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Paul Taylor

Brought Poetry and Lyricism to Modern Dance

Mr. Taylor’s poignant and exuberant works entered the repertory of numerous dance companies. His own company has been one of the world’s superlative troupes.

https://www.nytimes.com

Paul Taylor, who brought a lyrical musicality, capacity for joy and wide poetic imagination to modern dance over six decades as one of its greatest choreographers, died on Wednesday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 88.

The cause was renal failure, said Lisa Labrado, a spokeswoman for the Paul Taylor Dance Company.

Mr. Taylor, whose highly diverse style was born in radical experimentalism in the 1950s, created poignant and exuberant works that entered the repertory of numerous dance companies. His own company, eloquent and athletic, has been one of the world’s superlative troupes.

As a strikingly gifted dancer in his 20s, Mr. Taylor created roles for the master choreographers Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham and George Balanchine. He had piercing blue eyes, the power and musculature of a skilled athlete and an incisive, outgoing — but also elusive — personality.

Throughout the 1950s, he also made dances of his own — 18 of them with Robert Rauschenberg as his designer, two with music commissioned from John Cage. In 1960, he began to collaborate with the painter Alex Katz; though they worked together only from time to time, they continued to do so until 2014, and made two of Mr. Taylor’s most exceptional works, the highly dissimilar “Sunset” (1983) and “Last Look” (1985).

With the premieres of “Aureole” (1962, to music of Handel) and “Orbs” (1966, to Beethoven), Mr. Taylor broke through to new levels of national and international popularity as other companies started presenting many of his creations. At his own company, Rudolf Nureyev was often a guest star, as well as dancing “Aureole” around the world.

Mr. Taylor’s company included many illustrious performers, including Pina Bausch and Twyla Tharp, who themselves subsequently became world-class choreographers.

When he retired from dancing in 1974, both his dancers and his new creations became even more magnetic draws for audiences. New York’s annual Taylor season, usually occupying a large theater (for decades City Center Theater, since 2012 the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center) became one of the glories of world dance. Lincoln Kirstein, the eminent patron of the arts (and writer about them) who loved to complain that modern dance was governed by the cult of idiosyncrasy, made an exception for Mr. Taylor.

Mr. Taylor’s “Esplanade” (1975) was recognized immediately as an irresistible and transporting masterpiece. Set to the music of Bach, it explored pedestrian movement (walking, running, standing, skidding, falling) and encompassed both dark and bright emotions in a miraculous flow.

A large number of the other dances he made between 1975 and 1985 also became classics. Several later works, too, up to at least 2008 (“Beloved Renegade,” for example), showed the Taylor imagination in full power.

In 2014, after 60 years of choreography, Mr. Taylor, who leaves no immediate survivors, prepared for his company’s next phase: He turned its three-week New York seasons into a new entity, Paul Taylor American Modern Dance (originally Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance). His dancers now performed works old and new by other dance makers, older and younger than him, from Martha Graham to Doug Elkins. Other troupes appeared as guests under the Taylor Modern Dance aegis, performing choreography by Merce Cunningham, Donald McKayle and Trisha Brown. (The Paul Taylor Dance Company continued to perform his work under its old name on United States and international tours.)

In May, Mr. Taylor named Michael Novak, a company member, as the troupe’s artistic director-designate.

Paul Belville Taylor Jr. was born on July 29, 1930, in Wilkinsburg, Pa., and grew up in the Washington area. His father, a physicist who worked for the federal government, was of French Huguenot descent; his mother, Elizabeth Rust Pendleton, came from a genteel Virginia family. She was a widow with three children when she met and married Paul Taylor Sr., who was rooming in her home.

Mr. Taylor’s parents separated before he turned 4. “It became clear that my father had become overly attracted to her elder son,” Mr. Taylor wrote in his autobiography, “Private Domain,” published in 1987.

Mrs. Taylor supported her children by managing a restaurant in a Washington hotel. Paul, whose half siblings remained part of his life, grew up with a love of literature and art and a hefty penchant for fantasy. Taylor scholars have encountered many tales in which his version of the facts diverges from the provable record. He liked nonetheless to insist that his account was the historic truth.

According to his memoir, it was in childhood that he invented an imaginary companion or alter ego named George Tacet. In later years, he named Tacet as the designer of several of his most celebrated dances — notably “Aureole” and “Runes” (1975).

At Syracuse University, he joined the swimming team on a scholarship. Athleticism became something he was later to champion in dance: Many of his male dancers had powerful musculatures, while many of his female dancers displayed lissomeness, force and boldness.

