Paul Taylor Dance Company

Susanne Carbonneau: You first saw the Paul Taylor Company in 1964, near the very beginning of your writing career. Anna Kisselgoff: Isadora Duncan was my heroine when I was very small. If you can believe it, I had read a book about her when I started reading, and so it was the mother of modern dance who inspired me. For some reason I didn’t pay attention to her main principle, that ballet had spectacle and seduced children. My mother took me to Act II of Swan Lake at age four and I was seduced by the spectacle. I said, “I want to do that,” so I started ballet at four. I retired after three months and made my comeback at eight, and took ballet for nine years here in New York. For some reason, modern dance passed us by – but I belonged to the era when modern dancers could not afford to perform in New York City. Martha Graham could occasionally perform for a week but that was unusual; sometimes it was just once a year. I went to a college where we had no modern dance whatsoever. I was sort of afraid of modern dance, somewhat brainwashed by the ballet people that modern dancers couldn’t dance. I’ve gotten over that! I was living in Paris, in journalism but not yet dance writing. The Paul Taylor Dance Company came in 1964 to the International Dance Festival and I wondered if I would be able to understand it. I think all of us who are introduced to a new art form are fearful that we may not feel congenial with it. I just fell in love with Paul Taylor. I said, ‘This is dance!’ I was sitting in a French theater and I remember the woman sitting behind me saying, ‘My god – they’re dancing barefoot!’ I say that because we take certain things for granted. And if you notice the pieces today, they’re wearing shoes; bare feet is no longer a political statement. But the idea of feeling the ground under you with your feet was very important to dancers of a certain period. I started writing shortly thereafter for the international edition of The New York Times, and when that folded I came to New York and became the number two critic for the Times with Clive Barnes as the senior critic. I was the chief dance critic after Clive left, from 1977-2005, and I left the staff in 2006. I feel that my introduction to dance came with Paul Taylor, though I’ve seen everything since. I refuse to be put in the category into which I had placed myself briefly, that it’s ballet or modern dance. As Martha Graham said, either the toe is pointed or it isn’t. It’s just good or bad dance. Certainly Taylor is in the “good” category.

SC: Why do you think that ballet aficionados who don’t know modern dance before seeing Paul Taylor, find him an easy crossover? AK: This is the tricky thing about Paul Taylor’s choreography, unlike many modern dance choreographers: he was really interested in a continuum of movement. There’s constant movement; ballet also has the idea of a continuous line of movement – it doesn’t stop and go. One of the people in my “genius category” is Martha Graham. Her technique is highly percussive. There is contraction but there is also release, which is very important. But you do feel within the movement – this is nothing negative – that there is not a continuous flow; in fact, she was trying to avoid that. She said to me in the ’90s that her movement as it was being performed by her own dancers was too silken; that was what she didn’t want. Paul Taylor’s work isn’t silken, but ballet people are used to seeing linked steps. There’s no break in the movement; one step is linked to another. There has to be a transition. And what I think is magnificent about Paul Taylor is his ability to create movement. Paul Taylor’s movement often is sort of an entire line of scribbling. It’s a continuum – there’s constant momentum. And I think that both modern dance people and ballet people who worry that they don’t like this modern dance choreographer or that one might find that very appealing. It enriches the eye. You’re not going to have any empty spot, you will always see movement. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t use stillness.

SC: Unfortunately I only got to see Paul Taylor dance on film, but even on film what strikes you is that continuousness in his own personal style. What was it like to see Paul dance? AK: I was lucky, since he retired from the stage relatively early because of an ulcer. He was one of the first, like Alvin Ailey, to stop dancing for his own company. As my illustrious predecessor at the Times, John Martin, said of modern dance, ‘It is not a system, it is a point of view.’ The system being ballet with its codified vocabulary. Every choreographer in modern dance, certainly in the old days, felt compelled to express something, and they did it on their own body. You would rarely find a modern dance company in which the head of the company, the choreographer, was not dancing. Paul Taylor was a college swimmer – he was big and athletic and had huge arms. In Aureole, the major male solo, which is based on stillness, involves a lot of balancing on one leg. So you have these huge arms and huge legs going out into space. One of the things that Paul Taylor has always said to me is that it isn’t like ballet, just arms and legs. In modern dance the idea was not to have steps but to involve the whole body in movement. Paul Taylor was all movement. He was a big man but he moved awfully fast.

