Plaza Note:
Sacre, concld
19 March 2018
¶ On Saturday afternoon, we threaded our way around the St Patrick’s Day traffic — which was much worse coming home — to get to Lincoln Center, for the last of the Paul Taylors. As I had only bought the tickets several days earlier, they were supposed to be waiting at the box office. Good thing I wrote down the order number! Freshly printed tickets were passed through the window without an envelope. As on all earlier occasions this season, we sat in seats A9 and A11.
- There were four dances. One of Taylor’s first ballets, Aureole, was inserted into the program in memory of the dancer who created the female lead, Elizabeth LeBlanc, back in 1962. It’s a lovely dance, mostly to music from Handel’s Jephtha, Whether you regard Paul Taylor’s defection from strict modernism as bold or not, it cannot be denied that his company’s continued existence, indeed its current flourishing, owes a great deal to this move. Sean Mahoney danced the solo that was Paul Taylor’s first great signature.
- The second dance was Changes, a sporty piece set to songs sung by the Mamas and the Papas, some of them rarely heard. The costumes, in which the eclectic tailoring of late Sixties dandyism and the riotous tie-dyed color of the early Seventies are blended, absorb a great deal of attention. One is again struck — if one is my age or older — by the fidelity with which dancers who had yet to be born when “California Dreamin'” was a hit recapitulate their parents’ gyrations. Michael Novak’s identity was concealed by a large moustache, but I recognized him by his dancing anyway. Changes is a crowd-pleaser, and, what’s more, Kathleen was saying that she’d like to see it again. Something of a lagniappe for me, because I got the tickets for the other two dances, which were:
- First, Eventide. Set to Vaughan Williams, this is one of Taylor’s tender, bucolic dances, like Sunset and Roses. Elegaic, perhaps? There are five couples, four of which have duets. At the end, the men and women split up into two lines, with the men going off to one side and the women to the other. It is all terribly mortal.
- Piazzola Caldera, which is pretty much what you might expect of a ballet set to music by the Chopin of tango. What I mean by the Chopin reference is that we are as far from Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot as you can go while still using the word “tango.” Taylor has borrowed the dramatic hostility of danse apache for these pieces. Parisa Khobdeh played a woman who is rejected by the men; who has used and abused whom need not be clarified. Michelle Fleet did some extremely eponymic dancing with Michael Trusnovec.
- It was all great, but what I’ll remember most clearly is a brief conversation with Margaret Kampmeier, the Orchestra of St Luke’s pianist. I caught her eye at one of the intermissions, and asked her a question that had much occupied Kathleen and myself during the past year. Last season, when we saw the company do Le Sacre du Printemps: The Rehearsal, I noticed that
- “One of the pianists [not Ms Kampmeier] was reading from an iPad that turned its own pages, so to speak, automatically, at just the right time. How did it do that?” Did the pianist wink at the iPad, or — this seemed hardly credible — could the iPad follow the performance? The simple answer never occurred to us: “a foot pedal on Bluetooth.”
- In my inbox, there’s an announcement that Friday’s night’s performance will honor Michael Trusnovec’s twentieth anniversary with the company. In Eventide, his dancing reminded me that his entire body is equally articulate, his neck and his shoulders as much as his hands or his feet. Watching newbie Lee Duveneck fill in for him in Changes, I wondered if there was ever a time when Michael Trusnovec was not the great dancer that he has been for all of the twelve seasons throughout which he has utterly wowed us.