Paul Taylor Dance Company

I attended a performance of the Paul Taylor Dance Company at the Arnoff Center Music Hall's Jarson-Kaplan Theatre in Cincinnati, Ohio. The performance consisted of 3 pieces that were all driven by the texture and emotion of the music they were choreographed to. Here is a summary of each of the three pieces:

Cloven Kingdom

The dance consisted of 8 female dancers in long dresses of different colors in 3 pairs and one set of mismatched as well as 4 matching male dancers. The female dancers were wearing silver foot adornments that covered just their heels and laced around their ankles. The music alternated and overlapped between a classic style score and tempo driven percussive interludes. There were many sharp stops and changes in the music and the dancers responded accordingly. The juxtaposition of the music styles created a noticeable difference between the “cloven” and the “kingdom”. The male and female dancers were on stage, for the most part, at separate times. The female dancers alternated between mode flowing, graceful movements and angled, fast paced motions. The male dancers were very animalistic and aggressive. Many of their movements were squatting, lunging, thrusting, or leaping on angles that reflected the grotesque side of human nature. Some of the female dancers came on stage throughout the piece with mirrored headpieces in different shapes that reflected and refracted the light across the stage and into the audience. This added another dimension of movement in addition to that of the dancers an music that created a very interesting element to the piece.

American Dreamer

The song playing throughout the piece told a story that the dancers expressed through their bodies. Their costuming and lighting was very neutral. The neutrality worked well because many of the dancers used props that defined their character and the neutrality allowed them to switch between characters simply by switching props because they themselves were a blank canvas. The style of the outfits seemed to reflect what dancers might wear to a rehearsal. The neutrality of the piece, in addition to the old western feel of the music, created a sepia tone, silent movie type of feel to the dance. There were may points in the piece where a character would make a sound using their body and it reminded me of the sound effects in old western movies. The music was sweet but carried a message of a man having a crazy wife. The dancers danced in couples that represented the man and his wife. The dancers reflected this through their movements in that they danced very gracefully and fluidly but in an underlying aggressive way. For example, one of the couples did a traditional, over the head ballet lift, but the female was thrashing her arms and legs as if trying to hit her husband but it a way that was fluid and graceful.

Piazzolla Caldera The piece was influenced by salsa dance but was not choreographed with many salsa moves. The music was very typical of salsa and drove the emotion of the piece very well. The female dances wore rich colored floral dresses that flowed and gave the idea of a salsa dress without directly imitating the style, much like the choreography mimicked traditional salsa. The girls also wore black character shoes as opposed to the barefoot shoes in the first piece and no shoes in the second piece. There were 6 couples, 5 male-female and one male-male, at the beginning of the piece and it evolved into a single girl seemingly searching for a partner, then later a male dancing with two females, and finally two groups, one of 6 males, one of 1 male and 5 females, seemingly battling through choreography. The dancers took the emotion from the music and embodied it holistically, using their entire body to tell a story. The pairing of 2 male dancers as a couple added great depth to the piece because it broke the stereotypical norms commonly applied to partner dancing.