SC: I’d like to talk about his gravitas. It’s easy to forget about that because he provides us with so much pleasure; there’s so much humor in his dances. A lot of people mistake humor for non-seriousness. AK: I don’t think Europeans understand Paul Taylor’s really American humor. It involves laughing at yourself and even at your own country. There’s a lot of satire and a lot of commentary about human foibles; he really dissects the human character. And when it looks slight or funny or frivolous, there is always something underneath where he’s getting into what Graham used to call "the truth that we do not want to acknowledge in ourselves." I just happen to have a quote that I always liked. I interviewed Paul Taylor about his beliefs and he claimed to be an atheist. And he said: “And what is this thing about swearing on the Bible in court? I don’t need that to tell the truth.” I think there is a lot of truth underneath all the humor. His rather mysterious version of “Rite of Spring” contains many comic details. The father of the baby that gets sacrificed bounces the baby on his knee, and when he gives the baby back he wipes his thighs; you can guess why. It’s a building up of character that is done very quickly, in a fleeting manner, in a way that you can’t always catch. Cloven Kingdom has a magnificent passage for men in white tie and tails. Some of the movement is very grotesque; he’s telling us something about the veneer that we all have as a social façade, and what’s at work underneath. It’s not always pretty!

SC: I think the same is true in Taylor’s beautiful dances. Certainly the pleasures are there to seduce us, but we have this idea that to be good, art has to be like medicine, a little unpleasant, a little bitter and difficult. I think there’s a misunderstanding about what’s at the core of these dances. AK: It’s funny that we’re talking about the modern dance choreographer who I think has the most popular appeal of all. There’s been some writing for several years that somehow Paul Taylor is not a deep thinker. Well, my god, are we back in 1920? What happened to abstract arts? Since when does everybody need a story? To me, Paul Taylor is the deepest of all. He knows how to put movement together – how many people can do that? There’s deep thought in putting movement together. And not everybody in the dance world can put movement together. Believe me, I know – I’ve suffered through more performances than you have! Where he is a deep thinker is that Paul Taylor decided to sort of sugar-coat his conceptual pieces. If we look at Airs, how many people realize that the same duet is danced fast and then it’s danced slowly; very few people in the audience understand that. It’s exactly the same movement, but he has changed the context through the speed and what occurs in the music. And in Polaris, where one set of dancers dances within a metal cube, and exactly the same dance is repeated with different lighting by the wonderful Jennifer Tipton and to different music. It’s the same choreography but it looks totally different because context changes your perception. But he doesn’t say, “You must catch this.” In Esplanade, which is certainly one of his masterpieces, at a certain point everybody is doing the same movement backwards, as if it’s a film wound backwards. It’s striking to me that people are now asking for dramatic stories. When I go to Swan Lake, I’m not going for the story; I know how it ends. I’m going for that live performance.

SC: I think of Taylor in the tradition of an American inventor. He invented a movement language that is so versatile, we sometimes don’t even recognize it carrying over from one piece to another. AK: Piazzolla Caldera was astonishing to me because it is set to Argentine tangos and it is about the tango, but try as I might I couldn’t see one tango step in it. It captures the essence of tango. Then on a later viewing I found one tango step in it, but that’s it, and that’s amazing. What Paul Taylor has is his – you could call them “conventions,” you could call them his own “clichés.” You will see certain movements that recur but they’re used differently for different signatures of energy. Very often you will have a man twirling around with a woman on each hip, and there are certain falls and runs that are specifically Taylor. But when you see them in the tango piece, you forget that those are Taylor signature moves and see them as part of a tango picture, because he’s managed to change the rhythm and give you a whole different view. He’s using his own dance vocabulary. What’s the most astonishing thing of all is a real masterpiece, Promethean Fire. All the old moves are there – it’s like an anthology of Taylor silhouettes, Taylor moves, Taylor images – and yet the whole thing is different. It’s how they’re combined, and what the music does to them.

