Paul Taylor Season’s Premieres Lack the Luster of Its Revivals

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/arts/dance/paul-taylor-american-modern-dance-premieres.html

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What are we to make of the choreographer Paul Taylor and his annual three-week New York season? His dancers — the company is based here — are among the city’s most accomplished, personable and sensuous; his repertory includes many of the world’s most oddly imaginative masterpieces.

In 2014 Mr. Taylor announced, and in 2015 began to realize, his plan to turn his company — before that, almost invariably a vehicle for his own work — into a repertory troupe that honored both previous and later generations of American modern dance. Nobody has ever been so well placed to advance such a project. It has often seemed that the mainstream of American modern dance tradition passes through Mr. Taylor.

In the 1950s, he danced for the choreographers Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham. He began to choreograph in 1954, went independent with his own company in 1962, and for decades produced many classics. Pina Bausch and Twyla Tharp are just two of the choreographers who danced in his company early in their careers; Taylorisms are to be found in many of the best dances by the choreographer Mark Morris.

A central problem, though, is that Mr. Taylor, 86, is a master choreographer — singular in both compositional canniness and idiosyncratic imagination — who, paradoxically, keeps forgetting the secrets of his mastery. Since 1986, there have been periods when his work has lacked any fertilizing inspiration; none of the dances he has made since 2010 have been important.

His company has opened its season with characteristic abundance: nine works, including three premieres, in the first three performances, with 13 other pieces to follow. The many revivals are where the season’s heart beats most strongly.

Wednesday brought the world premiere of his “Ports of Call,” a complete embarrassment; Thursday’s gala featured the New York premiere of his “The Open Door,” half-baked at best. Both are comedies; in each case the comedy fails. Both show the bold peculiarity of conception that characterizes many of Mr. Taylor’s finest works, but there’s none of the Taylor dance poetry that might make them airborne.

‘THE OPEN DOOR’

“The Open Door” is set to Elgar’s “Enigma Variations,” but Elgar wrote 14 variations, and Taylor brings the curtain down after No. 10. There have been other Taylor creations in recent years that have seemed unfinished; this one, truncating a musical masterpiece, is the most obviously so.

You can easily see the originality of Mr. Taylor’s idea, which derives from Elgar’s music (and maybe from Frederick Ashton’s 1968 ballet for that). The Host (Michael Novak) invites a wonderfully motley gathering of eccentrics into his home, sets them performing and even quarreling, and then, when they are gone, starts to create dance poetry. Both with them and alone, Mr. Novak has rapturous gestures, as if building castles in the air, that begin to make magic; they lead nowhere. William Ivey Long’s set and costumes, which place “The Open Door” in an early-20th-century country house with a lazy green landscape outside, have a lot more detail and fun than Mr. Taylor’s dance.

‘PORTS OF CALL’

“Ports of Call” is set to two works by Jacques Ibert: “Escales” (which means “Ports of Call”) and “Divertissement”; the ports, according to the program, are in Africa, Hawaii, Alaska and the American Midwest. It’s a piece of cartoon craziness whose fun goes nowhere. Again, the designer — here, Mr. Taylor’s long-term colleague Santo Loquasto — has provided much more vitality than the choreography, as does Ibert’s potently colorful music.

Mr. Taylor gives us a crummy series of African tribal rituals; Hawaiian grass-skirt hula; Eskimos shivering and huddling outside an igloo; a church wedding for Midwestern yokels (one bride arrives heavily pregnant, while another is dragged by her man) — clowning without humor, all tepidly wrought. Most bafflingly, the Alaska scene is set to vividly Mediterranean music.

‘CONTINUUM’

“The Open Door” began Thursday’s gala, whose centerpiece was the world premiere of Lila York’s “Continuum.” Ms. York, a Taylor dancer for 12 years, is a prolific choreographer. Her opening tableau in “Continuum” handsomely paid tribute to the way many of Mr. Taylor’s pure-dance works start with an immobile nucleus that we know will soon burst forth into dance life like a seed head.

All of “Continuum” showed Taylorian dance skill, energy, form, contrast. Dances for Laura Halzack, Sean Mahoney, Mr. Novak and Michael Trusnovec, among others, demonstrated Ms. York’s appreciation of these artists’ talent. Yet the score she chose, Max Richter’s “Recomposé: The Four Seasons,” feels to me entirely synthetic (Vivaldi meets minimalism), and so does this dance. It’s a skillful Taylor pastiche, reminding us of the real Taylor experience without challenging it or making it fresh.

The main life of the company’s first three performances came from Taylor revivals. Live music, conducted by Ted Sperling, is played by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s for most of the works. Although I find it too mild for the Bach score in “Brandenburgs” (1988), elsewhere it is the breath of life.

As “Airs” (1978, to Handel items) started the season on Tuesday, it so gorgeously contrasted stillness, walking and running — all so lusciously textured — that tears of wonder filled my eyes. The joys and sorrows of “Company B” (1991); the excitingly energetic silent-comedy bizarrerie of “Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal)” (1980); the bittersweet Depression genre study of “Black Tuesday” (2001) — all show Mr. Taylor’s exceptional range.

His company now has two personas. On tour outside New York, it remains the Paul Taylor Dance Company, performing an exclusively Taylor repertory; it arrived in New York fresh from a successful four-performance engagement in Sarasota, Fla. In this annual New York season (at the David H. Koch Theater since 2011), it’s called Paul Taylor American Modern Dance.

This New York experiment still feels different at every performance. Some works project fully into the depths and breadths of the Koch space, but not all. Mr. Trusnovec, the company’s foremost dancer, now seems to lack the juice for the sensuously textured “Brandenburgs.” But most of these dancers are in their prime; every part of their bodies seems to sing with rich, bright depth of tone.