PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY.

PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY CITY CENTER MARCH 2-14, 1999

We admire a Mozart or a Picasso not only for the quality of their work but also for its sheer quantity. And it always seems something of a plus in comparing George Balanchine with Antony Tudor that the former was so much more productive than the latter. Thus, it seems admirable that since he started choreographing in 1954, the sixty-eight-year-old Paul Taylor has created more than 100 works. But how many survive as anything more substantial than memories, photographs, and press clips? Very few.

Abundance is no problem for a painter, a composer, a novelist, or a playwright, but for a choreographer the more works you create 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 onstage. There's the problem.

Among the special interest of this year's Paul Taylor Dance Company season at City Center was the number of old works Taylor has reintroduced into the repertory, giving them a fresh visibility and perhaps a renewed lease on life. Apart from the two New York premieres, these included Sunset, Airs, Cloven Kingdom, Piazzolla Caldera, Roses, A Field of Grass, Profiles, Nightshade, Offenbach Overtures, and The Word; some had not been seen for many seasons.

For his opening-night gala benefit March 2, Taylor produced a program that offered the New York premiere of his latest ballet, Oh, You Kid! (which is reviewed at its Kennedy Center premiere, on page 80), and was preceded by revivals of two other works, Airs, and Sunset. Both were given for the only time this season so the gala benefactors got "a unique selling proposition" before they sat down to the cultural equivalent of the politician's proverbial chicken dinner. The limpidly beautiful Airs set to Handel with Taylor in his cheery transcendental Baroque mood, and the playful, yet suggestively tragic, Sunset, an evocation to softly imperial Elgar of soldiers and their girls on the eve of battle, have been better rehearsed in the past.

Not all of the City Center repertory were voices from the distant past. Dating from the last couple of years, Offenbach remained pure delight, a frothy and satirical glance at all the frou-frou-and-chandeliers ballets you've ever seen. A dark tale of evil among repressed schoolboys, The Word, still appeared opaque in its message but the grotesque brilliance of its choreography, particularly as danced by Lisa Viola and Richard Chen See, remained undimmed. There were also repeat performances of last year's tango extravaganza, full of stylized sins of the flesh and spurts of the spirit, Piazzolla Caldera.

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's ballets. In such a tabulation, the delightfully carefree Field of Grass, bouncily performed to Harry Nilsson songs by a cast led by Patrick Corbin, would be pink, as might be the very different and sensuously beautiful Wagnerian love duets in the rhapsodic Roses. The twenty-year-old Profiles, to a specially commissioned score by Jan Radzynski, is perhaps neither pink nor black, although this essay in two-dimensional dance, seemingly inspired by Nijinsky's L'Apres-midi d'un Faune, is certainly provocative.

Even more provocative, and undeniably black, was Taylor's piece of nineteenth-century Gothic, also from 1979. Nightshade, a nightmarish, surrealistic comedy, set to Scriabin's music, features twisted souls chased by something horrible from the woodshed, played with demonic glee by a black-masked Andrew Asnes. Another program boasted yet another more familiar piece noir, Cloven Kingdom, that urbane picture of silk gloved savagery and dance satire of the satyr beneath the skin.

Balanchine liked to note that his muse had to arrive on Union time, and indeed one of the characteristics of major choreographers of dance companies is timely consistency. They not only have to be prodigiously prolific, they also have to meet the virtually contractual needs of their respective companies. With Taylor that has, for years, meant that, come rain, come shine, come blizzard, come earthquake, he has delivered both through and for his dancers, and for the never-satiated appetite of his loyal audience, two brand-new ballets a year.

Even if they were pretty bad ballets, that would still be a logistical achievement and a triumph of will, but the enviable thing about Taylor is that almost all of them are pretty good, with the absolute dud being rare enough to be a collector's item. This season that mean collector once again came up empty--for the night following the successful opening of Oh, You Kid! there was another highly rewarding New York premiere, Fiddlers Green.

There is no story, not even so much as a subtext, to this sunny, pure dance piece set to selections from John Adams's John's Book of Alleged Dances. I suppose the music, like most Adams, could be lumped as "minimalist." But like so many of the composer's scores it combines cheery harmonies with an ongoing rhythmic flow, here loosely structured as dances. Taylor has used the score as groundwork for a series of bucolic episodes that suggest a hoedown in a country barn--as envisaged by children. It's games and square dances, circular rounds with hands held in childlike innocence, with the occasional touch of playground hurts and playtime rivalries.

The title seems oddly literal; the sound of the Adams suggested fiddles and fiddlers, while the designer Santo Loquasto placed his white smocklike costumes against the background of a paintbox green so emerald it could make you dream of St. Patrick. The performers bounce and cavort through the piece with the blithe assurance of a cloudless summer day, where even dusk is just a rumor. Among the sweetly untroubled dancers, I particularly admired Corbin, looking rather like a cartoon Charlie Brown, and the zesty Chen See. But all were as charming and playful as kittens. Highly trained kittens!

However, the charmer of the season was the local premiere of the already reviewed Oh, You Kid!, with its sardonic yet affectionate humors of the Age of ragtime and the pop culture that flowed around it. Taylor delights in the prettiness of the rainbow film of oil on water, while insisting on revealing the grime of the muddy puddle beneath. It is the cool distancing of an often ironic, sometimes cynical, artistic sensibility. Pop ballroom dance, vaudeville, silent movies--and because we are dealing with Taylor here and his darker side--carnival grotes-queries and even a bitterly absurd, sidelong glance at the Ku Klux Klan, run riot in a collage of period dance and attitude.

With Loquasto's Keystone Kops-style bathing-beauty costumes and Jennifer Tipton's warm, enveloping lighting, the entire ballet takes on the look of a sepia-toned seaside photograph of the era, but one long tucked away in some forgotten drawer. It was beautifully danced, with Asnes and Silvia Nevjinsky in the "Dreamland" duet, a whole passel of dancers mugging away merrily in a silver-screen skit, and, most impressive of all, the extraordinary Viola, performing a sad, pathetic, and peculiar contortionist routine.

Oh, You Kid! will prove popular in the Taylor parthenon, but while giggling at the nostalgic belly laughs, keep an eye open for those overtones and undertones. The work, quite stealthily, is not as helter-skelter cheerful as it might at first seem.