Live Dancing and Taped Music
"Airs", "American Dreamer", "Mercuric Tidings"
Paul Taylor Dance
David H. Koch Theater
New York, NY
March 12, 2014
Though spring apparently has forgotten New York, Paul Taylor can warm up the coldest weather. The company returned to the Koch Theater, with its grand vistas, not to the more familiar City Center. But economics insist that the company rely on taped music, which sounded a bit tinny in Balanchine's hall. But nothing can really dampen the dappled serenity of "Airs", not even Handel on tape. "Airs" is the bright Taylor at his absolute best, as the dancers seem to inhabit a perfect world, where all the women are charming and all the men are good looking. Michael Trusnovec, the company veteran, had some rare partnering glitches (Aileen Roehl was a last minute substitute for Jamie Rae Walker which may have been the issue), but his dancing was pure, crisp, and mesmerizing. Few dancers today have his combination of power and radiant gallantry. To see him offer his hand to his partner with courtly and majestic concentration is to see generosity personified. Laura Halzack was the odd girl out. Her cool beauty didn't convey the pathos that some dancers give the role, but the slight distance she projected gave her dancing a slightly mysterious glow, as if she were a memory wandering through the dancers. It was an unusual but haunting approach.
As usual, Taylor is bringing two new works to New York, and the audience can not really expect masterpieces on demand. "American Dreamer", to songs by Stephen Foster (several sung by Thomas Hampson) is, to my eyes, one of his misses. Foster's parlor songs have an innocent sweetness, so well expressed by Hampson's light and limid baritone. But Taylor has choreographed a broad, and often not very funny, burlesque that worked at cross purposes to the music. The action, such as it is, took place somewhere backstage--there is a ballet barre, a trunk, and the dancers are in various practice costumes. (They don various Santo Loquasto hats from the sidelines as appropriate.) But unlike some of his other Americana works, the location seemed unfocused--this was neither an old-fashioned music hall or a modern day shindig. The songs rolled by with all their Victorian parlor sweetness, and the dancers act out the various lyrics; "Beautiful Dreamer" has three sleepwalking women broadly channeling Balanchine's Sonnambula, as they step over the hapless Sean Mahoney playing for laughs. Taylor can be sardonic, but he does overdo it a bit, I think, when he has the women enthusiastically smack their husbands around to “My Wife is a Most Knowing Woman”. The dancers, of course, gave it their best, but the work seemed unfocused, at times a salute to American energy (the hoe down to "Oh Susannah", and a send-up of it, as the dancers just went in circles to the "Camptown Races".
Fortunately, it was followed by "Mercuric Tidings", a triumphant explosion to excerpts from Franz Schubert's first two symphonies, led with joyful physicality by Trusnovec and Halzack. Their adagio again showed off Halzack's patrician beauty, as she flowed through Kleinendorst's arms; she might have been yet another elusive memory of younger days.
copyright © 2014 by Mary Cargill