He studied art at Syracuse and would later give divergent accounts of how and when dance entered his life. But it was certainly during his Syracuse years that he came to recognize it as a central mission

Dance Beginnings

He pursued dance studies in the summer of 1952 at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College, where Martha Graham became an oracular presence in his life. He followed this by studying at the Juilliard School in New York in the 1952-53 academic year.

He caught a golden era at Juilliard, where his eminent teachers included the composer and dance theorist Louis Horst, the modern-dance choreographers Doris Humphrey and José Limón, and the ballet teachersAntony Tudor, Margaret Craske and Alfredo Corvino.

In 1953, he became a founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Black Mountain College; he created a role in Cunningham’s “Septet,” a dance still performed today. But Cunningham was in the early stages of using chance procedures to compose a dance, and Mr. Taylor later wrote that chance excluded him from dancing once too often for him to hang around much longer.

Though he did not remain in the Cunningham company long, he spent the next several years in its orbit while he began to choreograph professionally. In 1954, at the Stable Gallery, he met Cunningham’s longtime designer,Robert Rauschenberg, who would make costumes or sets for 18 dances created by Mr. Taylor between 1954 and 1958, as well as a final one in 1962.

One of these, “The Tower” (1957), with décor by Rauschenberg, had costumes by Jasper Johns, who was then living with Rauschenberg. In 1958, when Cunningham made “Summerspace,” one of his enduring classics, Rauschenberg designed superlative costumes and décor in impressionist-pointillist style. Some of the paint work was contributed by Mr. Johns, and some by Mr. Taylor.

On Oct. 20, 1957, Mr. Taylor presented the most radical offering of his early career, “Seven New Dances.” Two of the seven, “Resemblance” and “Duet,” set to Cage’s music, had choreography akin to the composer’s 1950s departures from conventional music — using radical stillness and ordinary pedestrian movement. Mr. Taylor later recalled audience members walking out. Louis Horst, his former Juilliard teacher, wrote a review of the work in the magazine Dance Observer with a single blank space in lieu of words.

These choreographic experiments nonetheless developed Mr. Taylor’s interest in ordinary gesture and non-virtuoso motion. Henceforth, however, he grew more interested in keeping audiences in their seats.

Mr. Taylor had joined the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1955; he remained there for seven years. (“Naughty boy,” she remarked of some of his own choreography; he later reported those words with pride.) “Clytemnestra” (1958) was the most famous dance Graham created during his time with her troupe; it was also the blockbuster of the long period in which she revisited Greek myth by way of psychology and feminist affirmation. She played the title role; Taylor was Aegisthus, her evil lover and second husband.

He later wrote, however, that Graham’s work had become artificial by the time he joined her company. The Graham works that he felt were most sincere, deep-hewn and potent were ones that came from the 1930s and early ’40s, such as “El Penitente.”

Perhaps the most valuable element that Mr. Taylor took from Graham was her modernist dance technique, with the forceful expressive tension that it forged between torso and legs. In her work, the body was often excitingly at war with itself. In his work, that tension would be translated into a vehemently lyrical current.

In 1959, Graham and Balanchine, then the two most celebrated choreographers working in America, came together to create the two-part “Episodes,” to music by Webern. Each made one half. Graham’s was a drama about the hostility between Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor;Balanchine’s was a suite of plotless dances.

The two choreographers agreed to take one dancer from each other’s company. So from Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, Graham chose Sallie Wilson, who danced Elizabeth I to her own Mary Stuart. Balanchine chose Mr. Taylor, for whom he made an explosively knotty solo.

Mr. Taylor now spent time watching City Ballet closely. Balanchine invited him to dance the title role in his 1928 masterpiece, “Apollo.” Mr. Taylor declined this remarkable offer, but it seems likely that Balanchine’s choices of classical music and his fluent response to it influenced the big move that Mr. Taylor made in 1962 with “Aureole.”

Formation of a Company

Mr. Taylor was already gathering some remarkable dancers around him, including Pina Bausch (a company member from 1960 to 1962) and Twyla Tharp (1963-65). The tall, long-limbed, dramatic Bettie de Jong joined in 1962, later becoming the company’s main rehearsal director. She never left. Like her, Dan Wagoner and Carolyn Adams (1965-82) were beloved Taylor figures. The lighting designer Jennifer Tipton began working with Mr. Taylor in 1963; her most recent design was in 2013.

