TAYLOR, SENEGAL DANCERS HIGHLIGHT PILLOW SEASON.

TAYLOR, SENEGAL DANCERS HIGHLIGHT PILLOW SEASON JACOB'S PILLOW DANCE FESTIVAL LEE, MASSACHUSETTS PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY JULY 25-30, 2000 COMPANY JANT-BI AUGUST 9-13, 2000 JACK MITCHELL: DANCE PHOTOGRAPHS/FIFTY YEARS

One highlight of the Jacob's Pillow summer 2000 was the weeklong party celebrating Paul Taylor's seventieth birthday. The main company performed in the Ted Shawn Theater; Taylor 2 presented other Taylor repertory in the Doris Duke Studio Theater; members of the company taught classes and gave lectures; and Taylor contributed a selection of three-dimensional art works for an exhibit. At mid-week, dance writer Deborah Jowitt conducted an interview with the master choreographer before the evening performance. Since Taylor first performed at Jacob's Pillow in 1954 as a member of Pearl Lang's troupe, then brought his fledgling company here in 1964 and returned many times, the party was something of a homecoming.

The centerpiece of the celebration was a world premiere, Fiends Angelical, commissioned by Irene Mennen Hunter, a board member of both Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival and the Paul Taylor Dance Company. Performed by the main company on one of two programs presented during the week, Fiends Angelical is set to a score by George Crumb that makes violin strings screech like the sound of fingernails scraping a blackboard with some added incoherently muttered incantations. Eight dancers were dressed by Santo Loquasto in unisex "savage" costumes, topped by Afro wigs held in place by headbands. Francie Huber held center stage as a goddess or priest figure, wearing curled goat horns on her head to mark her pride of place. The work was staged before a backdrop printed like an African woodblock fabric, also devised by Loquasto. The choreography suggested a ritual that often sent the dancers writhing in a mass on the floor, or standing upright, making coded signals with their hands and arms. Stamping became an alternative mode of locomotion. The prominence of the priestess throughout the work, and another section where a long red ribbon, like the unraveling of an artery, was pulled from a pile of bodies, made one think of Martha Graham, but it was hard to tell if Taylor intended a spoof of his long-ago mentor. What was never kidded was the intensity of the frantic movement--twenty-five minutes of no letup for the performers.

If it was difficult to decipher the message intended by the choreographer for Fiends Angelical, there was no problem with the breathtaking works that came before and after it. The 1999 Cascade, set to Concertos for Piano and Orchestra by J.S. Bach, is another of Taylor's lush, lyrical pieces expressing the beauty of the body in motion to the long musical lines of Bach's composition. The company executed the much-praised Piazzolla Caldera (1997) with blazing sensuality.

"Assemblages," the exhibition of Taylor's artworks that spread across the lobby of the Ted Shawn Theater (with some spillover into Blake's Barn) gave the viewer another glimpse into the mind of this sometimes inexplicable genius. Taylor takes found objects and the detritus of nature to make his fey pictures: "First Course," a bas-relief of "The Last Supper," with beetles glued to the table spread before the Apostles, "Dear Departed," a dead mouse swinging in a glass box frame, among the four dozen on display.

Another major event later in the season was the United States debut of Le Coq est Mort, a seventy-minute piece performed by the Senegal-based Company Jant-Bi under the artistic direction of Germaine Acongy. Created by an international team of German dancemaker Susanne Linke as choreographer, assisted by Israeli choreographer Avi Kaiser, with musical realization by Etienne Schwarcz of France, the work is a stunner in its political implications as well as the strong performances by the eight male dancers, who hail from Senegal, the Republic of Congo and Nigeria. Where the piece falters is in its incomplete structure: It starts with well-defined images but loses context as it meanders through a central section, then builds to its touching denouement. Le Coq est Mort is about the familiar themes of power and competition in a man's world, but these are undercut by a disturbing subtext that refers to the prejudices dividing the white colonials from the black population of Africa.

The work begins with first one, then another of the dancers, wearing dark business suits and carrying metal briefcases, coming onstage, then moving in repetitive phalanx formations, upstage to down. Their faces are expressionless: their bodies upright and rigid. Only gradually does the symmetry crack, when one man breaks from the line in an African tribal dance phrase, only to return, subdued, to his place. As Le Coq progresses, the conformity is further distorted when the men shed their jackets, ties, shirts and shoes, and throw or kick handfuls of the tons of sand covering the stage. Toward the end, they regress from humans to apes, leaving the conventions of society behind them before they are killed by a fusillade of gunfire, except for one grieving survivor. The finale is a resurrection scene, the men coming back to life to sing a Senegalese athletic anthem that suggests gender and national solidarity. The tension for the viewer, at least at Jacob's Pillow, came as much from the ethnic contrast between the mostly white audience and the black performers as from the politically incorrect images at the ending.

A collection of pictures by master photographer and longtime Dance Magazine contributor Jack Mitchell was on display throughout the summer in Blake's Barn. To view the assemblage of images captured by Mitchell is to walk back through more than a half-century's worth of dance in America, beginning with an elderly Ruth St. Denis reviving one of her early works, White Jade. Mitchell's earliest photographs dated from 1950, when he first spent a summer at the Pillow. The variety of dance styles portrayed is indicative of the range of the art form, from ballet performers Erik Bruhn and Maria Tallchief, to modern dancer Merce Cunningham in the famous egg silhouette that is often reproduced, to Mikhail Baryshnikov and Mark Morris and representations of the ethnic dancers brought to the festival by its founder, Ted Shawn.

Aside from Mitchell's insightful visualizations of the artists, the photographs were further personalized by labels detailing his impressions of his subjects.