Dance: Frolic in Motion

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Abstraction in art seemed to reach some sort of apogee when Kasimir Malevich painted White on White. But Paul Taylor, an avant-garde dancer, may have topped that ploy by choreographing stillness: he once fashioned a dance called Duet in which a cocktail-party couple stood stock still for four minutes. He has composed dances to the sound of rain, and he has taken a collection of human postures and set them to the chant of the telephone operator — "At the tone the time will be . . ." The whole thing lasted 20 minutes, longer than a good many of the audience.

But few, if any, thought of leaving Manhattan's Philharmonic Hall when the Paul Taylor Dance Company made its debut there last week before a near capacity house. Taylor and his troupe set out to be cozily charming rather than abstractly far-out. The result was atypical Taylor, an airy dance frolic as pleasantly unpretentious as a gambol on the green.

In Aureole, the dancers are all in white, stark against a backdrop lighting of limpid Mediterranean blue. Taylor, a blond, blue-eyed matinee idol, looks as if he could double as a circus strongman, and the trio of girls accompanying him are Nereids in semidiaphanous slips. The dancers move like sails on a summer sea, now lazing, now racing, sometimes capsizing, then righting themselves as they catch each new breeze of improvisation. There is no story line whatever, but the mood is as artless as love.

Piece Period, the troupe's second number, is a tart, witty spoof of people and places, Italian, Spanish, French, English, German. In one of its six segments, Dos, an adventure-bent minx, appears in a saucy blue corselet with a black lace fringe. She is hounded, and eventually grounded, by twin Mrs. Grundys in black mantillas who shadow her every move on angry little sandpiper feet, then go skittering triumphantly off, presumably to tell the neighbors all about it.

Although he studied with Martha Graham, the doyenne of modern dance in which story line is endemic, Taylor now leans toward the avantgarde, which argues that dance alone is the proper subject of dance. Its credo: the motion is the meaning. When Taylor takes a few liberties with this dogma, it makes for fine summery fun.