Mr. Taylor in 1961 had made dances to Bach (“Junction”) and Schoenberg (“Fibers”). But his use of Handel in “Aureole” displayed a quality of powerfully rhythmic melody and charming blitheness that were departures from the largely tough-grained ethos of modern dance. It caught the “Camelot” moment of happiness and hope in John F. Kennedy’s America.

Some of Mr. Taylor’s old artistic colleagues, however, felt that he was courting popularity and compromising his former standards. Cage, Cunningham and Rauschenberg never worked with him again; neither did Mr. Johns. Mr. Taylor made barbed remarks about Cage’s music as late as 2009, though Cage had died in 1992.

Mr. Taylor’s growing status in the dance world only kindled his singular imagination; his works grew even bolder and more authoritative. In “Orbs,” he coupled human life and the course of the planets. Four central sections were called “Venusian Spring,” “Martian Summer,” “Terrestrial Autumn” and “Plutonian Winter.” “Big Bertha” (1970), set to music from the St. Louis Melody Museum collection of band machines, showed a fairground machine of initially comic appearance but eventually lethal effect: It drives a family into incestuous rape and murder.

Mr. Taylor’s range of musical choices likewise grew: from the 17th century to commissions, from Haydn to the popular music of yesteryear. The breadth and depth of his reading also became apparent. It was not unusual for the program notes for his works to feature literary quotations from the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, Herrick, Spinoza, Blake, Whitman, Yeats, Neruda and other sources. The title of the dance “Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun” is from Wallace Stevens. “To Make Crops Grow” (2012) was a dramatization of Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery.”

Mr. Taylor himself emerged as a skilled writer. Many consider “Private Domain” their favorite dance book. It is rich in acute intelligence about dance (“Dance is only a symbol, not the real thing,” he wrote about the importance of order), pungent observations (Bausch, he wrote, danced “like calipers across paper”) and memorable narrations of the serious and absurd moments of Mr. Taylor’s life.

The memoir reaches its most despairing moment with the injury that curtailed Mr. Taylor’s career, in 1974. This makes a curious end to the Taylor autobiography, for it implies that he — like many modern-dance creators — was bound up with making dance vehicles for himself. Yet by the time he published “Private Domain” in 1987, Mr. Taylor had proved the opposite. In the 11 years that followed his withdrawal from the stage (1975-85), he created an exceptional number of enduring classics.

It is often hard to believe that “Esplanade,” Mr. Taylor’s most widely beloved dance, contains no formal dance step. Its dancers walk, stop, run, skip, sit, jump, fall, embrace and gesture. Everything is very precisely choreographed; patterns predominate. Yet the impetus underlying it is powerful; its moods combine joy and grief, heartbreak and exuberance, memory and impulsiveness; and its spontaneity is often astounding.

With such masterworks, the annual Taylor season became one of the highlights of the New York dance year. Few if any companies devoted to the work of one sole choreographer ever matched that of his.

Masterworks Abound

The years 1975 to 1986 showed Mr. Taylor widening his range to a bewildering and dazzling extent. The dense series of classic works from that time have all remained in repertory, most of them also acquired by other companies — and each is extraordinary in a different way. They include “Runes,” “Cloven Kingdom” and “Polaris” (1976), “Images” and “Dust” (1977), “Airs (1978), “Le Sacre du Printemps (the Rehearsal)” (1980), “Arden Court” (1981), “Mercuric Tidings” (1982), “Sunset” (1983), “Byzantium” (1984), “Roses” and “Last Look” (1985), and “A Musical Offering” (1986). In these years, he was deepening his skill in making classical constructions of pure dance, in blending comedy with darkness, and in showing the complexity of his imagination.

An example of that complexity is “Cloven Kingdom” (1976), in which Mr. Taylor used sometimes overlapping scores from three different composers, the Baroque Arcangelo Corelli and the American modernists Henry Cowell and Malloy Miller. His dancers here seemed alternately, then simultaneously, civilized and animal, following different drummers, sometimes as if to music unheard. The result shows how contrasting facets of humanity (celestial, bestial, civilized) coexist.

“Le Sacre du Printemps (the Rehearsal)” combined, with absurd logic and tragicomic intensity, the stories of a ballet company rehearsing with a private detective hunting for a lost baby. As so often with Mr. Taylor, the concept seems bizarre; as so often with Mr. Taylor, the stage creation has such a complete inner life that it triumphs.

“Sunset,” with designs by Alex Katz, was immediately recognized as among the great dance works of its day. Set to music by Elgar, sometimes alternating with the call of loons, it depicts a number of soldiers on leave with the women they visit and who care for them. The mood is elegiac. One man appears to die; his funeral is suggested. The highly ambiguous drama that develops demonstrates the poignancy of men who have more in common with one another than with their women, and for whom self-expression is difficult.