SC: Yesterday we saw Lines of Loss and I could hear people behind me trying to puzzle out all of the gestural detail. Would you talk about the idea of Taylor’s intention versus what we are seeing in the work; what he is actually telling us and what we can gather on our own. AK: You and I can interpret his pieces as we wish. However, as a reviewer I can tell you that sometimes I would hear that I didn’t get it, and my answer to that is, maybe he didn’t put it across. It’s true of every choreographer: the distance between intent and execution can sometimes be a little wider than intended. I also think that some pieces are open to interpretation. But then, on the other hand, I think there are some pieces where he is pretty specific. There are wonderful moments in De Sueños – a very dreamlike piece in which the images are all Mexican. The lady who comes out flattened with a sun-like halo suggests a goddess, and she’s very obviously the Madonna. And the man who comes out with antlers is the famous Yaqui deer dancer. In hunt rituals among Indians and other peoples, you don’t impersonate, you personify the animal you are hunting. In this case, the Yaqui deer dancer becomes the deer. Very often people say Paul Taylor has light and shade in his pieces, and that those are symbols. In this piece, where he deals with life and death, you see a symbol of life and a symbol of death. One piece in which I didn’t get what he wanted the first time I saw it was Sunset. You had six soldiers in red berets in a park with a wonderful, stylized abstract backdrop by Alex Katz. Girls come in wearing white dresses. The music, which I thought was bittersweet, was by Elgar. I thought this was a bittersweet encounter between some soldiers who were about to go off to war and girls they meet in the park – sort of Fancy Free in a different time. Suddenly, there’s a break in the music and you hear the sound of loon calls, and there’s a passage that I thought was a dream passage where the women were adoringly lifting up some of the men. Paul Taylor made it very clear to me through various intermediaries that this was a foreshadowing of death. So I wrote a piece in the Sunday Times that said, “Now that I’ve been told this, I see this is a soldier foreseeing his own death.” Then they go back to reality and it’s all very sweet again. I then asked, “How can you see it two different ways? Is it because you’ve been told this? Does the restaurant meal you just had affect your viewing?” I still see it as just a bittersweet encounter, but I can also see it the way it was important to Paul Taylor for us to see it. I think it works on two levels.

SC: The measure of its greatness is that it will sustain varying interpretations. AK: I also think that ambivalence – not ambiguity – is a feature of Paul Taylor’s work and what makes it interesting; that you can interpret something one way or another. He did Big Bertha during the Vietnam War and the villain is this huge nickelodeon, a female figure decked out in a patriotic flag-like costume. She drives a middle-America family to destruction every time the father puts a nickel in. I thought of it as a commentary on the My Lai massacre, the killing of Vietnamese civilians by an American unit, which had just been revealed. Paul was mystified that I saw it that way; he agreed that it was a critique of middle-American values but said it wasn’t about the Vietnam War. So maybe I went too far. Very often his pieces can go one way or another, and that’s what makes them interesting.

SC: He is interested in the fact that we’re complex, that we often contain contradictions. People talk about his work being only dark or only light, but I think there is so much more going on there. AK: He has a very wide range. Because he does so many of these so called “light” pieces, some people think he is a lightweight. Most of you, since you are here, presumably do not. But that is a very dangerous way of looking at art. That you are not heavy-handed doesn’t mean you are lightweight. I strongly believe that in all art. Paul Klee is a good example.

SC: All of those years you were writing for the Times, you would see not only premieres but repeat viewings of dances. Would you talk about what’s to be gained from repeat viewings. AK: With people like Taylor and Balanchine you are always uncovering things in the choreography that you hadn’t seen even on repeat viewings. If you really want to get into another level of watching Paul Taylor’s dances, look at his structures. That includes floor plans: who is doing what when, what is repeated, what is done backwards, who is doing one thing while someone is doing something else. You can’t grasp that all the first time. With Paul Taylor I’m always seeing new details and choreographic structures. Don’t be fooled by the fact that it may be a lighthearted piece. One of the funniest pieces and one of the most interesting in terms of choreography is Offenbach Overtures, the spoof on French Can-Can and Offenbach operettas. There’s a fake duel that wouldn’t work without a perfect sense of comic timing. When you go over and over again, you see different casts. I used to think it was always better in the “good old days” with the original cast. Not necessarily! A new cast can come in and change a dance entirely without betraying what he wanted, and that will give you a whole new perspective. Paul Taylor is one of the few who used all sorts of bodies. The short girl is always there. One of them was Mary Cochran, and at the moment it is Julie Tice. He always took people who might not have the ideal body; that doesn’t change the choreography but adds something to it.

