Paul Taylor 70th A Birthday Remembrance.

MY FIRST SIGHT of Paul Taylor the dancer was when I saw Martha Graham's company in the mid-1950s. My first awareness of Paul Taylor the choreographer was when I read Louis Horst's piece in Dance Observer in 1957. Horst's memorable review was of Paul's 7 New Dances, which deconstructed dance to its minimum by using not only everyday gestures and repetition, but also absolute stillness. In one dance, the curtain went up on Paul standing and a young woman sitting. After four minutes of this frozen posture, the curtain came down. Louis Horst's review began by stating that Paul Taylor performed at the 92nd Street Y. That was followed by blank space and his signature at the bottom of the page. The review made Paul famous and infamous in the then-tiny world of dance.

In 1962, Paul walked into the office of Isadora (Issie) Bennett, the best-loved dance press agent, manager and producer of her time. She knew Paul well as a dancer and young choreographer. Issie and her business partner Richard Pleasant (he founded American Ballet Theatre in 1939) were my mentors. At about this time I was starting my own press and dance management business, and Issie let me use, free of charge, a tiny closet-size room next to her office. Paul was looking for a manager. Issie told him to check out the guy in the closet. (Years later, Paul told an audience at the American Dance Festival that I was the first closet king he had ever met.) At that initial meeting, Paul asked me if I would like to come to a rehearsal of his company. Soon after Paul left, Don Duncan, then a Dance Magazine editor, called. I asked him what he thought about Paul Taylor. He replied, "That guy is talented! Get him!"

I huffed and puffed as I reached Paul's fifth-floor studio on Sixth Avenue between Thirty-eighth and Thirty-ninth Streets. Paul introduced me to his dancers: Bettie de Jong, Liz Walton, Dan Wagoner, Sharon Kinney and Renee Kimball. The first piece they did was Aureole, set to Handel. At that time, many modern dance choreographers used contemporary music. A reporter once asked Paul why he used Handel, and not a new composer, for Aureole. He replied, "Well, Handel was new to me!" The piece, a non-balletic white ballet where the weight is down, not up, left me stunned at its extraordinary beauty and movement invention. So moved was I by its elegance and originality that, as the dance ended, I literally fell off the bench I was sitting on, and the dancers burst out laughing.

Much of Paul's choreography shows us life's dark side as well as its joy. We need to pay attention to see the levels of human experience in his dances. Paul once said there is no abstract dance. When one dancer moves toward or away from another, the dancer is either arriving or leaving. When you see his Esplanade, a joyous dance constructed of everyday movement, the middle "family" section has dancers reaching out to each other, but the careful observer notices that they never touch.

Once I began to manage the company, I found that Paul was anxious to get on the road--not only to perform but also, because he was living (illegally) in his dance studio, which had no showers, to take advantage of motels that had them.

We toured the U.S. in a rented station wagon, which limited the company's size to nine people plus baggage. The shorter ones (i.e. Twyla Tharp) had to sit in the third row, facing backward, and expressed their discontent at always seeing where they'd been, never where they were going. After one such tour and repeated trips carrying the bags up to the fifth-floor studio, exhaustion and hunger set in, and Paul and I were too tired to search for a restaurant. So Paul emptied the sand-filled red fire bucket, threw in some potatoes, vegetables and meat, and cooked a stew over a Bunsen burner. It was delicious--but grainy.

In the summer of 1963, Paul was to premiere a new dance, Scudorama, at the American Dance Festival, then in Connecticut. Jack Jackson had written the music, which was to be played live. The score, sent up by bus, never arrived and the premiere happened in silence. Ten years later to the day, the New London, Connecticut, bus station was torn down and I received a dusty package containing Jackson's score.

Nineteen sixty-three also brought us our first grown-up European date at the Berlin Festival, complete with first-class hotel. Tom Skelton came over to light the performance, but when he arrived, he was ill. Lying flat on the stage, Tom tried to give the light plot instructions, to no avail. He had to go to the doctor. Before he left, he handed me a fat sheaf of lighting cues. "It's all yours, kid!" he said. Of course, the only times I had been backstage had been to thank the dancers. Meanwhile, Paul was having excruciating stomach pains, and I rushed him to the doctor, who wanted to operate. Paul said, "No, thank you." He returned to the hotel and I to the theater. While I was trying to figure out how to light the show, the dancers were trying to figure out how to perform without Paul. He carried a heavy dance load in Aureole and Scudorama, and a lighter one in Piece Period. At 7:40 P.M., he entered the theater, ashen-faced and holding his stomach. He said not a word and at 7:55 P.M. was on stage for Aureole. For me, it was one of his greatest performances. At one point in Scudorama, he was on the bottom of a pile of dancers and to my amazement, still had the strength, per his own choreography, to propel the pile. Due to his condition, perhaps, he didn't notice that at the conclusion of the dance, I still had two more light cues to call, which I did. After the performance Paul seemed exhaustedly energized, especially when a striking woman came backstage and said, "I'm Mary Wigman; I liked the second dance."

