Paul Taylor: 50 Years of Greatness

Ritual plays a central role in folk dancing, as do the geometries that inform the mainly circular dances that symbolize wholeness, community and rebirth and that go as far back as the history of man. Paul Taylor understands all these things and he also knows how to challenge dancers with fast-paced, serpentine-like moves that would leave even the most seasoned long-distance runner breathless. Taylor is also a doyen of modern dance: His company has been performing for over 50 years and, in that time, his commitment to human rights and the key issues in recent American history has been exemplary. He took on the KKK and the Vietnam War, for example, with a courage rare among even his more politicized contemporaries.

Which is what made his March 19 presentation so frustrating to attend. Sure, Taylor is often hit or miss. And it's not just that the choreography is dated in a way that, for me at least, Graham and Limon are not. Perhaps his dancers were tired after their three-week marathon celebration, but there was a certain lack of rigor or intensity to the movement itself. Too often the dancers looked as if their smiles had been painted on. Spring Rounds, a breezy piece set to Strauss, full of dancing in the round, is reminiscent of too many other Taylor pieces: it's light, it's lovely an-so what? The seaweed green-and-yellow costumes made one feel-to paraphrase my colleague Nancy Agabian-as if one were trapped in an Irish Spring soap commercial.

The French poet Baudelaire knew a thing or two about correspondences-between the visual, the musical and the tactile, and one wishes that Taylor had paid more heed to these as well in the night's second piece, Dust. The Poulenc score behaved in such a musically quixotic fashion that some audience members laughed at first, not yet realizing that-rather than performing light comedy-Taylor dancers were enacting the death throes of victims of some terrible parasitic disease. Once again the pretty costumes didn't do the dancers justice, as the supposed infections looked more like paisley by Benetton that the bubonic plague.

Finally, there was Esplanade, a Taylor classic. This happiest of romps has more than its fair share of innovative movement, as when one dancer balances herself on another's stomach before walking over his myriad joints (knee, shoulder, etc.), or when Lisa Viola joyfully jumps back and forth over a row of kneeling dancers, or runs in a hallucinating configuration of demi-and quarter- circles. In the end there's an awful lot of chasing going on in this dance.

It can't please feminist critics too much that it's always the boys chasing the girls or the girls leaping, bottoms up, into the arms of their male colleagues who catch them in near synchronicity to an astounded audience's gasps. I feel almost curmudgeonly criticizing a company as accomplished as Taylor's, but in the end I left the theater with the gnawing feeling that something just wasn't quite as choreographically on pointe as it could have been.