WILD STYLE

Versatile dancer whose personality always informed her work

Mary Cochran, a versatile dancer with America’s Paul Taylor’s company for 12 years, has died. She was 54.

A spokeswoman for the Paul Taylor Dance Company said she was found dead in her apartment in New York on 6 October, though when she died was not clear. The cause was thought to be a heart attack, the company said.

Cochran was a member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company from 1984-1996, appearing in numerous works, beginning with Roses. Raegan Wood, director of the dance troupe’s Taylor School, who danced with her, called her “a passionate woman on and offstage who met life and her artistry with radiance and abandon”. Sometimes, Wood said, “she literally lit up the stage with her fiery energy – her red curls would be flying as if she were laughing hysterically.”

At Barnard from 2003-2013, Cochran presided over a wellregarded programme that included courses on both technique and the academic side of dance. She also initiated projects that had students working with professional choreographers, showcased student works and otherwise connected the academic and professional dance worlds.

“My vision is really practical,” she said in a 2009 interview, “which is, what can I do with what I have to help support the field?”

Mary Miriam Cochran was born on 13 January 1963 in Dallas. Her father, George Cochran, was a lawyer and banker. Her mother, the former Jerry Bywaters, was a dancer who trained at Juilliard, dancing in New York in the 1950s and later, back in Dallas, teaching dance.“i started taking classes with my mother when I was five,” Mary Cochran recalled.

For high school she went to the North Carolina School of the Arts, and at 18 she moved to New York, having been accepted at her mother’s alma mater. But a recommendation from one of her North Carolina teachers fast-tracked her career: she decided to forgo Juilliard to join Alwin Nikolais’ dance company.

“I was thrown into the fire,” she recalled of that early professional job. “We rehearsed for two weeks and went on a nine-week tour.”

After two years she went to an audition for Taylor’s company, but he said she was not the physical type he was looking for. In 1984, when Lila York, a dancer who at 5ft was Cochran’s physical type, was preparing to leave the troupe, Taylor told Stone, “Have your friend Mary come in tomorrow.” She did, and he threw her immediately into a rehearsal for Roses. She inherited some of York’s roles and initiated others. One of the troupe’s most popular works was Company B: Songs Sung by the Andrews Sisters, in which, in 1991, she made a striking impression in a section called Rum and Coca-cola.

“To a calypso beat,” Anna Kisselgoff wrote in her review in the New York Times, “Mary Cochran is a tiny Carmen Miranda in bobby socks who sends a unit of servicemen reeling every time she lifts her skirt or her legs: a perfect time capsule for an era when grown men said ‘Golly!’ and ‘Gee!’ if not ‘Hubba hubba!’ ”

She was often given lighter, sassier roles, but said she was most intrigued by the occasional darker role, like the gang-rape victim she portrayed in Last Look. In 1996 Cochran gave academia a try, first as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, then at Mills College in California. Taylor’s company lured her back to New York to direct Taylor 2, his streamlined touring ensemble, in 1998 and ’99.

She was a guest artist at a number of universities before joining Barnard. There, Cochran started the Barnard Project with Dance Theatre Workshop, pairing professional choreographers and dance students in collaborations that culminated in an annual performance.

Cochran also found time to return to her own education, receiving a master’s degree in choreography and performance at the University of Wisconsin-milwaukee in 2005.

Cochran’s first marriage, to Bruce Adolphe, ended in divorce in 1992. In 1994 she married Thomas Patrick, a Taylor company member. They were divorced in 1998. She is survived by her mother and a brother, Robert.

John Tomlinson, executive director of the Paul Taylor company, whose association with Cochran went back to her years with the Alwin Nikolais troupe, said her death had prompted an outpouring of tributes from Taylor members and alumni. He was struck by the comments of dancers who had worked under Cochran in Taylor 2, some of whom were early in their careers then. “They say she transformed them,” he said © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service

“She lit up the stage with her fiery energy – her red curls would be flying as if she were laughing hysterically”