Taylor 2: Paul Taylor's Genius...Now in Fun Size

Last Wednesday, Paul Taylor's Taylor 2 Dance Company visited Bellevue's Theatre at Meydenbauer Center with a three-piece evening. Established in 1993 by now-80-year-old choreographer and dance giant Paul Taylor, Taylor 2 is a touring group that travels all over the world.

His dances are often reworked for this six-person troupe, allowing for Taylor 2 to play in smaller houses with smaller budgets. The six-member company of young dancers is to Paul Taylor's main company as the Seattle Opera Young Artists Program is the Opera's mainstage performances. With this performance, you don't get technical precision, but you do get a youthful spirit of dancers emerging as artists.

The evening started (oddly, ten minutes early) with 3 Epitaphs. First performed in 1956, the piece begins as slouching figures lope onto the stage, covered head-to-toe in dark grey jumpsuits designed by the American abstract expressionist artist Robert Rauschenberg. With small mirrors over their eyes and on the palms of their hands, their knuckle-dragging treatise on posture--and playful sense of humor--brought to mind designer sock monkeys. (All right, they also reminded me of the back-up dancers for the Black Eyed Peas, circa "Boom Boom Pow.")

Paul Taylor (Photo: Maxine Hicks)

Taylor's focus on everyday movements, and their integration into his choreography, was revolutionary at the time--and so commonplace in dance today that it's hard for us now to see this piece as those who saw its premiere did. The lazy jazz music--an early form played, interestingly, at both weddings and funerals in NoLa--matches the intentionally lazy body movements of the dancers.

Taylor's brilliance was more in evidence in Duet from Roses. This balletic pas de deux featured dancers Justin Kahan and Madelyn Ho. Much of this piece is a pretty, standard duet from any story ballet. Even the music, Adagio for Clarinet and Strings by Heinrich Baermann, is reminiscent of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, making me wonder where the Taylor was in all of this.

But if you look closely, you see the small touches that are, for me, what makes his work a departure from Ballanchine. At one point, Kahan crouches down and places his hands, one above the other, gently on Ho's right hip. It's a tiny detail, lasting for only a few seconds and serving no purpose other than to convey an intimacy in a way deeper than your standard ballet vocabulary allows. Both danced with a graceful fluidity. Ho, whose bio mentions her recent graduation with a degree in Chemical and Physical Biology from Harvard, is charismatic. While some of the other dancers are clearly more accomplished, she has a magnetic quality that outshines them.

The last piece, Company B, subtly juxtaposes the innocence that was represented in the pop culture in the '40s with the realities faced by soldiers at the time. It begins quietly, with the full company emerging from a grayish fog-like light, as if they are stepping in from the past. The Andrews Sisters kick in with "Bei Mir Bist du Schön" and all are in high spirits. During the "Pennsylvania Polka," a couple whirls about the stage, while upstage, two soldiers act out war games in slow mo. In "The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (of Company B)," Kahan is all brash exuberance until he's shot in the last moment of the piece. If you blink you miss it--and you see the piece completely differently. 

Having seen Taylor's work performed by ballet companies across the country--especially Company B--I can say that Taylor 2's performance lacks the cohesiveness that, say, a PNB would bring to Taylor's choreography. But Taylor interpreted by a ballet company is a different animal. Beautiful, but different. Taylor 2 brings a non-classical, everyday movement feel to the work that works. It's different, imperfect, and beautiful.