More movingly yet, “Sunset” also develops a quasi-tragic depth of feeling, with men and women trying to bridge the gap between them. For many, this equals “Esplanade” as Mr. Taylor’s greatest work; it is also one of several creations that qualify him as one of the superlative war poets.

One of the skills he now increasingly evinced was in evoking different historic periods. “Runes” suggests tribal ritual; “Images” (to Debussy) suggests Minoan culture; the policemen of “Le Sacre” are Keystone Kops.“A Musical Offering” is a close response to Bach’s highly European masterpiece of that name, and yet, with wonderful defiance of cultural logic, its movement is all neo-primitivist, evoking Polynesian or Aztec imagery.

The Taylor company of the 1980s was dominated by the lovably heroicChristopher Gillis, who joined in 1976, and by such female paragons as Susan McGuire, Cathy McCann and, especially, Kate Johnson. Guest dancers included Mikhail Baryshnikov, Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins; other guests were Gwen Verdon, Adolph Green, Betty Comden and Hermione Gingold.

The composer and conductor Donald York became part of the Taylor operation in 1976: He composed new scores (his most recent was “House of Joy” in 2012), arranged others and conducted entire seasons. The master designer Santo Loquasto first worked with Mr. Taylor in 1987; the most recent of his many contributions was in 2017.

After 1986, there were diminutions and depletions. Mr. Gillis died of AIDS in 1993. Mr. Taylor began to use taped music for most seasons between 1991 and 2013. His success rate grew more intermittent, and a few works looked at best half-baked. Later, he sold four works by Rauschenberg that he had long owned so he could afford to bring live music back.

But many later Taylor dances became beloved, too. “Company B” (1992), “Eventide” and “Piazzolla Caldera” (1997), “Promethean Fire” (2002) and “Beloved Renegade” (2008) were among the classics made by Mr. Taylor after he turned 60.

Mr. Taylor’s dances contained, like tributaries into the mainstream, the influence of many senior choreographic currents. He in turn fed the delta of multiple junior streams. A number of works by the younger choreographer Mark Morris — more musically analytical than Mr. Taylor — contained overt Taylor quotations; there can be no greater homage.

Edward Villella, the celebrated former principal of New York City Ballet and founding artistic director of Miami City Ballet, remembered Mr. Taylor in a phone interview on Thursday. “When he danced the solo that Balanchine made on him in ‘Episodes’ in 1959, I was just stunned,” Mr. Villella said.

Mr. Villella later acquired several of Mr. Taylor’s dances for Miami City Ballet. “Paul was something of a recluse,” he recalled, “and yet he came down to Miami to work with our dancers, helping them to find a more weighted kind of movement.

“We were especially privileged when he let us dance his ‘Promethean Fire,’ his response to 9/11 — an amazing work. And he was so funny; we knew his love of poetry, but he also loved sharing and collecting dirty jokes.”

To the end, Mr. Taylor stayed unpredictable and irreverent — sometimes lashing out at the use of pointwork in ballet, once writing venomously to a number of critics, often wicked about artists dead and alive. His collection of moths, butterflies and other insects was famous.

Aside from his memoir, Mr. Taylor had at least one work that could be interpreted as autobiography: “Beloved Renegade,” which shows his contradictory originality in full flower.

Why is a dance set to Poulenc’s “Gloria” linked in the program to a number of quotations from Walt Whitman? The only answer lies in the theatrical beauty of Mr. Taylor’s dance creation. “Beloved Renegade” became a work of great emotion for many — and was reportedly so for Mr. Taylor during its creation, with its intimations of immortality: The artist’s muse is also his angel of death.

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 31, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Virtuoso Who Gave Wings to Modern Dance. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Litván Ádám

1992. 02. 21-én látta meg a napvilágot Budapesten. 10 éves kora körül kezdett el írással foglalkozni – tizenéves éves kora elején többször is első díjat nyert próza kategóriában a VI. kerület középiskolai szépíróversenyén – többek között az Egy érdekes napom és az Egy boltos naplója c. írásaival pályázott. 

Nem sokkal később játékfilmeket kezdett rendezni és legtöbbjükhöz a forgatókönyvet is maga írta. Kamera-közelbe 2006. márciusában került először, amikor is a Bajza Utcai Általános Iskolába járván, osztályának március 15-i műsorának rendezői példányát dolgozta fel egy másik, hitelesebb környezetben felvett mozgókép formájában (expresszív stílusban), melynek nem hivatalos címe Civitavecchia. 

