IN RESIDENCY JUNE 21–JULY 4 AND AUGUST 1–8, 2021

A two-part residency: in July, Paul Taylor dancers rehearsed, reworked, and performed signature works, including Company B, Esplanade, and Aureole, under the guidance of Claudio Schellino, Ballet Master at Staatstheater Saarbrücken and Rehearsal Director Bettie de Jong, the former lead dancer of the Paul Taylor Dance Company. 

In August, the company returned to reconstruct Kurt Jooss’s modernist masterpiece The Green Table (1932), presided over by Jeanette Vondersaar, former principal dancer of the Dutch National Ballet, who supervises stagings of The Green Table by dance companies throughout  the world. Its mesmerizing choreography and  passionate anti-war sentiment are as essential in our era as they were a century ago. The Green Table was the centerpiece of PS21’s 2022 Gala on August 6, where the program included a panel discussion about the profound impact of the work and the role of dance in society then and now, and was performed for a general audience on August 7. Read more about the company’s residency at PS21 in Side of Culture.

Company B

Opus Number:  96
Music:  Songs sung by the Andrews Sisters
Costumes:  Santo Loquasto
Lighting:  Jennifer Tipton
Date First Performed:  June 20, 1991

Just as America began to emerge from the Depression at the dawn of the 1940s, the country was drawn into the Second World War. In a seminal piece of Americana, Paul Taylor recalls that turbulent era through the hit songs of the Andrews Sisters. Although the songs depict a nation surging with high spirits, millions of men were bidding farewell to wives or girlfriends and many would never return from battle. The dance focuses on such poignant dualities. Young lovers lindy, jitterbug and polka in a near manic grasp for happiness while in the background shadowy figures – soldiers – fall dead. Among the sections of the dance, the one choreographed to “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (of Company B)” is carefree until the moment the bugler is shot; the one set to “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” tells of a young lady’s affections for a soldier an ocean away who, for his part, reaches out to a comrade in arms. The dance ends just as it began, with “Bei Mir Bist du Schön” – but the world has clearly changed.“Evokes the exuberant rhythms of the ’40’s as well as the grim and persistent shadow of war. But even more vividly, it honors Taylor’s magnificent dancers. Some of the most glorious dancing to be seen anywhere… – Laura Shapiro, Newsweek

Esplanade

Opus Number:  61
Music:  Johann Sebastian Bach
Costumes:  John Rawlings
Lighting:  Jennifer Tipton
Date First Performed:  March 1, 1975

An esplanade is an outdoor place to walk; in 1975 Paul Taylor, inspired by the sight of a girl running to catch a bus, created a masterwork based on pedestrian movement. If contemporaries Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg could use ordinary “found objects” like Coke bottles and American flags in their art, Taylor would use such “found movements” as standing, walking, running, sliding and falling. The first of five sections that are set to two Bach violin concertos introduces a team of eight dancers brimming with Taylor’s signature youthful exuberance. An adagio for a family whose members never touch reflects life’s somber side. When three couples engage in romantic interplay, a woman standing tenderly atop her lover’s prone body suggests that love can hurt as well as soothe. The final section has dancers careening fearlessly across the stage like Kamikazes. The littlest of them – the daughter who had not been acknowledged by her family – is left alone on stage, triumphant: the meek inheriting the earth.“When I left the theater… I was thinking that I’d seen a classic of American dance. It confers a mythic dimension on ordinary aspects of our daily lives – it’s unfaked folk art. The dancers, crashing wave upon wave into those falls, have a happy insane spirit that recalls a unique moment in American life – the time we did the school play or we were ready to drown at a swimming meet. The last time most of us were happy in that way. – Arlene Croce, The New Yorker

Aureole

Opus Number: 30
Music: George Frideric Handel
Set and Costumes: George Tacet
Lighting: Thomas Skelton
Date First Performed: August 4, 1962

Aureole, perhaps his first major success, was the first time Taylor combined his loping antelope style of movement with baroque music, and its grace and individuality instantly spun into orbit throughout the world of dance. There is an interestingly variegated luminosity of spirit that recalls fluffy clouds on Shakespeare’s summer’s day.” – Clive Barnes, New York Post

Kurt Jooss, pioneering choreographer, dancer and theoretician, “one of the world’s most brilliant dance minds” (The New York Times) stood among the great figures of 20th-century dance. His anti-war masterpiece, The Green Table, is as resonant today as it was when first performed in 1932. Cinematic, packed with drama, visually stunning and still shocking, it’s a profoundly human work of social protest. Jooss’ genius for expressing emotion with “piercing truth and vibrant theatricality” has lost none of its power in the passage of time; his message of the futile, relentless tragedy of war is powerfully apposite today.