Review: Paul Taylor Dance Company at the Royal Ballet and Opera, programme one

It seems eons since the Paul Taylor Dance Company last appeared in London. Those performances were part of a four-week, seven-city tour in April 2003, played out in large venues that led to PTDC winning the National Dance Award for Best Foreign Dance Company. Given the pent-up demand for Brits to experience live one of America’s principal modern dance companies, it seemed only half-baked for them to appear in the 400-seat Linbury Theatre, which booked out very quickly. While applauding The Royal Ballet for making this happen, the programme, the performers and the potential audience unable to get a ticket deserved a bigger place.  Or was it perhaps an excellent marketing ploy for a return visit to a larger venue? Let’s hope so!

This first offering was marginally the better of the two programmes that comprised this brief season (Jonathan Gray reviews the second programme, Concertiana | Echo | Esplanade, here), principally because it kicked off with Brandenburgs, put simply, one of the best pieces of pure modern dance of the last half-century, and rightly regarded as Taylor’s masterpiece.

Created in 1988 to selections from Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, the lyrical musicality in his movement is always mesmerising and frequently breathtaking. His choreography is a fusion of baroque and contemporary movement, using his nine-strong ensemble to create kaleidoscopic patterns of bodies in fluid movement. It seems as if he is continually knitting them into shape. Frequent dynamic entrances and exits are key components of Taylor’s choreographic mix.  

As is also so often the case in Taylor’s choreographies there is a focus on one dancer amongst the group and in this piece it is John Harnage, a kind of Apollo-type figure, wearing just tights in a golden shade of green topped off by an elaborate waistband, in contrast to the five other men whose chests are covered in a shift-style, black knee-length leotard. The late Mary Clarke wrote that Brandenburgs is a ‘radiant, seamless flow of invention‘, a matchless description that deserves to be repeated, and is as true now as when she wrote it in the last century.    

Piazzolla Caldera, the concluding work in this first triple bill, was created as a tribute to the Tango music of Astor Piazzolla and the Polish musician Jerzy Peterbushsky. Made by Taylor in 1997, it’s inspired by Tango, but rather than using the language of the dance form, Taylor has reimagined it through the medium of modern dance. It is nonetheless placed in a Milonga, where men and women come to play out their sensual passions in various combinations on the dance floor.

It is a work that simply sizzles with lust and the heat implied by the title. Taylor’s work is unashamedly sexy: the men are virile hunks and the women alluringly seductive. Here, it is Jessica Ferretti who stands out from the ensemble as the fiery woman searching for a partner but (unaccountably) failing and closing the work by collapsing to the floor in desperation. Taylor’s observations of the social and cultural significance of Argentine Tango are beautifully observed in his seamless clutch of human interactions, enticingly performed by this current generation of PTDC dancers.

Paul Taylor died in 2018 and the company that bears his name could be forgiven for simply preserving his repertoire, there are enough of his great works to keep filling the seasons for years to come. However, the PTDC policy is to bring along new work in the Taylor tradition, and it has two resident choreographers for this purpose – Lauren Lovette, and former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Robert Battle. And it was Battle’s first work for PTDC that provided the centrepiece of this first programme. 

Under the Rhythm is a personal tribute to Battle’s mother, Dessie Williams, and the love of jazz music and rhythm that she instilled in him as a child. To an eclectic soundtrack including both Ella Fitzgerald and Steve Reich, Battle eschews superstition with his ensemble of thirteen dancers, identically dressed in showtime garb (bowler hats, white shirt, black tie and trousers, braces and white spats covering black shoes) and his choreography showcases individual dancers – I recall Patrick Gamble leaping effortlessly through the air – often with a line of the ensemble shuffling through upstage. In another nod to showtime, there is an all-male duet by Lee Duveneck and Alex Clayton wearing full evening dress with burgundy suits (I thought of the Nicholas Brothers as possible inspiration).

To be sandwiched between two classic works by Taylor is a challenging place, but Battle’s long elite experience as a choreographer is well up to the task, and it’s a credit to him that Under the Rhythm shows similar flair and invention. The dancers responded with both euphoric energy and tightly synchronised unison.

It may be almost a decade since Taylor’s death, but dancers who never met the great man are ensuring an enduring legacy.

Graham Watts

Graham Watts is a freelance writer and dance critic. He writes for The Spectator, Tanz, Shinshokan Dance Magazine (Japan), Ballet Magazine (Romania), BachTrack and the Hong Kong International Arts Festival and has previously written for the Sunday Express, Dancing Times, Dance Europe, DanceTabs, London Dance, the Edinburgh International Festival and Pointe magazine (USA).  He has also written the biography of Daria Klimentová (The Agony and the Ecstasy) and contributed chapters about the work of Akram Khan to the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet and on Shobana Jeyasingh for the third edition of Routledge’s Fifty Contemporary Choreographers.

He is Chairman of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle and of the UK National Dance Awards and regularly lectures on dance writing and criticism at The Royal Academy of Dance, The Place and (until the war) for Balletristic in Kyiv.  He was a nominee for the Dance Writing Award in the 2018 One Dance UK Awards and was appointed OBE in 2008.