Northrop Presents Paul Taylor Dance Company

Throughout his remarkable 64-year career, Paul Taylor was a trail-blazer in the world of modern dance. When he died in 2018 at age 88, he left behind a legacy of masterworks unrivaled by any other modern dance artist. His life and legacy are the focus of The Celebration Tour, coming to Northrop on Sat, Mar 21. While presenters worldwide have been honoring Taylor with different versions of The Celebration Tour, Northrop's program reveals the incredible range of this legendary choreographer in three masterfully crafted and emotionally powerful works, demonstrating Taylor's keen understanding of "the light and the dark" of the human experience, performed by many of the dancers who completely embody his style.

Paul Taylor helped shape and define America's homegrown art of modern dance from the earliest days of his career as a dancer and choreographer in 1954 until his death in 2018. As artistic director of the Paul Taylor Dance Company he created 147 dances, many of which rank among the greatest ever made. A longtime dancer with Martha Graham Dance Company, Taylor first gained notoriety as a dance maker in 1957 with Seven New Dances; its study in non-movement famously earned it a blank newspaper review, and Graham subsequently dubbed him the "naughty boy" of dance. A trailblazer throughout his 64-year career, Taylor continued to win public and critical acclaim for the vibrancy, relevance, and power of his dances into his eighties.

Before his death, Taylor appointed Michael Novak as the second Artistic Director in the history of the Paul Taylor Dance Company. He believed that Novak, "understood the need to nurture the past, present, and future of modern dance." The Celebration Tour is Novak's way of honoring the life and career of his predecessor. Northrop's program consists of Polaris, Last Look, and Esplanade. From the 147 original works that Taylor produced, Novak devised nine programs, each with a focus on a phase in Taylor's career: "I felt like it was my duty as artistic director to pick the works that transform the modern dance landscape and package those together in a way that would hopefully not just excite people but also remind them how vast Paul's imagination was."

Audience perception is explored in Polaris. It is a two-part work in which the dancers move to music by Donald York within and around a large metallic cube designed by Alex Katz. The choreography of the first section is repeated step for step in the second section, but performed by different dancers to different music and different lighting. As the score changes from pastoral to menacing and the lighting darkens, the second set of dancers perform the steps with different emphasis and attack than the first set of dancers. And as a result, the viewer's perception of the exact same choreography is altered.

In Last Look, Taylor and two of his long-time collaborators-designer Katz and composer York-created a dystopian world inhabited by survivors of an apocalyptic event. Desperately clinging to life but repulsed by their own mirrored images, the survivors straddle the edge of madness. Never prone to hyperbole, Taylor called this brilliant, riveting and disturbing work "the most unpleasant dance ever made." Esplanade, the name of the last piece, translates to an outdoor place to walk; in 1975, Paul Taylor, inspired by the sight of a girl running to catch a bus, created a masterwork based on pedestrian movement.

If contemporaries Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg could use ordinary "found objects" like Coke bottles and American flags in their art, Taylor would use such "found movements" as standing, walking, running, sliding and falling. The first of five sections that are set to two Bach violin concertos introduces a team of eight dancers brimming with Taylor's signature youthful exuberance. An adagio for a family whose members never touch reflects life's somber side. When three couples engage in romantic interplay, a woman standing tenderly atop her lover's prone body suggests that love can hurt as well as soothe. The final section has dancers careening fearlessly across the stage like Kamikazes. The littlest of them-the daughter who had not been acknowledged by her family-is left alone on stage, triumphant: the meek inheriting the earth.

Before his death, Paul Taylor launched the Paul Taylor American Modern Dance (PTAMD) program in the spring of 2015 in an effort to strengthen and expand the field of American modern dance. The program was designed to present the works of a new generation of choreographers and preserve the work of the genre's pioneers. Ensuring the future of dance, PTAMD has bridged founders of modern dance including Isadora Duncan, Trisha Brown, Jose Limon, Donald McKayle and Martha Graham, with new dancemakers of the 21st century.