2006. nyári napfordulóján leforgatta az Aria & Malaria című nagyjátékfilmet – habár egyes filmtörténészek az ál-dokumentumfilm műfajába sorolják. A filmben keverednek realista és szürrealista jegyek. 

2008-tól versírással is foglalkozik – különféle versformákban kipróbálta magát. 

2013-tól színházi rendezéssel is foglalkozik – Protekció c. darabját több ízben előadták lakás- és kocsmaszínházi környezetben. A darab Locsolóvers betétjéből videoklip is készült a „Godot Galéria” jóvoltából. 

2014. óta tagja a Szecsődy Péter vezette Íróműhelynek.

2014. óta a Károli Gáspár Református Egyetem „Szabad bölcsészet” szakának a „Színházi stúdiumok” specializáció padjait koptatja.

Jelenleg készülőben van Kopi naplója c. regénye – amely egyben novellafüzér is –, továbbá Az úrhatnám polgár és a szent ördög (áthallás Vszevolod Pudovkin „Sakkláz” c. filmjére) c. filmjén dolgozik rendezőként és forgatókönyvíróként, valamint Batári Gábor Pustula Moderna c. regényéből készült színdarabját rendezi.

http://ahetedik.hu/kategoriak/versek/itemlist/user/216-litvanadam.html

"...Holdköltők társasága címen – mindenki hozhat majd magával saját vagy általa kedvelt verset, aztán meg buli."

Részlet az egyik, ha nem legerősebb művéből. Jellemző rá az erőteljesség, nem kertel.

Rendezés közben is egyenes. Buda Géza, Stefán Vivien, Pécsi Mária és még sokan mások vesznek részt a próbafolyamatban.



Jellemző rá a művészet szeretete. Illusztráció: Labedzki

A művészet szeretetére jó példa Nagy Andreával levő jó kapcsolata. Igen jól elbeszélgettünk Nagy Andreával az Eötvös Kollégium első, megrendezésre kerülő olyan speciális rendezvényén, melyen olyan ínyencségek is jelen lehettek, mint a mi filmünk.

Az InterPara forgalmazza és terjeszti az Átok és Kísértés című filmet. A film többórás és sok szereplős. Jelenetei között van elmélázás is, mely adja a művészeti megközelítést, de megtalálhatóak benne a filmekre oly jellemző gyakori helyszín és szereplő váltásokból adódó különféle helyzetek és párbeszédek, hangulatok megjelenítése.

Litván Ádám munkássága szerteágazó. Széles kiterjedésére jellemző, hogy fellépett a MERSZ klubban és a József Attila emlékhelyen egyaránt.

A MERSZ klubban prózai alkotásokat hallhattunk tőle, de verset is, míg a József Attila emlékhelyen egy markáns alkotással lepte meg a művészetben oly jártas közönséget és minden más érdeklődőt egyaránt.

Rendkívül termékeny időszaka Gudenus Gézával a Dogma című alkotásból ered. De láthatjuk a mainstream közeget megközelítő, tán el nem érő videómegosztós vetélkedő egyik versenyzőjeként is, ahol Mondik Noémi értékelte, bár inkább véleményezte művét. Egy mindent átfogó elemzéshez ugyanis stílusok, helyenként korstílusok és persze összevetés a nagy elődökkel esetenként kortárs térben való elhelyezés dukál. Mondik munkásságával így ért össze Litván Ádám munkássága.

A MERSZ klubra jellemző és alapítói is Falcsik Mária, akinek jó néhány költeményét itt bemutatunk és Lantos László Tricepsz, akinek viszont egy remek prózája jelent meg egy irodalmi oldalon és a mi hasábjainkon egyaránt.

Kedvcsinálónak, s míg bemutatásra kerül legújabb rendezése Ádámnak egy kis MERSZ-hangulat, ahol Coboly és Buda Géza szerepel.

ROHANÁS A ROHADÁSBA - 1 ÉVES A MERSZ KLUB 2016.12.301.

Most már három éves a MERSZ Klub, ahogy a Görbe Bögre is, ahol Kicsiny Győző is tartott egy művészeti összejövetelt.

Kicsiny Győző honnan máshol inspirálódna, mint kedves fotós ismerősétől, Kicsiny Győző is fotós, ismerősének viszont van egy egyedi bája, ami Kicsiny Győzőre könnyen átragadt:

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