Taylormade

SPOTLIGHT

almost as soon as Paul Taylor appeared on the modern-dance scene, American ballet tried to entice the hunky, blue-eyed golden boy over to its side. In 1959, when Martha Graham and George Balanchine decided to collaborate on Episodes, Balanchine chose Taylor, then a Graham dancer, to perform in his section. In 1968 the Royal Danish Ballet staged Aureole, one of Taylor's early works for the barefoot angels in his own company, and the first of many Taylor dances to be taken on by ballet companies over the next twenty years.

Since 1983, balletomanes with a hunger for physically voluptuous, aromatically musical dances have looked to Taylor to fill the void left in their lives by the death of Balanchine, but Mr. T remains very much his own man. In his autobiography, Private Domain, he was blunt about how he feels. "Hang onto your beanstalk ballerinas and their midget male shadows," he declared in a hypothetical letter to "Classic Ballet." "Run yourself out of business with your tons of froufrou and costly dattery toe shoes. .. .We're to be seen undiluted, undistorted, not absorbed by your hollow world like blood into a sponge." This month the Taylor company climaxes its thirty-fifth-anniversary year with the usual four-week season at New York's City Center, and as usual the sometimes sweet-talking, sometimes surly Taylor has produced a couple more fresh dances for the occasion. One—Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun—is an evening-long opus whose title comes from a line in Wallace Stevens. The other—The Sorcerer's Sofa—is a one-act psycho-comedy that takes on Walt Disney. Bereft ballet lovers will be more than welcome, but only on Taylor's big-footed terms.

ROBERT GRESKOVIC

PAUL TAYLOR AND DANCERS Bereft balletomanes look to him.