SC: We have time for a few questions from the audience. The gentlemen says Arden Court is one of his favorite Taylor dances and wants to know what you thought of the piece when you first saw it, and now? AK: I made my father, who never went to modern dance, come and see it! First of all, I am not afraid of using the word “beautiful.” And Paul Taylor handled that baroque music, which not everybody was using at the time. Look at how subtly he plays structural games; someone is facing the back while everyone else is facing the front, or everybody is standing up and one man is upside down – and it happens so subtly that it’s barely perceptible. The way he uses bodies has a Michelangelo-like feel, and yet it has light moments too. Let’s not forget that a majority of Paul’s works are pure dance. Mercuric Tidings is one of my favorites. It’s so difficult for the dancers to do the first time because they’re rushing so fast, they almost collide with each other.

SC: Speaking of pure dance, Taylor, like Balanchine, said something about putting people onstage and drama. AK: After the famous episode in Seven New Dances, where Paul Taylor had two people stand still on stage for four minutes, he determined that once you have two or three dancers onstage, there’s a relationship among them all. In Lost, Found and Lost the main image is everyone standing in a line. In theory, they are just standing, but the audience laughs because they look like they’re in line at the restroom. So you have drama any time you have two or more bodies on stage. Balanchine did not like the word abstract, but he didn’t want stories read into his works. That’s a slightly different point of view.

SC: This question is about influences of other artists on Paul Taylor. AK: Well certainly not Balanchine; Paul Taylor is an anti-ballet man. Ballet people mistake his choreography for balletic because it moves along so quickly in a continuous line, like ballet. Except for pirouettes, which have crept into his choreography lately, there’s rarely a real ballet step in any of Paul Taylor’s works. There’s a jeté but it’s not performed like a ballet jeté. I’m not sure he’s going to like this, but I do see an awful lot of Martha Graham. And I see a lot of affectionate satire on Martha. In Esplanade, when the women suddenly sit down and cross their hands over their pelvis and have a feeling of mock angst – that’s definitely an affectionate reference to Graham. If you know the Martha Graham vocabulary, which is the only codified dance vocabulary outside of ballet besides Indian classical dance and other dance forms abroad, there are movements that are totally Graham movements. In the old days I felt that everyone in the Taylor Company had had Graham training. Now he takes people who have had only ballet training. Kate Johnson was a wonderful lead dancer in the Taylor Company and she came out of ballet. There are the bison steps, the dart, the back falls – there’s an awful lot of Graham in there. Paul Taylor was a major Graham dancer.

SC: The question concerns contemporary dancers who have been influenced by Paul Taylor. AK: Certainly those that come out of his own Company; when they start choreographing there are a lot of Taylorisms. This is the thing: if you have a very strong profile in choreography like Martha Graham and Paul Taylor, and you are influenced overtly by them, you look like an imitation. Although you can see Graham movement in some of Paul Taylor’s works, he doesn’t deal with dance the way Graham does. To avoid becoming an imitation you have to break away completely. That has been the story of modern dance. The people who broke away from Graham who were most successful were the rebels: Erick Hawkins, Merce Cunningham, and Paul Taylor.

SC: Would you comment on Private Domain. AK: That’s a very dark dance; the setting is panels or arches that prevent seeing the dancers or the dance completely – you see sections of the dance. It’s sort of a study of clinical love with no romance in it. It has a lot to do with the formal problem of how a dance could be not seen. Just as in Diggity, the dancers have an obstacle course and must avoid stepping on the cutouts. So he will set himself formal problems like that, although the work itself seems to be about something else.

SC: Thank you for sharing your experience with us today!