal place with more conceptual ideas.

Born during the Depression near Pittsburgh, Paul Belleville Taylor Jr was the only child of Elisabeth Pendleton’s second marriage, to Paul Belleville Taylor, a physicist. She already had three children by her first marriage, and when Paul Taylor Sr lost his job, she became the breadwinner.

Soon afterwards, the father left home after becoming over-intimate with his eldest stepson, and young Paul grew up in the Brighton Hotel, Washington, where his mother ran the dining room. He spent periods living with his various older siblings, before being sent to a corrective school.

He won a swimming scholarship to Syracuse University, but at 21 had what he called ‘‘a flash’’ that he had to train as a dancer, and took his first lessons.

Despite his elementary knowledge, he won a dance scholarship to New York’s Juilliard School, where he first encountered Martha Graham’s modern dance technique. When the choreographer saw his 6ft 3in swimmer’s physique, she told the teacher: ‘‘I want him.’’

At Juilliard he studied ballet with the British choreographer Antony Tudor and imbibed radical ideas from Doris Humphrey, and Merce Cunningham, who was exploring minimalist abstract ideas with John Cage. Experimental dance had yet to catch on, however, and Taylor’s first professional dancing job was as a gorilla, eating a banana and prancing about in a TV commercial.

He also bluffed his way into a spot in Jerome Robbins’s Peter Pan and appeared alongside the tenor Lauritz Melchior in Arabian Nights, dancing in the dung left by the elephant Melchior was riding as he sang.

Between studies, Taylor joined Merce Cunningham, then embarking on his own radical path in choreography. One night, however, he was dropped from Cunningham’s show because of the roll of the dice (Cunningham’s favoured method of determining choreography, music,

His choreographic debut, 7 New Dances, included a motionless duet, which was reviewed by the Dance Observer critic Louis Horst with a blank space.

performers and scenery). Taylor told Cunningham he could not leave his career to the mercy of chance decisions, and left.

He took up Graham’s offer and stayed six years with her, often cast as the ageing choreographer’s token hunk in her Greek tragedies. For Graham, men were ‘‘something large and naked for women to climb up on’’, Taylor wrote in his 1987 autobiography Private Domain.

When Graham and George Balanchine were commissioned to collaborate for a New York City Ballet creation, Episodes, Taylor was cast by Balanchine in a solo in which the ballet master explored modern moves far away from his usual accent. Balanchine told him the mood to inhabit was that of ‘‘a fly in a glass of milk’’.

On the strength of Taylor’s performance, Balanchine asked him to join the City Ballet, but Taylor, who had begun attempting his own choreography, declined, preferring to set up on his own.

The names of his early collaborators would become a Who’s Who of the modern arts, with dancers including Pina Bausch and Twyla Tharp, and designers such as the young abstract artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Taylor initially attempted to be fashionably abstract. His 1957 full-length choreographic debut, 7 New Dances, included a motionless duet, which was reviewed by the

Dance Observer critic Louis Horst with a blank space. It made Taylor’s name, however, and he then rapidly evolved a style combining acrobatic physicality, emotional lyricism, dark humour and musicality.

Later masterpieces include Esplanade (1975), his 1980 setting of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring as a gangster farce, and the poignantly humorous Company B (1991), a homage to the Andrews Sisters and young soldiers of World War II.

His last premiere, earlier this year, was

Concertiana, one of 10 new works created in the past five years.

Taylor himself danced until 1975, when undiagnosed hepatitis caused him to have convulsions during a performance in New York.

As well as his autobiography, Taylor published a collection of essays, Facts and Fancies (2013). He was also well-known for his extensive insect collection.

In the mid-1950s he rescued a deaf-mute man being beaten up in a bar; George Wilson became his lifelong companion until his death in 2004. –