Choreographer’s sterling career covered 6 decades
Paul Taylor, who brought a lyrical musicality, capacity for joy and wide poetic imagination to modern dance over six decades as one its greatest choreographers, died Wednesday in New York City. He was 88.
His death was announced by 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 repertoire of numerous dance companies. His own company 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 all-American good looks, with piercingly blue eyes, the power and musculature of a skilled athlete and an incisive, outgoing — but also elusive — personality. He continued dancing leading roles into the early 1970s, concentrating on choreography after that.
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 only worked together 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, named after him, 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 world-class choreographers.
When he retired from the stage 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 theater (for decades, City Center Theater and from 2011 the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center) became one of the glories of world dance. Lincoln Kirstein, the eminent patron of the arts (and writer about them) who loved to complain that modern dance was governed by the cult of idiosyncrasy, made an exception for Taylor.
Taylor’s “Esplanade” (1975) was recognized immediately as a 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”), showed the Taylor imagination in full power.
In 2014, after 60 years of choreography, Taylor prepared for his company’s next phase: He turned his 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 himself, from Martha Graham to Doug Elkins.
Other troupes appeared as guests under the Taylor Modern Dance aegis, dancing choreography by Merce Cunningham, Donald McKayle and Trisha Brown. (The Paul Taylor Dance Company continued to perform his work under its old name on United States and international tours.)