Dance: The Tolkien of Choreographers

Paul Taylor's new work: virtuosity at 1,000 r.p.m.

Back in the '60s when the Paul Taylor Dance Company traveled to the hinterlands, people mistook the troupe for the June Taylor Dancers from the Jackie Gleason Show. The confusion ended at curtain time. Then, instead of metronomic chorines, the stage was peopled with muscular, disciplined dancers falling, posturing and accelerating to everything from Bach to Cage. Dressed as Elizabethan figures or satyrs in evening clothes, or in nothing more than bath towels, the company disturbed as many as it dazzled.

Since those days, the phenomenal popularity of dance has made sophisticates of the most provincial audiences. Yet even in New York City, epicenter of the modern movement, the 27-year-old Taylor company has retained its power to astonish. At the City Center the dancers are currently providing evening after evening of crackling wit and virtuosity under the hand of a master.

Taylor, 51, has taken the rich vocabulary of dance, from the spine-straight balletic pas de deux to the earthbound dynamics of Martha Graham, and shaped it into a shifting and special language. He is the J.R.R. Tolkien of his form, and like the fabulist creates works too elaborate to please the avant-garde and too impudent for purists. In short, Taylor remains one of the most accessible of choreographers.

In Lost, Found and Lost, premiered two weeks ago, for example, the subject is false sophistication. The music: airport Muzak. Charmaine sugarcoats the strings in one segment as dancers posture wearily in line, shuffling forward slowly. Fond of reconciling opposites, Taylor was struck by the idea in a dentist's office. "I used to ask him to turn off the wallpaper music," he says. "But then I started listening." Banality has never been as vibrant as it is under his direction. In black costumes with veils, designed by Artist Alex Katz, dancers stare into space, scratch, arrange hips and arms into poses of boredom, with hilarious bursts of writhing impatience. The work is also an in-joke: the choreographer has put evening clothes on normal street gestures. In his treatment of walking, standing and running—staples of the form—Taylor is like Henry Higgins remodeling Eliza Doolittle.

Taylor has always tested limits. Older pieces (going back as far as 1956) included in the current program confirm the breadth of his skill. Le Sucre du Printemps (The Rehearsal) (1980) pits a Chicago-style gangster and his moll against gray-clad ciphers in a workers' state, concluding in a massacre. Private Domain (1969) exposes a beach full of muscle builders, sexual athletes and Esther Williams-style chorus lines. Orbs (1966) harks back to the wedding scene in Martha Graham's landmark Appalachian Spring. Here, however, the screwball marriage takes place in "Terrestrial Autumn," where a drunk polkas with a rubber turkey.