Paul Taylor's golden age: as the Paul Taylor company reaches its 50th season, the choreographer's innovative work has earned a place among the classics.

AN APT METAPHOR for celebrating the Paul Tailor Dance Company's fiftieth-anniversary season this March is an image of Taylor as a swimmer, which he was at Syracuse University in the late 1940s. As a choreographer he also plunged into deep water and often struggled to keep his head above it, but he never went under, and eventually he won the equivalent of the gold medal time and time again. The company that bears his name reflects the same endurance and adaptability as its founder.

Gold in any form was in particularly short supply during the company's early years. Charles Reinhart, the Taylor Company's first manager, now president of the American Dance Festival, recalls, "Paul at one time was living in the back of the studio. It didn't even have a shower, but that didn't stop him. Nothing stopped him.

"Once I remember he emptied the sand out of the fire bucket at the shabby old walk-up because he needed a pot to make a stew. He always made do with what was at hand."

Taylor began studying modern dance at Syracuse and, after moving to New York City in 1952, continued under such pioneers as Doris Humphrey, Jose Limon, and Merce Cunningham, for whom he danced in 1953-1954; he began giving intermittent performances with his own company of six dancers in 1954. Glasses with Martha Graham led to membership in her company from 1955 to 1962, where he created major roles in Clytemnestra (1958) and Alcestis (1960), among others.

HIS EXCELLENCE a performer who uniquely blended athleticism and musicality earned him an invitation to join New York City Ballet after the Graham and Balanchine companies collaborated on Episodes (1959). (The solo Balanchine made on Taylor proved too demanding to remain in the version that entered NYCB's repertoire.) Balanchine's offer was rejected; submitting to the discipline of yet another twentieth-century dance master was the furthest thing from Taylor's mind. Nor would he ever create work on unfamiliar dancers when fulfilling choreographic commissions in the future; he always makes work on his company first. Before he left Graham's company, his fiercely original works were already providing a taste of the masterpieces to come. 3 Epitaphs (1956), for instance, with the dancers sheathed from head to toe in black body stockings flecked with shards of mirrors, revealed his unerring taste in collaborators. The designer was artist Robert Rauschenberg, a colleague of Taylor's at his day job dressing Tiffany's windows. Epitaphs, with its hilarious, faceless dancers flopping and shuffling around, seemingly boneless as rag dolls, remains in the repertoire after almost fifty years, and has been revived on the present company to close its forty-ninth-season when they appear at New York's City Center. The score, a set of muzzy recordings by the Laneville-Johnson Union Brassband, exhibited the range of music Taylor has employed in choreographing for his company. Period recordings of popular songs have inspired subsequent masterpieces, such as Company B (1991), which uses the Andrews Sisters's World War II hits to create a deep sense of loss and nostalgia, and Black Tuesday (2001), which uses songs of the Great Depression to call up a spunky defiance laced with bitter dejection. Other superb collaborators such as designer Santo Loquasto and lighting designer Jennifer Tipton continue to set the highest standards in modern dance.

Seven New Dances (1957) provided the cachet of notoriety so often essential to an artist's career. Taylor wanted to move 180 degrees from Cunningham, whose method of finding inspiration he likened to choreographing by rolling the dice, and from the mythological agonies of Graham, whose women dancers were swathed in fabric while her men were nearly nude.

REINHART POINTS OUT that Dances preceded the trailblazing experiments at Manhattan's Judson Memorial Church in the 1960s. "Paul wanted to philosophically reduce dance to everyday movement and gesture," he recalls. Duet, which consisted of nothing but Toby Glanternick seated and Taylor in jacket and tie standing for minutes on end, impelled Graham mentor Louis Horst to publish an equally notorious "review" in Dance Observer: nothing but blank space. Taylor bad Iris scandal, and the use of nondance or "pedestrian" movement reached fruition two decades later in the headlong joy of Esplanade, with walking, running, sliding, and striding set to Bach concerti. The aerial image of a dancer hurdling over the bodies of others lying prone was an icon for the American Dance Festival's summer programs.

Carolyn Adams remembers her time with tire company (1965-82) as one of joyous ferment. Now on The Juilliard School faculty, she recalls, "We were the younger generation, and we were out to change the world. Working with someone like Paul, you thought you could do just that. He was always honest with us, I can recall him beginning some rehearsals by saying, 'Dancers, I don't know what I want here.' And he'd be open to our ideas. He would invite someone like the great poet and critic Edwin Denby to observe a work and welcome his comments. He didn't need help very often, of course. And he was a wonderful partner! The best I ever had. I never worried about support when I danced with Paul."

THROUGHOUT the life of the company. Taylor has continued to demand a high level of partnering from his dancers. Taylor's performing career ended in 1975, and he subsequently channeled his energy into the company.

Bob Yesselman, executive director of Dance/NYC, recalls his fifteen years managing the Taylor company as a time of outpouring of choreographic masterpieces set to composers as disparate as William Boyce (Arden Court, 1981), Franz Schubert (Mercuric Tidings, 1982), and former music director Donald York (Last Look, 1985). And there was more than mere genius at work. Yesselman says that there was a very practical foundation underlying such fecundity: "Paul always created with repertoire in mind. He would look at what was needed to balance a program--something dark, say, to offset something light--and lie would make it. And it would be marvelous."

After five decades the company repertoire abounds with extremes of dark and light, along with a generous helping of what lies in between, set to everything from piano music to electronic potpourri: a Stravinsky masterpiece in a two-piano version as a spoof (The Rehearsal, 1980); soldiers on leave (Sunset, 1983); a look into the dark soul of fundamentalism (Speaking in Tongues, 1991); hippies high on folk ballads (A Field of Grass, 1993); a tango hall enveloped in brooding sensuality (Piazzolla Caldera, 1997); and the shock of and recovery from 9/11 (Promethean Fire, 2002).

Mary Cochran, who danced with the Taylor Company from 1984 to 1996, directed Taylor II in 1998-1999, and now sets favorite Taylor works on selected companies, recalls that Taylor used any lull in creativity to go back and fine-tune what he had already done. "He never wanted to Jose his momentum, which could be incredible," she says. "I remember that he made Roses (1985) in two weeks, and Last Look just as quickly. But with Spindrift (1993) he quit when he was well into it and started again from the beginning. We trusted him to solve any problems."

"He left us to improvise some of the movements in Syzygy (1987) at specific moments," says Cochran, now a professor at Barnard College in New York, "but in a manner that he approved, of course. My gestures were too broad, I remember, and he said they should be more like 'scribbling' or 'filigree.' Paul never missed anything. And he was so organized--rising every day at 5:00 A.M. with a daily schedule all mapped out. He was always an inspiration to us all."

The Paul Taylor Dance Company has performed Taylor's choreography in some 450 cities in more than sixty countries, gathering the highest honors in dance. In the U.K, for example, after a seven-city tour last year the company was awarded the Manchester Evening News Best Dance Production award, the 2003 Critic's Circle National Dance Award as the Best Foreign Dance Company, and was nominated for the 2004 Olivier Award for Promethean Fire. Although Taylor himself hates to travel, audiences will celebrate the company's fiftieth-anniversary year with a tour of the current sixteen-member troupe in all fifty stales as well as internationally, setting standards for musicality, wit, inspiration, and accessibility unique in modern dance. [For a detailed anniversary tour schedule call 212.431.5562 or visit www.ptdc.org]