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Dance Review

Extreme Mating Rituals: Lust Can Be So Deadly

Paul Taylor Dance Company in “Gossamer Gallants” at the Performing Arts Center at Purchase College.Credit...Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

PURCHASE, N.Y. — In the case of his newest dance, “Gossamer Gallants,” there are a few things that are helpful to know about Paul Taylor. He is a choreographer who calls himself a spy: he likes to see how strangers move when they’re not aware of his presence. That’s when their secrets come out.

He is also passionate about insects and primitive behavior; in his 1976 piece “Cloven Kingdom,” Mr. Taylor highlights the delicate line between man and beast. As the dancers become more animalistic, they also become more themselves.

And finally, Mr. Taylor is fond of undercutting something beautiful with something dark. Not that “Gossamer Gallants,” which takes a grim view of mating rituals, is necessarily sinister. With its breakneck speed and cartoonish costumes, the new work, performed on Saturday evening at the Performing Arts Center at Purchase College, is a veritable hoot. That it followed “Roses,” Mr. Taylor’s truest romantic work, was a perverse touch. At the heart of that 1985 dance is a luminous duet for a couple in white that shows what happens when dancing ascends to floating.

In “Gossamer Gallants,” the men are dressed as uncommonly fit houseflies in blue and black, while the women, in skintight shiny green tops and tights, are their obsession and their demise. (For both, there are caps and wings.) In this raucous, highly satirical dance set to five pieces from Bedrich Smetana’s “The Bartered Bride,” Santo Loquasto’s costumes are an instant clue that this will be a weird one. His backdrop is a fisheye view of a kingdom adorned with towers, and Jennifer Tipton’s lighting stays true to the storybook tone: against the dark brown setting, the blue and green pop.

Initially the women seem alluring, even cute, but their bobbing antennas belie how fierce they are. In lieu of a program note, Mr. Taylor includes a quote by Herman Melville: “The nocturnal radiance of the firefly is purposely intended as an attraction to the opposite sex ... some insect Hero may show a touch to her gossamer gallant.”

Good luck with that, insect heroes. These lusty flies — Michael Trusnovec, James Samson, Sean Mahoney, Francisco Graciano, Michael Apuzzo and Michael Novak — don’t stand a chance. But like a pesky insect circling a plate of food, they don’t give up. Thrusting their hands, palms down and level with their heads, back and forth with the rapidity of needle on a sewing machine, they mimic the quivering forelegs of a fly. At the first sight of the women, they hunch their backs, pitch forward with their arms dangling, and gape. Men are beasts.

After Michelle Fleet prances by them with the backs of her hands resting on her hips — it’s a clever touch that gives the women a lazily sexy strut — she pauses for a moment and dips a finger in and out of her mouth. The males show their excitement by transferring their wiggling hands to their crotches. (Yes, Mr. Taylor is wicked.)

These predatory fireflies — or are they sexy green hornets? — know their power. Laura Halzack, the most intriguing female dancer in the company, tempers her beauty with a withering stare. As she tilts on one leg — holding the position for ages — she twirls her fingers indifferently around the ball of one of her antenna. She only needs bubble gum.

But the madness ramps up when the women, including Eran Bugge, Jamie Rae Walker and Heather McGinley — a promising addition to the company for her daring and glint of devilish humor — reverse the pursuit. Chasing the shocked males across the stage, they charge ahead with a kick-leap combination that sends one leg shooting forward and the other bent behind like a cocked pistol. Eventually, the males go down, their limp bodies piling into a heap onstage.

Victorious, the females beat their chests and flex their biceps while their victims lie on the floor — prey turned doormats — ready to be walked on (literally). In “Gossamer Gallants,” Mr. Taylor’s view of mating rituals is only partly extreme; he didn’t have to spy too hard, in other words, to see such scenarios in action. (The shopping stretch of lower Broadway? The L train to Bedford Avenue on a Friday night?)

But Mr. Taylor ends on a devious note: one of the flies gets away. There’s always that one you can’t kill.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: Extreme Mating Rituals: Lust Can Be So Deadly. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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