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Choreographer
David Israel
Costume
William Ivey Long
Santo Loquasto
Lighting
Jennifer Tipton |
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Sadler's
Wells
29
April – 3 May 2003
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Paul
Taylor is an imaginative, witty, expansive
choreographer who likes to tell stories,
to make jokes, to celebrate rhythm and
sexiness, and to surprise his audiences.
In this delightful suite of dances the
full range of his talent is on display.
Company
B, set to
songs by the Andrews Sisters and redolent
of the bobby-sox 1940s, offers a cheerfully
amusing reprise of the American way
of youth, and shows what Taylor can
do with a very American way of dance
– the happy marriage between modern
ballet and showtime. Perhaps he is the
master of this idiom, so it is no surprise
that one feels one could watch Company
B all evening
long.
In
the Beginning
relates the early section of Genesis
– the creation, the adventures
and misadventures in Eden, and the expulsion
therefrom. Although it ends on an optimistic
note – God graduates from an unpleasant
and ill-tempered nay-sayer to a welcoming
figure in white at last – much
of the story is of course a painful
one for the first man and woman and
their immediate progeny. Taylor's depiction
of birth-pangs and the arrival of that
progeny is hilarious. Never has Genesis
been related thus, and it perhaps deserves
to be thought the best version of the
myth around.
Promethean
Fire illustrates
a central feature of Taylor's work:
the integral place of lighting and costume
in the construction of the dance. The
troupe wear dark leotards with chevrons
representing flame, and the stage is
lit from the flats at the side, as in
the baroque theatre of Cesky Chrumlov.
To Stokowski's orchestration of Bach's
Toccata
and Fugue
in D minor
(the inevitable comparisons with Disney's
Fantasia
not only leap to mind but to the eye)
the dancers interweave, flow rapidly
together and flee apart, criss-crossing
and overlapping in the side-illumination,
making a flickering effect of sparks
and flames. Although Taylor dance is
very physical and demanding, it has
the effortless-seeming economies and
graces of the classical vocabulary of
movement which underlies it, while at
the same time succeeding in being more
contemporary than much contemporary
dance. It is a treat to watch, and one
of the must-sees wherever the troupe
visits.
AC Grayling |
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