Exquisitely Taylor-Made.

PAUL TAYLOR is a choreographer. Paul Taylor is a dance company. But Paul Taylor is also a way of looking at dance, and a way of looking at life. It is a way with a very personal slant. This slant, that highly individualized and attitudinized attitude colors the work and infuses the dances. In dance terms Taylor is recognizable four studios off. Today, following the death of Jerome Robbins, Taylor, who this month reaches his seventieth birthday, and the eighty-one-year-old Merce Cunningham, are the sole survivors of the universally recognized great twentieth-century choreographers. They are as different as chalk is from cheese--well, to be more accurate, say as Stilton is from Camembert--but they now stand alone. Others may well join them in the pantheon--one prays they will--but on all the present contenders, it can be said that the jury is still out. Only Cunningham and Taylor can claim to wear by consensus universal laurels on their lofty brows.

I was deeply aware of this the other month, when I was hosting our annual Dance Magazine Awards. I introduced Taylor, who was, in turn, about to present one of the actual awards to his own choreographic protege and onetime young luminary in his own company, David Parsons. Taylor paid his young friend a delightful tribute, and I could not help but notice that he unobtrusively sweetened the award pot, as it were, by tossing in a check (for a rather considerable sum, I later learned) as a contribution to Parsons's company. Deeds and words were the order of his day.

Yet even in introducing Taylor I felt that indescribable shiver where we have to use French to distinguish it from anything else--a frisson--making me suddenly aware that I was in the presence of a real genius. I have met the odd genius or two before--choreographic and otherwise. But usually we take these for granted and in our stride. It would be unbearable for us and them if we didn't. But once in a while, in the presence of the really great, one does get the thrill of recognizing that one is occupying the same air-time in history. It could be them or it simply could be their work--for yes, all this is admittedly subjective stuff that you admire beyond admiration.

Taylor wears his eminence as lightly as ever, but that lightness has its own profundity, as his apparent ease is forever skating over depths mostly hidden, occasionally shatteringly revealed. When he's at his best, Taylor is almost inevitably disconcerting. The French playwright Jean Anouilh liked to categorize his plays as "pink" or "black," and it is a characterization that might be well applied to Taylor. But Taylor is so often pink and black all at once. He delights in the prettiness of the rainbow film of oil on water, but usually insists on re vealing the grime of the muddy puddle beneath. It is the cool distancing of an often ironic, sometimes cynical, artistic sensibility.

Taylor is arguably the most inventive and the most versatile choreographer alive today. Nor is that the most remarkable thing about him. Actually, the most remarkable aspect of all this Taylor-made choreography is simply its consistency. We all know that the admirable Ralph Waldo Emerson warned that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," but Emerson never met Paul Taylor. If he had, he would doubtless have claimed that Taylor's consistency, turning out ballet after ballet with exquisitely accurate quality control, is scarcely foolish. Always---even when his pure genius is not sparking as genius should spark--his impeccably musical choreography is, apart from anything else, a perfect environment for dancers, but luckily for audiences it is an environment of an ever-variable emotional climate and poetic atmosphere.

Yet this particular consistency--you might call it the consistency of the long-distance choreographer--is even more remarkable than it might seem at first sight. George Balanchine liked to remark wryly that the trouble with his muse was that it had to arrive promptly on cue in the rehearsal room and then pay serious attention to union time. This is the real problem for choreographers providing all, or in Balanchine's case the bulk, of their season's new ballets. The sheer restraints of rehearsal time and rehearsal material, which of course is their dancers' bodies, are grievous, yet these valiant choreographers must deliver. They must feed the hungry mouths of audiences and critics forever wanting to see something new.

In such circumstances the occasional bad ballet---even the very occasional stinker--would be at least understandable, yet the fantastic thing about Taylor is how very few twenty-four-carat duds he comes up with. Almost all of his ballets deserve at least a limited survival, few indeed to sink without a trace.

Ironically, that itself provides special problems. Of course, for a painter, who can produce storerooms of paintings; for a composer, who can maintain a shelf of scores; for a wordsmith, either novelist or playwright, who can offer a library of texts, fecundity is no problem. Sheer quantity can even be its own reward.

But for a choreographer, the more works you make the more difficult it is to keep them alive and in repertory. Dance notation (still relatively primitive compared with its musical cousin) and video can help, but ballets can only really exist on stage. And there's the problem. Since he first hung up his choreographer's shingle in 1954, Taylor has created more than 100 works. But how many survive as anything more substantial than memories, photographs and press clips? Very few. Let us hope that Taylor is luckier than most.

Those, I suppose, were just some of my thoughts at the awards ceremony as I looked at Taylor, who was awkward, lanky, ill at ease, yet totally in command at the rostrum, and I remembered all the fun of discovery he had provided me over the past four decades. I remembered his dancing--sharp images of faun-like loping, a big body careening through space with a shy and almost imperceptible grin. And I looked back--seeing them almost in a series of vignettes and cameos--at so many of his ballets. What a heritage ... and one not even anything like finished.

Senior editor Clive Barnes, who covers dance and theater for the New York Post, has contributed to Dance Magazine since 1956.