December 16-22, 2004

dance

Hot Stuff

by Janet Anderson

The great ones never stop. Legendary 74-year-old choreographer Paul Taylor clearly has not run out of steam. If anything, he's pushing his fantastic group of 16 dancers to new limits—proven by his troupe's performance at Annenberg last week.

Promethean Fire headlined the evening. Some critics call Fire Taylor's response to 9/11. Taylor, however, says his inspiration was the Disney film Fantasia. Fantasia opens with Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor in Stokowski's thunderous orchestration. Taylor uses Stokowski's phrase-emphatic rendering to drive his dance. Black-clad dancers pile up at the front of the stage, but Taylor quickly spins them into vignettes, which seem more about dance pyrotechnics than catastrophe. In one instance, a woman supports a man holding a balance pose, while in another, a woman hurls herself across stage only to be plucked out of the air by a male dancer. With performers' heads and shoulders brightly lit against the black stage, the dancers looked like flames flickering on stage. 9/11? Fantasia? Who knows? Gorgeous stagecraft? You bet.

The cheery Klezmerbluegrass, commissioned to celebrate 350 years of Jewish life in America, melded Jewish folk dance with country hoedown. This sprightly dance combines leg-kicking squats normally associated with Cossacks (but actually found in many folk-dance traditions) and hip-slapping country reels. The sections where Taylor chose to have square dances and reels performed to Jewish Klezmer music good-naturedly showed not only the similarities but the easy blending of the two traditions.

Catastrophic implications seem more evident in Dante Variations. The program quotes Dante describing this circle of hell as filled with "the nearly soulless whose lives concluded neither blame nor praise." The dancers looked trapped in a grim place indeed: Dimly lit and dressed in camouflage-like leotards, they danced to Gyorgy Ligeti's Musica ricercata, adapted for barrel organ, which sounded like haunted-house music. But they performed extraordinary feats trying to conquer annoying punishments. One dancer whose hands were tied together leaped up in frustration and landed smack on her knees; another managed fantastic turns and footwork with knees tied together. One poor fellow simply kept trying to get a toilet paper streamer off his shoe. Eventually these spooky waifs fell down again into a heap, left in their particular hell. This may not be great way to spend eternity, but it looks terrific onstage.

Paul Taylor Dance Company Dec. 9, Annenberg Center