A retrospective of Paul Taylor Dance at Meany

The dance is rich in character portrayals and full out movement, a deep vocabulary to be juxtaposed by the viewer to the earlier Aureole of sweeping runs, leaps, and hops. Made to entertain, yet dark with lessons of the bitterness of the time, Black Tuesday is made richer by the elegant set and costumes of Santo Loquasto, and the unobtrusive and effective lighting by the great designer Jennifer Tipton.

Cloven Kingdom is another of Taylor's works that comments upon the human condition, here a social satire reflecting upon the narrow line separating human from beastly behavior. The score by John Herbert McDowell juxtaposes refined Baroque music by Corelli with driving rhythmic percussion by Henry Cowell and Malloy Miller, just as the dance veers back and forth between elegant and primal movements, with dancers dressed in formal evening wear. As the work unfolds, three women don oddly shaped shiny headwear whose reflected light bounces out into the audience, and towards the end, men and women alike don masks.

Viewing this dance after not having seen it in many years, I was struck by the strength of several individual sections, most notably a testosterone-laden men's dance that gave new meaning to the term "hot to trot." Overall though, I was left with the impression that the dance did not quite hang together as the social commentary that Taylor meant it to be. Still, few choreographers approach their subject matter with such an intriguing mix of subtlety and realism, with a dash of abstract mystery - who were the three women in those bizarre shiny hats?

The one misfire of the evening was Taylor's slap-stick Troilus and Cressida (reduced), replete with hapless Trojans, three put-upon cupids, and our clueless hero and heroine. Played so broadly that it would have been at home on the burlesque stage, a work like this has been done many times before and is what often passes for humor in dance. It was the most recently created work on the bill, and seemed a bit like slumming for a choreographer of Taylor's wit and intelligence. But after 50 plus years of fine dance making, who can blame Paul Taylor for wanting to have a bit of raucous fun?