Nineteen sixty-three was also the year of Paul's first Broadway season. All of us who are old enough to remember know where we were on the day President Kennedy was shot. Well, that was the day Dick Barr and I were signing the contract for a four-performance season at the Little Theater on Forty-fourth Street, just west of Broadway. Dick Barr was Edward Albee's producer and a friend of Paul's. Those performances were not only important because we were "uptown," but also because some newspapers back then would not review dance off-Broadway. Paul's reviews were wonderful, but did not translate into box office sales. A measure of present success is that there were more people at the closing-night party of the Taylor company's 2000 New York season than there were in the audience back in 1963.

In 1965, Gian Carlo Menotti, director of the Spoleto, Italy, Festival of Two Worlds, invited Paul to perform and make a new dance for the company. Paul asked Alex Katz, the painter, to design the set and costumes. Unfortunately, the tee was not very much, so we had to skimp and save. Alex paid his own way to Spoleto on a regular airline, having the benefit of a special fare offered to World War II veterans as part of the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war. The rest of us flew the budget Icelandic Airlines, which landed in Luxembourg. I had arranged for a friend to meet us at the airport with a Volkswagen minivan, and I had promised the dancers, lighting designer Jennifer Tipton and Paul that we would drive down and have a vacation on the French Riviera before we continued on to Spoleto. Well, the minivan was old and tired and reached a high speed of only thirty-five miles per hour--downhill. We arrived in Nice at about 1 A.M. and unfortunately, we had to leave by 6 A.M. However, I assured the company that the Mediterranean was indeed blue and Nice beautiful.

Upon finally chugging into Spoleto, we made our way to our rented "villa" just outside of town, which came with a couple to take care of it and us. The villa's isolated location and insufficient bedrooms, plus only one escape vehicle, made things a bit heated. When the "villa" couple was found to be making our white wine by squashing the grapes in their bare feet, that did it. A dancer revolution took us all into town, where everyone but the budget was happy.

For Paul's new piece, Red Room, Alex designed large red walls that covered three sides of the stage. Since we couldn't afford to tour with them, we left them, and they may be rotting in an Italian warehouse somewhere. Paul renamed the dance Post Meridian.

Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev were also performing at the festival, with The Royal Ballet's second company. Rudolf invited Paul and company to see the dress rehearsal. The numerous flashes from the photographers' cameras were adding undesired lighting effects to their rehearsal. After Margot whispered into Rudolf's ear, he stopped the rehearsal and started screaming, "Clear the theater! Everybody out!" followed by a whispered, "Except the Taylor people." After the opening the next day, Menotti had one of his extravagant parties. But by the time Rudi et al. arrived, little food was left. What ensued made world news, as Nureyev, then in a real rage, proceeded to pick up the dishes and try out his pitching.

Jean-Louis Barrault, the great French actor/director, asked Paul to perform at his Festival of Nations in the Odeon Theater in Paris. Of course we were thrilled, and this time added performances in Stockholm, Sweden; Copenhagen, Denmark; Yugoslavia; and St. Helen's in England. Staying in Paris at the Hotel Michelet on Place de L'Odeon, we were literally yards from the theater and the wonderful restaurant La Mediterranee. During a rehearsal, Paul came soaring down on his ankle, which turned and then swelled. The doctors put him in a cast, and we changed the program so that for the first time the Paul Taylor Dance Company would dance without Paul Taylor. It was one of those times I was grateful for being busy. It shielded me from seeing the look in his eyes. If this had happened in Berlin, we would have cancelled the performances--but now that we were almost double the number of dancers, we were able to go on. I wonder which Paul preferred.

We opened the next night to a full house and a great reception. Just as I was about to talk to Paul after the performance, I noticed many young people coming backstage. We were so pleased that they wanted to thank the dancers. I asked them in English to wait until the dancers changed. They paid no attention to me, which I attributed to a language problem. However, I soon realized that this steady stream of students from the Sorbonne next door was not interested in thanking the dancers, only in evicting them. This was the takeover of the theater and the siege that paralyzed France and became the 1968 French Revolution, a student uprising that brought France to its knees. Paul actually went on stage the next night with friend/interpreter Mark Rudkin to plead with the occupying students, of course to no avail. Even their leader "Danny the Red" Cohn-Bendit's visit to Paul's room did not change the situation. The theater was ruined--the "civil tumult" clause in our contract meant the theater didn't have to pay us--and in the next few days our theater was surrounded by students, or gendarmes, or both, in pitched battle. Then three miracles happened. La Mediterranee sent over free food, Jean-Louis Barrault arrived and paid us in full and became canonized in Taylor Heaven, and our orchestra conductor, John Perras, said he had a bus driver friend who would drive us to Brussels, Belgium, where we could get a flight to Stockholm, our next performance stop. Of course, the bus had to arrive at 4 A.M. so that we could slip past the sleeping students and police. Alas, people were paying fortunes to escape Paris and, had we solicited other escapees, we would have eliminated all the company's financial woes for the next couple of years.

