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Dance Review | Paul Taylor Dance Company

A Poet of the Body, Bending All the Rules

Paul Taylor Dance Company performing “Brief Encounters,” set to Debussy, at City Center, where the troupe opened its season on Wednesday.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

If you want to learn just how differently dance can be set to music — and how dance can reveal different aspects of music — then there is no better place to be than in New York this weekend. Three companies are all showing first-class examples: New York City Ballet in George Balanchine’s “Jewels” at the David H. Koch Theater; the Mark Morris Dance Group in a program of works by Mr. Morris at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; and the Paul Taylor Dance Company in a series of triple bills of Mr. Taylor’s work at City Center, where the troupe opened its season on Wednesday. (At such times, New York is the envy of the dance world.)

Mr. Morris found his identity as a mature choreographer only after steeping himself in Mr. Taylor’s work. Mr. Taylor found his only after dancing for Balanchine. And yet each choreographer is most unlike the other two when it comes to music, which each presents as the foundation of his art. Although comparisons are inevitable, there’s more than enough room in the world — and in our hearts — for all three, at least when they’re on form. More important, at their best, they make the world a larger place.

Of the three, it’s Mr. Taylor whose way with music is the least explicable, the most miraculously illogical. He’s like a dreamer whose visions are all his own but are impelled by music being played by other people in the next room.

Perhaps this is why taped music, though irksome, is less troubling with him than it would be with Balanchine or Mr. Morris. Admittedly, I wish he hadn’t opened with a revival of “Syzygy” (1987), whose music (by Donald York) strikes me as tacky, and whose high-energy, shake-it-all-about choreography strikes me as watchably bogus.

The same program, however, also includes “Brief Encounters” (in its New York City premiere), which is set to Debussy, and “Beloved Renegade,” set to Poulenc. These two works pull viewers deeply, sensuously and movingly into the core of the Taylor experience.

In “Brief Encounters” the dancers are adults in elegant black underwear (designed by Santo Loquasto), years beyond the nursery that Debussy had in mind when he composed “Children’s Corner,” which we hear here. What we see, however, heads into something strangely akin to the nursery: various facets of adult innocence. Things — and emotions — keep happening, as if for the first time.

The work starts with an image of pure form, with dancers in a circle that travels counterclockwise, then back the other way. But before this circle moves, a woman lays a hand on a man’s buttock. It’s gently enough done, and soon lost amid the motion, so that it can be easily overlooked. Yet it raises a fleeting question in the mind, the same question that returns in different ways throughout the piece: Aren’t all these characters on the cusp of sexual experience?

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Laura Halzack, top, plays the muse in “Beloved Renegade.”Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

It’s never quite clear how adolescent or naïve they are, but Debussy’s music helps the feeling that at one level they’re all potential nymphs and fauns, while on another level each one is a confused, isolated failure. The particular spell of the piece is that these layerings aren’t anguished or violent; Mr. Taylor makes everything transient, carried along by the glowing beauty of youthful flesh.

The dancers — ravishingly lighted by James F. Ingalls — look more attractive than ever. James Samson, the company’s tallest and broadest man and here its most innocent, has his most important role to date: his quality of weighty helplessness is terrific.

In “Beloved Renegade” (from 2008) the protagonist (Michael Trusnovec) is the dreamer or visionary, the artist who sees and then enters his own visions. Wounded soldiers fall, crawl and die; children play silly games; a perhaps spastic girl moves in stunted, labored style but seems to undergo a cure; a muse (Laura Halzack) proves also to be an angelic messenger of death.

This poet — who, according to the program material, is Walt Whitman — views them all, meets them all. His relationship with the muse (superbly lighted at each phase by Jennifer Tipton) is the most encompassing. It seems to shut him off from the world, and his feelings for her include those of both son and lover.

How on earth did Mr. Taylor come to set this to Poulenc’s “Gloria”? This music — which has references to Stravinsky, resemblances to Prokofiev and hints of jazz, but contains the sensuous vocal lines of French music — had its premiere in 1961. Logically it should be as wrong for Whitman as Shostakovich is for the story of Marie-Antoinette (in Stanton Welch’s “Marie,” for Houston Ballet last year).

Instead the score takes Whitman out of the 19th century, makes him our Whitman and lets him become other artists too. Because it addresses the Christian God — the soprano’s liquid calls of “Domine deus,” “Pater omnipotens” and “Rex celestis” are gorgeously branded onto your very soul — it becomes a moving accompaniment for the story of a man approaching his end, yet nowhere does this Whitman address God: this angel of easeful death is the only face of the sublime onstage.

Mr. Taylor weaves his way in and out of the music’s detail with bewildering skill. Several connections of full chorus to full dance ensemble have great power. And the kaleidoscopic changes of symmetrical ensemble patterns (something in which Mr. Taylor surpasses all choreographers since Ashton and Balanchine) is marvelously satisfying, though you can overlook it amid the work’s larger drama.

The spastic solo for Amy Young is among the most exceptional elements in this great work: the way it’s rhythmically at odds with the music makes it only more effective. Sometimes the dance and music seem separate, and then suddenly Mr. Taylor hooks them together unnervingly, as when artist and muse both extend a leg up sideways, echoing the way the soprano jumps an octave with the final syllable of “Domine deus.”

In the final scene, as muse and artist approach each other from either end of a human avenue, Mr. Taylor’s drama rises to its elegiac summit. Now the others present are disciples and friends; now they’re friezelike architecture; as either, they’re staggeringly beautiful. This was at least the sixth time I have seen this work, and still, by the time the artist takes his leave of individual friends — the playing here by the Taylor dancers is impeccably restrained — I am choked with emotion at every performance.

The Paul Taylor Dance Company continues through March 14 at City Center, 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Poet of the Body, Bending All the Rules. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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