Date/Time
Date(s) - 03/10/2015 - 03/29/2015
7:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Location
David H. Koch Theater
Category(ies)
Add This Event to Your Calendar
Buy Tickets
The inaugural season of PAUL TAYLOR’S AMERICAN MODERN DANCE brings to Lincoln Center a trove of treasures by the Dancemaker The New York Times calls “the greatest choreographer alive” – from the deeply poignant to the astonishingly athletic to the delightfully comic. Mr. Taylor also gives audiences the New York Premiere of Sea Lark, with set and costumes by his long-time design collaborator Alex Katz and a vibrant score by Francis Poulenc, and a World Premiere to be announced.
Mr. Taylor caused quite a stir in 1962 when he set Aureoleto music by Handel rather than that of a contemporary composer. The multi-layered, groundbreaking Esplanadewas acclaimed as “a classic of American dance” by The New Yorker upon its premiere 40 years ago. Like that work, the exuberant Brandenburgs is set to beloved concertos by Bach. The ever-popular Arden Court is propelled by symphonies of Boyce. Cloven Kingdom’s fascinating aural montage ranges from baroque to modern music as Mr. Taylor reveals the animal nature lurking just beneath man’s sophisticated veneer.
Hailed as “one of the great war poets” by The Times, Mr. Taylor presents Beloved Renegade, inspired by the life of American poet and Civil War nurse Walt Whitman. Company B juxtaposes the exuberance of Americans in the early 1940s with the tragedy of men who never returned from battle. Sunset is a heart-wrenching look at soldiers and the girls they meet who mourn their passing. On the considerably lighter side, dancers cavort around a stage littered with cutout dogs and a giant cabbage in the whimsical Diggity, and one of Shakespeare’s bitterest becomes an irresistible comic romp in Troilus and Cressida (reduced).
In Promethean Fire, Mr. Taylor shows how renewal of the spirit can follow a cataclysmic event. The Word depicts a community whose rigid conformity to authority is threatened by a seductive succubus. Last Look provides a disturbing vision of victims of an apocalypse. Big Bertha tells the tale of a family whose visit to an amusement park turns nightmarish at the hands of an old-time nickelodeon. Eventide gently captures the coming together and parting of romantic couples. Piazzolla Caldera ignites the stage with the fiery passions of tango culture. And Syzygy is a virtual meteor shower of movement invention.
Doris Humphrey’s Passacaglia, according to the choreographer, “was inspired by the need for love, tolerance and nobility in a world given more and more to the denial of these things.” And Shen Wei’s Rite of Springdeparts from the narrative of Nijinsky’s original ballet and offers a vigorous formal investigation of the pounding chords and rhythms in Stravinsky’s famed score.