Older favorites show troupe at its best
smallish vocabulary of movement, but when you’re watching one of the great ones, like “Airs,” which opened the program, those considerations don’t matter.
“Airs” (1978) is one of Taylor’s many baroque music dances; it is not the most iconic of them (that honor goes to “Esplanade,” on tap this weekend), but it is surely the most lyrical. The 10 musical excerpts (all Handel and all recorded) frame an excursion for three men and four women. Taylor makes much of that unequal number; the wondrous Laura Halzack seems to stand apart and gets a rapturous solo. The moves are familiar — scooping arms, angled torsos, lofty leaps, descents on one knee and fast, lateral entrances — but they seem sculpted and posed with care for 18th century symmetries.
It’s not all that way. A saucy gavotte offers a frolic for Parisa Khobdeh and Robert Kleinendorst. Then, Eran Bugge tangles with Michael Trusnovec in a Handel musette. Canons and unisons reflect baroque forms. Taylor resists the temptation to end with a bravura rouser. Instead, the seven dancers assemble as if they were in an 18th century family portrait, with Halzack front and center. It’s seductive beyond words.
An abyss (and nine years) separates “Airs” from “Syzygy.” The movement, arranged for 13 dancers, is weighty, mostly earthbound, even graceless; you could easily mistake the tank-topped performers for cavemen. Taylor mingles the trajectories of human genders with astral movements. Men and women inhabit parallel lines and, like asteroids, seem to meet only by chance.
Taylor wrings much invention from this scheme. The dancers face each other, arms curl threateningly, fists clench. Solos proliferate; the floor cushions the many falls. A recently hired dynamo named Madelyn Ho thrust and convulsed, hair flying, and she promised much for the Taylor company in the future; her encounter with Trusnovec brought the work to an understated if appropriate close. Notable in the cast were Heather McGinley, Michael Apuzzo and George Smallwood. Donald York’s score mingled romantic and ironic elements. Jennifer Tipton’s lighting was a mighty asset.
But nothing, with the exception of Michael Novak’s breezy dancing, did much to save “The Open Door,” which received its West Coast premiere Wednesday. Novak is a host at a house party; he arranges chairs, welcomes guests, dances a bit and rearranges chairs. It includes fat ladies falling and guys making eyes at each other, all set to a cruelly abridged version of Edward Elgar’s “Enigma Variations.” Taylor wastes the great “Nimrod” variation on a round dance that lacks resonance, poetry or wit. Coming from a major artist, “The Open Door” is simply bewildering. Elgarians will have convulsions.