For six decades, the Paul Taylor Dance Company has been just that—a company devoted to the creative outpourings of one man. And that was enough, both for Mr. Taylor and for the dancers. He’s prolific and disciplined. To date, he has made a hundred and forty-two dances, usually at a pace of two per year. Some are better than others, but he never runs out of ideas or the desire to get out of bed and head to the studio. (This, at the age of eighty-four.) And the company has achieved a high level of success; since 2012, it has presented yearly seasons at Lincoln Center, an anomaly in the cash-strapped world of modern dance. Only Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre can say the same.
But Taylor has been thinking about the future. His own, as well as that of his company. As much as he would like to, he won’t live forever, and the path for modern-dance companies that outlive their founding choreographer has not been easy. Martha Graham Dance Company suffered through a bitter and expensive battle for succession. The Limón Dance Company, founded by José Limón, has soldiered on, with restricted budgets and limited exposure. Other, smaller groups have disappeared. Trends change, audiences move on. And the uncomfortable truth is that it’s hard to maintain the vitality of these historic works. What once felt revolutionary can now seem reverent, dusty, and old-fashioned.
To counter this erosion, Merce Cunningham, ever the radical, resolved that, after his death, his company would simply cease to exist. Now his dances are licensed to other troupes, universities, and training programs. (In February, New York Theatre Ballet will perform one of his early trios, “Cross Currents,” at N.Y.L.A., and, a few weeks later, a French company, Compagnie CNDC-Angers, will bring a compendium of Cunningham excerpts to the Joyce.) At the opposite end of the spectrum lies Alvin Ailey, which, despite providing a home for Ailey’s works, is really a repertory company. In order to survive in this age of short attention spans, companies need to commission new works. This has become the model, one followed also by Graham, and, to a lesser extent, by Limón.
Paul Taylor agrees. But being a man of feisty spirit, he has decided to get the process started now, while he can still control the results. Beginning with the upcoming season, his troupe will no longer call itself the Paul Taylor Dance Company but rather Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance. Later in the spring, it will begin commissioning new dances from living choreographers. But it will also do something that its peers haven’t—invite outside companies to perform works from their repertories on the same program with Taylor’s. Some of these will date from the early days of modern dance. Others will be more recent. All will be selected by Taylor, aided by a triumvirate of advisers: a dance historian, a festival director, and a former company member.
Essentially, Taylor will become a presenter of dance as well as a dance company. “It’s a beautiful gesture, reminiscent of the beginnings of modern dance, when different choreographers would share a program,” Carla Maxwell, the artistic director of the Limón Dance Company, says. Limón will be one of two guests to be presented by Taylor this season. They will perform the stately “Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor” by the modern-dance pioneer Doris Humphrey, a contemporary of Martha Graham. (José Limón, a student of Humphrey’s, invited her to direct his company in 1946.) The other visitor will be Shen Wei Dance Arts, created in 2000 by a young Chinese-born choreographer. That ensemble will perform Shen’s formal, abstract interpretation of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” from 2003.
Why these two particular pieces? Beyond the fact that Taylor must like them, there is an almost familial relationship among the three choreographers. Back in 1952 when Taylor first moved to New York, he studied with Humphrey and danced with her company. In his cheeky memoir “Private Domain,” he pokes gentle fun at her sometimes solemn approach to dance-making: “We imitate heat waves by holding our arms stiffly to the front and making scything motions. At the same time we do this, our legs are to take us forward in groups of four running steps and one limp . . . . After a while the scything, the limping and the counting are fun and almost make sense.” His own choreography, especially in the early years, was born of the impulse to get away from the seriousness that characterized this first generation of modernists. And yet, clearly, he values them.
As for Shen Wei, he was part of the first wave of performers to explore non-traditional dance in China. As a child, he had endured the rigorous training in Chinese opera. (Both of his parents were opera performers.) But in his early twenties, he jumped at the opportunity to study at the newly created Guangdong Dance Academy, where many of the teachers were American. There, he studied the techniques of Graham, Limón, and Taylor, and even performed one of Taylor’s most famous roles, the God-like central figure in “Aureole” (1962). The world of modern dance is a small world after all.
Taylor shows no signs of slowing down, and, as usual, he has produced two dances for the new season. “Sea Lark” is a collaboration with the artist Alex Katz; the company member Eran Bugge characterizes it as “sunny, beachy, and sweet.” In contrast, “Death and the Damsel” is a dark fantasy revolving around the petite, blond Jamie Rae Walker. A few years ago, Taylor was in a more valedictory mood. “He would cry in the studio when we rehearsed ‘Beloved Renegade,’ ” Bugge says. The central figure in that 2008 work is a man (hauntingly played by Michael Trusnovec) who reflects on his life, bidding farewell to each of his past loves before calmly, willingly, following an angelic figure into the unknown.
One of the reasons that “Beloved Renegade” packs such an emotional wallop is the music to which it is set: Francis Poulenc’s soaring “Gloria.” This season, for the first time since its creation, the dance will be accompanied by an orchestra (the excellent Orchestra of St. Luke’s, conducted by Donald York), augmented by St. George’s Choral Society and a solo soprano. The music-making is part of a new commitment by the company to use musicians whenever possible, at least in New York. Recorded music inevitably diminishes the effect of a dance. It eliminates surprise and the small variations in tempo and dynamics that keeps the dancers in the moment. Without it, you can almost hear the dancers counting in their heads. With live music, as Bugge says, “we can let go.”
All this change will be expensive. Paul Taylor put up the seed money by parting with five beloved Rauschenberg paintings, gifts from the painter, a close friend. (The two quarreled in the sixties, but that’s another story.) The paintings sold for six million dollars last year at Sotheby’s. Donors and foundations put up another four million dollars. The first season is paid for, but for this new model to work in the long term it will require major, ongoing commitments of cash. “We’re taking a huge financial risk,” says the company’s executive director, John Tomlinson, “like stepping off a cliff.” Hopefully foundations will like what they see and respond accordingly.
As with any change, there are skeptics. Some fear that the company will become a museum of the past rather than a fertile ground in which to plant the seeds of the future. There are questions of legitimacy: What gives Paul Taylor the right to show other people’s work? Last year, in a rather pointed blog post that grouped the Taylor initiative with the opening of a new institute for the study of ballet at N.Y.U., the dance writer Wendy Perron wrote, “There’s a ring about each name that implies that the form in question is endangered, and that these initiatives are meant to protect them in their purity.” But the fact is, the early works of modern dance are in danger. The danger is neglect. It’s easy to imagine a time when the only way to get an idea of what “Passacaglia” looked like would be by watching a scratchy video. Is that enough?
**“**I know in Western culture there is great reverence for the new and the innovative,” Shen says, “and that is what makes this culture so energetic and vibrant. Yet I wish there were more reverence for the past. In China, traditional opera was banned under the Cultural Revolution, but after it ended there was a rush to rebuild this three-hundred-year-old art form, a unique part of China’s cultural heritage. The government supported its revival and today all the repertory exists, and it is thriving.” American dance has never suffered a similar violent rupture with its past, but, in a way, the slow death brought by time can be even more definitive. Taylor can’t change this, of course, but if he can bring a few of these dances to a wider audience so much the better.
