Paul Taylor Dance Company

This venerable modern dance company was in New York when I was there on a business trip. They were performing at City Center, which is just one block north of the hotel that my company puts us up in, so I took advantage to see them perform. I didn't know much about the company, but Paul Taylor is one of the founders of modern dance in America. He's still running the company and creating pieces for them. The program I saw consisted of Company B, Phantasmagoria and Promethean Fire. The company uses the same three people to design costumes, sets and lighting for all of their pieces.

The first piece was set to music by the Andrews Sisters and the costumes had a war-time look and feel to them. The dance was composed of various vignettes that captured that mood of each of the songs, ranging from fun to melancholy to sexy. The second piece was set to Renaissance music, with a mish-mash of costumes from peasants to a nun to an Irish step dancer and an East Indian Adam and Eve. Again, the piece was a series of vignettes although in this case the various odd and mismatched characters went in and out of each other's stories. This piece had a lot of humour in it, which was a nice change of pace from so much of modern dance.

Up to this point in the evening, I had been enjoying the performance and the strong dancers but not overly impressed. The final piece blew me away. The music was Bach, starting with the Toccata and Fugue, the preferred theme of all organ-playing villains everywhere. The costumes were black full length camisole suits with a silver chevron pattern and the stage was set with dark backdrop and dark floors. The music is enough to make you kind of sit up and take notice, but as soon as the dancers started moving, you could feel the entire audience become electrified. This was one of the most remarkably emotional dance pieces I've ever seen. And I'm not the only one who felt this way, as I saw another woman wiping her eyes after wards. This piece also has some of the most beautiful corps patterns I've ever seen in modern dance (which is not much known for choreographing for a group like that). This is one of those pieces of performance that makes me glad to be alive and to be able to experience it.

At the end of the evening, Mr. Taylor came out and took the stage with his dancers to bow to the audience.