Before this tour began, we had sent dancers to stage Aureole on the Royal Danish Ballet and had arranged for a dance/demonstration for Denmark TV. This was extremely difficult to Set up, because Paul had never let any other company do his work, let alone a ballet company. The TV program, the setting of Aureole and the performances in the Royal Theater were all necessary to make the tour financially feasible. Another reason was an emotional one--mine. I had lived in Copenhagen for several years in the late 1950s, following-the Royal Danish Ballet, among other things. The Ballet had a rich tradition in August Bournonville's ballets and I wanted the Danes to see their ballet dancers dance Aureole. The Taylor company was the first modern company to appear in the Royal Theater's annual Dance and Music Festival, performing Aureole alternately with the Royal Danes. On the first evening the Danes danced Aureole. Paul was sitting next to me with casted leg stretched out in the aisle. I awaited Paul's wrath for having forced him to give Aureole to the Danes. After the curtain rose and the first section proceeded, I heard the voice next to me say, "Well, it sure is different--(pause)--but interesting."

In 1968, the late McNeil Lowry, the extraordinary Ford Foundation vice president who did so much for George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet, gave a half-million Foundation dollars for the presentation of modern dance. He gave three competing proposals Norman Singer's City Center. Harvey Lichtenstein's Brooklyn Academy of Music and the proposal of Dick Barr and myself for the Billy Rose Theater--a half hour to come up with a coordinated plan, or no one would get funded. We did, and practically anyone who was someone, plus some who weren't, became a part of this 1969 nineteen-week season at all three theaters. Of course, the New York Times wanted a photo of the choreographers together and the location was to be Martha Graham's garden. Jack Mitchell, the great dance photographer, was assigned to take the photo. This historic occasion included not only Martha and Jose Limon, but also Paul, Merce Cunningham, plus many others including the kids: Twyla Tharp, Meredith Monk and Yvonne Rainer. Jack was trying to figure out how to arrange this photo when Martha took over and choreographed. She put herself in the middle and Paul in front of her, but lower. Unexpectedly, she started to massage Paul's shoulders, and in that flirtatious sing-song voice of hers chirped, "You know. Paul was an Olympic swimmer, everyone." Paul, a little embarrassed, answered irritably, "Oh, Martha, I was not." Her immediate reply, wrapped in her coquettish tone, was, "Well, you could have been if you wanted to be." (He actually was a star swimmer at Syracuse University.)

Yes, I agree with Martha. He could have been whatever he wanted to be and he wanted to be a dancemaker. And what a dancemaker!

PAUL TAYLOR won't be celebrating his l, 70th birthday (which falls July 29) with a quiet, intimate little party. Instead, Taylor and his work will be the subject of a rare weeklong celebration at Jacob's Pillow, a stopover at the American Dance Festival and a fall engagement at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Jacob's Pillow has scheduled a whirlwind of activities, including an exhibit of dance memorabilia and Taylor's own art, a series of lectures and workshops, showings of Matthew Diamond's documentary Dancemaker and archival footage, and a series of performances by the Paul Taylor Company and Taylor 2. A birthday party will be held on the opening night of performances, which include repertory favorites like Company B, Aureole and Piazzola Caldera, as well as a world premiere commissioned by board member Irene Mennen Hunter and set to an existing score by George Crumb. The combination of what Pillow Executive Director Ella Barf calls a humanities program with the party and performances should offer "an in-depth consideration of the artist's work and engage the public."

At the American Dance Festival at Duke University in Durham. North Carolina, the company will perform repertory works July 20-22, including Esplanade and Arabesque. This fall, they'll dance new and classic works during "The Legacy of Martha Graham and Paul Taylor," October 3 and 4, inaugurating the Kennedy Center's 2000-01 dance season. The arrangements were made by former Taylor company manager Charles Reinhart (see story), who, with Stephanie Reinhart, directs both dance programs. Though not birthday celebrations per se, each show is a tribute to Taylor's five-decade career, celebrating, as Reinhart put it, "the grand Taylor limb of the modern dance tree."

In addition to favorite Taylor memories, Reinhart said he's found pleasure in the company's evolution, which has rewarded performers as well as viewers. Dancers dedicate themselves to their craft because they have a gift; the return, Reinhart said, "is in the doing of it." Taylor has given generations of dancers interesting work, and for that, he added, "I think all Taylor dancers are lucky."

The Paul Taylor Company will be at the American Dance Festival July 20-22, at Jacob's Pillow July 25-30 and at the Kennedy Center October 3-4.

Heather Wisner

Charles L. Reinhart was the Paul Taylor Dance Company's first manager. He and Stephanie Reinhart are co-directors of the American Dance Festival and co-artistic directors for dance for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Their daughter, Ariane, works part-time in the Taylor company's office, and a son and grandson are both named Taylor.