Paul Taylor

Dancer, choreographer of world-famous modern dance, writer

Paul Belville Taylor Jr, choreographer. Born: 29 July, 1930 in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. Died: 29 August, 2018 in New York City, aged 88

Paul Taylor, who brought a lyrical musicality, capacity for joy and wide poetic imagination to modern dance over six decades as one of its greatest choreographers, died on Wednesday in a New York City hospital. He was 88.

The cause was renal failure, said Lisa Labrado, a spokeswoman for the Paul Taylor Dance Company.

Taylor, whose highly diverse style was born in radical experimentalism in the 1950s, created poignant and exuberant works that entered the repertory of numerous dance companies. His own company, eloquent and athletic, has been one of the world’s superlative troupes.

As a strikingly gifted dancer in his 20s, Taylor created roles for the master choreographers Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham and George Balanchine. He had piercing blue eyes, the power and musculature of a skilled athlete and an incisive, outgoing – but also elusive – personality.

Throughout the 1950s, he also made dances of his own – 18 of them with Robert Rauschenberg as his designer, two with music commissioned from John Cage. In 1960, he began to collaborate with painter Alex Katz; though they worked together only from time to time, they continued to do so until 2014, and made two of Taylor’s most exceptional works, the highly dissimilar Sunset (1983) and Last Look (1985).

With the premieres of Aureole (1962, to music of Handel) and Orbs (1966, to Beethoven), Taylor broke through to new levels of national and international popularity as other companies started presenting many of his creations. At his own company, Rudolf Nureyev was often a guest star, as well as dancing Aureole around the world.

Taylor’s company included many illustrious performers, including Pina Bausch and Twyla Tharp, who themselves subsequently became worldclass choreographers.

When he retired from dancing in 1974, both his dancers and his new creations became even more magnetic draws for audiences. New York’s annual Taylor season, usually occupying a large theatre became one of the glories of world dance. Taylor’s Esplanade (1975) was recognised immediately as an irresistible and transporting masterpiece. Set to the music of Bach, it explored pedestrian movement (walking, running, standing, skidding, falling) and encompassed both dark and bright emotions in a miraculous flow. A large number of the other dances he made between 1975 and 1985 also became classics. Several later works too, up to at least 2008 (Beloved Renegade, for example), showed the Taylor imagination in full power.

In 2014, after 60 years of choreography, Taylor, who leaves no immediate survivors, prepared for his company’s next phase: He turned its threeweek New York seasons into a new entity, Paul Taylor American Modern Dance (originally Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance). His dancers now performed works old and new by other dance-makers, older and younger than him, from Martha Graham to Doug Elkins. Other troupes appeared as guests under the Taylor Modern Dance aegis, performing choreography by Merce Cunningham, Donald Mckayle and Trisha Brown.

In May, Taylor named Michael Novak, a company member, as the troupe’s artistic director-designate.

Paul Belville Taylor Jr was born on 29 July, 1930, in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the Washington area. His father, who had a doctorate in physics and worked for the federal government, was of French Huguenot descent; his mother, Elizabeth Rust Pendleton, came from a genteel Virginia family. Taylor’s parents separated before he turned four.

At Syracuse University, he joined the swimming team on a scholarship. Athleticism became something he was later to champion in dance: many of his male dancers had powerful musculatures, while many of his female dancers displayed lissomeness, force and boldness.

He studied art at Syracuse and would later give divergent accounts of how and when dance entered his life. But it was certainly during his Syracuse years that he came to recognise it as a central mission.

He pursued dance studies in the summer of 1952 at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College, where Martha Graham became an oracular presence in his life. He followed this by studying at the Juilliard School in New York in the 1952-53 academic year.

He caught a golden era at ju illiard,where his eminent teachers included composer and dance theorist Louis Horst, modern-dance choreographers Doris Humphrey and José Limón, and ballet teachers Antony Tudor, Margaret Craske and Alfredo Corvino.

In 1953, he became a founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Black Mountain College; he created a role in Cunningham’s Septet, a dance still performed today. But Cunningham was in the early stages of using chance procedures to compose a dance, and Taylor later wrote that chance excluded him from dancing once too often for him to hang around much longer.

Taylor joined the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1955; he remained there for seven years.

Taylor himself emerged as a skilled writer. Many consider Private Domain their favorite dance book. It is rich in acute intelligence about dance , pungent observations and memorable narrations of the serious and absurd moments of Taylor’s life.

It is often hard to believe that Esplanade, Taylor’s most widely beloved dance, contains no formal dance step. Its dancers walk, stop, run, skip, sit, jump, fall, embrace and gesture. With such masterworks, the annual Taylor season became one of the highlights of the New York dance year. Few if any companies devoted to the work of one choreographer ever matched that of his.

ALASTAIR MACAULAY

“He had piercing blue eyes, the power and musculature of a skilled athlete and an incisive, outgoing personality.”