Vanity Fair

Jan Morris has written a bittersweet love poem to New York.

RICHARD MERKIN

Taylor-Made Memoirs

DANCE

In 1969, Paul Taylor made a dance called Private Domain (on view during the current New York season), in which halfdressed performers are only desultorily visible behind a few dark panels, like figures glimpsed in tenement rooms. The work's coldly tempting physicality, its rootlessness, typify the late 1960s. But the dualism of it—the idea of heaven and hell locked up in one being—typifies all of Taylor's choreography; it is the raw material for dances that are funny, musical, beautiful, and humane.

This season, Taylor gives us a second Private Domain (Knopf), this one his autobiography. The metaphor of deracination which informs his dances is actually embodied in his book's episodic structure—repetitions, puns, distracting tense changes—and it's not a quick read. Yet Private Domain has the charisma of a writer's journal, a writer whose voices career from Carlyle to A1 Capp.

The story opens on Taylor's Washington, D.C., boyhood and concludes with an early rehearsal of his 1975 Esplanade, a suite that marked his maturity as a choreographer and an armistice with his grief over the premature end of his dancing career at forty-four (a result of injuries, drug abuse, and self-imperiling bravado, as well as middle-age wear and tear). Taylor keenly conveys the sensation of dancing, in health and in pain; his account of one of his last appearances, when he performed despite bleeding ulcers, a dozen Dexamyl in his system, and a crippled foot, sets a new, hideous standard for "The show must go on." He is also a brilliant observer of the links between a dancer's inner life and his theatrical effects, although on the issue of his own sexuality he can be very coy, relating mostly heterosexual affairs but philosophizing about androgyny. Still, his memoir's emotional intensity and almost southern richness of description leave a dramatic afterglow.

City Center Theater. New York. (4/21-5/17)

MINDY ALOFF