Houston Ballet and Paul Taylor Dance Company.

Eisenhower Theater, John F. Kennedy 

Center for the Performing Arts

Washington, D.C.

April 9-13, 2003

Of all the images Paul Taylor created in his newest work, In the Beginning, the most lasting is likely to be that of God, or Jehovah, as the main character is called. Jehovah is a rare role for a danseur mur, a mature classical dancer. It requires an academic technique imbued with both expansiveness and gravity. There's nothing quite like it in the recent repertoire, in terms of dance and drama. Jehovah rising into the air during a solo, his left foot sweeping up at his side to waist level, seems to pull along part of the earth, so powerful is the impetus. The acting demands are very tricky: Taylor's take on God and the entire story of Biblical creation is both comical and serious, yet there's nothing ambivalent about this duality. Humor and anger both seem to arise from a great fountainhead of love for fallible humanity.

That said, Beginning seemed unfinished. Portions of it lacked the rich detail of Taylor's great works and its hopeful ending felt abrupt. But the piece's potential is enormous. As usual, Taylor made the choreography on his own company. Then it was set on Houston Ballet, which gave the world premiere in the Kennedy Center engagement it shared with the Paul Taylor Dance Company. Houston dancers Dominic Walsh and Lucas Priolo alternated as Jehovah, establishing this role's centrality and suggesting its possibilities. That all the performers looked picture-perfect yet moved freely in their biblically inspired costumes is a credit to Santo Loquasto's designs. His sets, particularly the ultimate one with its rainbow, resonated. Friedrich Wanek's re-orchestration for woodwinds of Carl Orff's music, especially the extract from Carmina Burana, was an improvement on the original.

Altogether, this pairing of a ballet and a modern company was the most successful mix-and-match program the Kennedy Center has yet devised to attract balletgoers into a smaller theater while its Opera House is under renovation. As WITH THE ALL-BALLET GROUPS THAT PRECEDED HOUSTON/TAYLOR COMPETITION AROSE BETWEEN THE COMPANIES, ALTHOUGH IT SEEMED MINOR HERE COMPARED TO THE DEDICATION DANCERS FROM BOTH TROUPES SHOWED TO ONE CHOREOGRAPHER'S VISION. Some people argued that the reason this combination clicked so well is because the types of dancing complement each other, that ballet with its airiness and ease needs the counterpoise of movement with weight and force, and that, once upon a time, character dancing supplied the contrast which is the job of modern dancers today. This line of thought made some sense until the final work, Promethean Fire, for which Taylor used a Leopold Stokowski orchestration that made Bach sound amazingly like Wagner. Taylor's dancers, led by Patrick Corbin and Lisa Viola, were like Michelangelo figures--larger than life, yet intensely individual, yet part of a grand design. They were both noble and vulnerable to the core. Comparing them and their comrades to booted divertissement dancers in nineteenth-century ballet is out of the question.

Taylor dancers also performed the opening work, Offenbach Overtures. It has become richer since its 1995 premiere, when it wasn't as funny or poignant as the Massine type of romantic comedy on which it seemed modeled. Offenbach was followed by Houston's performance of Company B, in which Taylor explores another duality: that of intense living and sudden dying during wartime. With the Iraq war going on, these performances should have been powerful, but on this visit Houston wasn't as authoritative as it has been, and its two casts (except for Phillip Broomhead) seemed new to their roles. Undoubtedly, more performances will bring out nuance.

Seeing the Taylor company do Offenbach and Houston do Company B illustrated the differences that still exist between ballet and modern dance and their practitioners. Years ago, when Taylor was told a story then circulating that Lincoln Kirstein might choose him as Balanchine's successor at New York City Ballet, his eyes opened wide in astonishment. He asked aloud what in the world he would do with "those bodies." Since then there's proof Paul Taylor has learned how to handle ballet bodies too, and become resigned to the knowledge that their different intonations don't necessarily detract from his texts.