The Terrific Tempo of Paul Taylor

The Paul Taylor Dance Company has never lacked spirit. Far from it. But last week as the 13-member troupe opened its fourth summer season at Lake Placid, N.Y., its mood seemed more buoyant and carefree than ever before. On the stage of the Adirondack resort's Center for Music, Drama and Art, there were the usual sprints, baseball slides and staggers. A woman flew through the air and, miraculously, a man appeared out of nowhere to catch her. Four men in dinner jackets pranced madly around like stallions crashing the Gong Show. Dancers dove to the floor and scrambled up--all in time to the music, all illustrating Choreographer Taylor's kinetic sense of the zany and the zestfully breathtaking.

To the Wall. The joy was real. This was a company that had gone to the wall financially, and had come back not only to tell about it, but to dance better than ever. Last season Taylor announced the disbanding of his company. A big-bankroll tour of South America had just been canceled at the last minute, and Taylor had a $50,000 deficit from the previous Manhattan season to pay off. Dissolution seemed the only course.

Fortunately, Taylor's many admirers did not agree. One of them was John P. Holmes Jr.. president of the National Corporate Fund for Dance. Says Holmes: "The idea of disbanding one of the foremost modern-dance companies was absolutely ludicrous. It could not happen." It did not happen because the National Corporate Fund--created in 1972 to dig money out of the corporate world for U.S. dance companies--went beyond the realm of fund raising. Holmes became the Taylor Company's president and began cutting costs where he could, notably by limiting the company's number of performances in Manhattan, where operating costs are very heavy. That is just fine with Taylor--at least for now. "The businessmen leave me alone artistically," he says. "And besides, I happen to be a skinflint myself."

Until two years ago, Taylor, 46, was his own principal dancer. Before he started his first troupe 21 years ago, he was a soloist with the Martha Graham company. Like George Balanchine, he almost always works with his own dancers, whose speed and athleticism are virtually his signature. Taylor calls his newest dance, Dust, "a subconscious stream of action that just bubbled up." The description applies to all his work. It seems spontaneous, serendipitous, full of abrupt exits and startling entrances. For Taylor, the glory of motion is where you find it: "I look at people in the streets and in the country, and I come to the conclusion that the most beautiful things to see are not in the art galleries. They are all around. You just have to open your eyes."

A Paul Taylor dance may not leave the audience time to blink. Polaris is a bold conceit in which the choreography is repeated but the performers, music and lighting shift. In Cloven Kingdom, a satire on modern manners, the dancers slide between the human and animal kingdoms. The bright costumes of Post Meridian seem to make their own choreography. In Esplanade, one of Taylor's most popular works, there is no traditional dancing at all, but rather a dizzying series of walks and runs set to the music of Bach. At one point Nicholas Gunn, the company's best-known male dancer, must run across the stage to catch Carolyn Adams. Says Gunn: "I have to keep moving at that terrific tempo, and she has to jump in the air and hope that a man who is not there yet will get there at the last second to catch her. It's frightening."

Taylor's trust is placed mostly in his dancers and in his own imagination. When he arrives at his cramped Manhattan studio, he has only the vaguest notion of what he will create. He starts by working out movements using the dancers as a sculptor uses clay. He may throw out weeks of expensive rehearsal time if things do not progress properly. This year's Images, an innocent but enigmatic piece that evokes ancient rituals, did not jell. "I started out with a nice Schubert piece," Taylor recalls, "but after two weeks I saw I was getting nowhere. Three weeks before the opening, I said, 'Quick, I need some music.' I had some Debussy piano pieces in my record collection, and I thought, 'That's better.' I started all over again." Taylor's improvising continued. The eventual motif was determined by Designer Gene Moore, who watched a run-through and said one word, "Crete." The resulting Images seems like an inevitable blending of Debussy with Minoan reliefs.

Now that his company is better financed, Taylor will follow the Lake Placid season with a six-week Latin American tour. Beyond that, he plans to go on quietly creating new works for his dancers. A shy, unflamboyant man, he does not fly into rages when rehearsals go badly. But once he did get off a memo that has been quoted ever since. Unable to pin down what was wrong, he did what he usually does: he made something up--in this case the word zunch. "Zunch is the magic that stays with the watchers after we are done. Zunch is opening up. Turning the burner on. Going beyond. Isn't that what makes a dancer out of a pedestrian?" And a wizard out of a choreographer?

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