Paul Taylor Dance at Annenberg

How Paul Taylor has grown!

JIM RUTTER

After seeing choreographer Paul Taylor’s 2007 work, Lines of Loss, at the Annenberg last weekend, I can fully understand why some politicians want to raise the mandatory retirement age.

Though Taylor is much better known for his signature 1975 work, Esplanade, his newer works show not only a continued relevance to the genre in Changes, but Lines of Loss also displays a near-octogenarian at the peak of his dramatic, and thematic power.

Compared to these two newer pieces, Esplanade’s use of everyday gestures— a characteristic that permeates much of Taylor’s choreography— seems almost amateurish in its simplicity. Esplanade, set to Bach’s Violin Concerto in E Major and his Double Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor (Largo and Allegro), delivers on its title, mostly showing the company’s ensemble as a group of people out for a lazy afternoon stroll, something I’ve seen— well, not with these dancers—in several European cities during afternoon siesta.

Here, the Annenberg’s stage became a brightly lit field, where the company members strolled or chased one another, literally running across the stage before stopping to flirt, gossip, or admire their counterparts, before resuming the chase. With their playful gestures and smiling faces, the corps in Esplanade evoked the occasional chuckle as the dancers played an intermittent game of leapfrog (of sorts). But otherwise this “dance pastoral” generated only mild dramatic interest, instead displaying the grandeur, pomp and excitement of a processional.

While Esplanade ends on a chilling, visually enthralling theme, it comes too late and, like an idle afternoon devoid of structured activity, it goes on too long, making even the ending seem false and tiresome. Moreover, hearing the two violins only reminded me of the much better use of Bach’s music in Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, choreographed more than two decades earlier.

With a little help from the Beatles

By contrast, Taylor’s 2008 Changes resurrected the 1960s in costumes, song— by Lennon, McCartney, and John Hartford— and movement, opening with each member of his corps performing one of the era’s signature dances while the remarkable Annmaria Mazzini snubbed the audience with her pert, perky rebelliousness.

In Changes, Taylor infused the dances of the ’60s with a high degree of athleticism, incorporating twirls and leaps and even a bit of cheerleader-style standing-on-shoulders and acrobatics. A flirty sense of fun and whimsy permeates the early pieces before segueing into more psychedelic scenes— these preceded by the dancers passing a mock-joint between them, then loping about in what were still quite beautiful movements. Even I would smoke grass if it could make me move like this.

Despite these qualities, Changes lacked vibrancy and felt flat overall, crippled by Jennifer Tipton’s poor lighting, which exacerbated the way in which the Annenberg’s large stage dwarfed the close-cohesiveness of the full corps dances. Only the eminently danceable “California Dreaming” created a crest of energy and supple flow where the ensemble movements suddenly unfolded like flower children in bloom and the dancing approached an embodiment of the ideal promised by the hippie lifestyle (an ideal hope still embodied by today’s Green “buy local” community).

Almost unbearable to watch

Though Tipton’s lighting failed to add buoyancy to Changes, she helped capture the devastating spirit of Taylor’s work in his Lines of Loss, a meditative dance suite of nine movements unified by the theme of loss and the suffering, grief and trauma that often accompany it.

Set to the Kronos Quartet’s arrangements of music of Guillaume de Machaut, Christopher Tye, Jack Body, John Cage, Arvo Pärt and Alfred Schnittke, Lines opened on the solitary Lisa Viola pounding on her legs and staring upward at the impassive heavens while the ensemble’s circular movement around her evoked the crushing and unavoidable power of fate. This monumental piece, searing and almost unbearable to watch, only lacked the wailing and gnashing of teeth to go with the rent garments.

But Taylor didn’t merely limit his work to an exploration of physical loss and mortality. In harrowing duets, he portrayed the emptiness that often accompanies the many little deaths that come before. Here he stripped the work of the excitement of eroticism, and only showed the remorse and regretful pangs of parting that left these empty bodies wandering around as if they still believe they’ll find the missing object or person whose absence causes their misery.

The visually staggering movement #5 showed Michael Trusnovec lumbering back and forth with a crippled gait, his hyper-muscular body broken and worn down by a persistent torment. No one escaped; one dancer would move in the center as those around her circled, and after they passed through the circle from all sides, a different woman would be left standing in the middle when the dance continued. Suffering, as Taylor makes perfectly clear, is interchangeable.

All nine of these movements required great physical strength, not only to convey the powerful emotions, but also in the cumulative effect of the laborious movements required to paint portraits of anguish. And if Taylor achieved a triumph in these depths, it came in his double use of the Schnittke piece, which the Kronos Quartet appropriately titled “Collected Songs Where Every Verse is Filled with Grief.” Through otherwise beautiful movements, Viola nearly crumbled on stage, her expressive performance conveying the agony of eternity felt in a moment of grief.