Constructing 'The Wrecker's Ball.'(three-part work by the Paul Taylor Dance Company)

Outside New York City's small, red-brick Cornelia Connelly Center for Education on East Fourth Street on a damp morning in March, several men and a few women are standing about, smoking. Some are slight, wearing makeup and bathrobes. Others, in T-shirts and baseball caps, sport thick leather tool belts wrapped around beerbelly waists. The slight people, the dancers, shiver and mark time. The others--techies, cameramen, electricians' and carpenters--stolidly enjoy the fresh air.

Inside the school, with its worn linoleum floor and bleak walls, people mingle in two large adjoining rooms, some chatting casually over the coffee machines while others, absorbed in intense conversation, quickly down their lunches at cafeteria-style tables. The ringing of telephones at an improvised communications headquarters punctuates the general hubbub.

With no discernible warning, the lunch break ends. The smokers come in from the cold, conservations die down, and everyone disperses. Snaking cable lines, taped to the floor in bunches, lead the way, twisting along staircases through narrow doors and encircling the dark balcony and the perimeter of the floor of a dilapidated auditorium. In the center of the space, in dramatic contrast to the surrounding cramped, dark chaos, designer Santo Loquasto has created, for Paul Taylor's Company B, a World War II army canteen rich with sentimental mementos and bathed in the nostalgic haze of Alan Adelman's golden lighting. Work is resuming on "The Wrecker's Ball," a program composed of three Paul Taylor dances--Company B, Funny Papers, and A Field of Grass--for PBS's Dance in America,

The cables wind farther out the auditorium's back door into a parked beige trailer. From there, watching multiple monitors of the action on the set, producer Judy Kinberg communicates with director Matthew Diamond and the choreographer. Working from meticulously scheduled charts and cue sheets, associate directors and producers help guide the activities. Holding a fistful of markers, Kinberg takes color-coded notes on what she sees: for herself, for Diamond, and for Taylor. She must project from this moment to a few days hence, when she will be pondering the various takes with editor Girish Bhargava on compound monitors in a mid-Manhattan editing studio.

The cast of characters from the opening scene take their places. Several dozen circle the set like hungry lions, waiting for the cue that will prompt them into action: to rearrange a dancer's hair, alter a costume, fill canteen ashtrays, light candles, roll the sound, or film a shot. Another few dozen seem in perpetual motion on the perimeter of the floor and on the balcony: moving lights, attaching light and sound cables, climbing ladders, carting portions of sets and assorted heavy equipment. A crew making a documentary on the Taylor company insinuates itself at the locus of power, the choreographer, at every opportunity. A lone photographer, Johan Elbers, captures all. Smack in the middle are the dancers, some merely longing about the set, while others, in the camera's eye, start and stop, picking up in the middle of a phrase, waiting, changing a facing, relocating to another section of the set. Beginning again. Each performance with complete concentration and full energy, but without applause.

Taylor occasionally comes to the center to talk to the dancers. More often, he too is on the periphery, watching a floor monitor and consulting with the director and with his longtime associate, Bettie De Jong. His delight in the process is palpable. A little tongue-in-cheek, he states,"I enjoy watching other people work." If you have read Taylor's autobiography and heard him talk about his fascination with the interaction of natural phenomena, flora and fauna, then such a statement makes sense. He values the symbiosis of artists-dancers and artists-technicians in this hive of activity. Who would better appreciate that the cameraman, operating the hand-held camera, found that he had better traction and could travel with greater fluidity working in bare feet!

Not that Taylor isn't working, too, but these three dances being filmed were choreographed years ago. The shoot for "The Wrecker's Ball" took six days; the planning took five years. From Kinberg, Diamond, Loquasto, and Adelman to the many men and women circling the dancers, the people involved in this production are familiar to one another from other productions. There is a calm about the proceedings that comes from professionalism at every level. Mary Cochran, a veteran of many Taylor videotapings, recognizes the expertise of the crew. "Everyone knows their job, and that helps us concentrate."

Diamond has looked at each dance live and studied a performance tape many times before he decides how he wants to shoot each dance. A former dancer and choreographer, he tries to see "the dance behind the dance," and finds approaches and techniques that are not possible onstage. A week prior to the shoot, Taylor and Diamond walk and talk the company through the spacing with a single handheld camera. Visualizing his work in the context of a set inspires Taylor to experiment, so he chose to rechoreograph some of his work, particularly a solo for Andrew Asnes, making it "darker than it is onstage." But this is done before the shoot.

On the set, De Jong is there to remind the dancers of the angle for each shot and what is being stressed, while Taylor watches for gestural and facial expressions that may need to be toned down due to the proximity of the camera. Having performed on television before, the Taylor dancers know that a few inches can make a vast difference. Each step must be rethought. The shoot follows the chronological progression of the dances: Company B, the 1940s; Funny Papers, the 1950s; end A Field of Grass, the 1960s. In the World War II canteen, Francie Huber and Hernando Cortez whirl through "The Pennsylvania Polka," stopping precisely when the action is cut, catching their breath, and then, when directed to, plunging into motion again. Without the natural momentum of the dance's progression, they must find resources to invest each take with the remembered energy of live performance. Without duplicate costumes, the dancers fan themselves to evaporate perspiration. Dressers from the sidelines mop the dancers' brows and freshen their makeup.

Overnight, the canteen metamorphoses into a 1950s movie theater, and Taylor's Funny Papers becomes the requisite cartoon that precedes the main feature. Patrick Corbin and Thomas Patrick, fearing that their white pants will quickly soil, practice their "I Like Bananas" duet in their dance belts, to the crew's heckling applause. By the final scene and another overnight redecoration by Loquasto's crew, the theater has deteriorated into an abandoned building and has been overtaken by the band of hippies in A Field of Grass.

There is now an air of anticipation on the set. While the previous shoots have presented various technical challenges, this one surpasses them. The simulated disrepair of the building allows rain to fall in on the dancing hippies. The actual rainfall will be the final scene of the shoot, but until then the dancers must be kept wet. Taylor and Diamond seem to take the most pleasure in spritzing the dancers, who put up with some dramatic changes in body temperature. While dancing, they don't seem to be bothered by their wet costumes, but when they are draped around the set in feigned hallucinatory states, they shiver under repeated sprayings. As the final day progresses, the upstairs balcony fills with visitors arriving for the "rain" scene--former company members, press agents, the physical therapist. Taylor hands out "Wrecker's Ball" T-shirts to the crew.

It's about 6:30 on a Saturday night when the rain falls. There is a brief test without the dancers. Diamond raises his voice for the first time. The water has not been turned off quickly enough after the take to suit him. He is justifiably concerned about the dancers moving on wet linoleum, although they are wearing shoes with special soles to prevent slipping. Diamond would love to get this shot in one take. It progresses perfectly until a dancer slides into a prop. Another take ... another ... again another ...