Paul Taylor's movement vocabulary? Ballet vocabulary?

 It has been a little longer than I might have liked since I last posted. However, I think this "gap" speaks to, "what do teachers do between the classes they teach?" My primary work in life, of late, is as the director of licensing for Paul Taylor's dances. What this means is that I am responsible for contracting and providing rexources to companies and schools outside of Paul Taylor's own organizations to learn, mount and perform Taylor's dances. These resources include a professional "stager", who is intimately familiar with the dance to be learned, historic and technical information specific to the dance, and artistic stewardship of all aspects of a production (music, costumes, sets, lighting, et al). While I still go out to stage works, I also coordinate a good number of other professional alumni dancers from Paul Taylor Dance Company to work with as many different institutions as I can muster.

As a dance teacher, I love to have a plan in place, and also be prepared to adjust that plan as needed to suit the dancers' needs in class. This is also true when my mission is to get one of Taylor's dances taught, coached and staged for performance. Over the past couple of months, I have had the pleasure of leading the reconstruction of an early Taylor dance, "Tablet" (1960) for Paul Taylor Dance Company itself.

Looking at reconstructing a dance from a single, fuzzy, film from 1961, led me to spending a lot of time digging through the Taylor archives to look at interview transcriptions, programs, Mr. Taylor's notebooks of his preparations for creating the dance, and reflecting on what I knew about the original performers. Gathering as much information as possible is not intended to replicate a carbon-copy of the original performance, but is more about HOW a unique choreographic vocabulary might have been created to form a whole dance. I then used my own methods of notating the movement, spatial patterns, and musicality to be clear that I had a full understanding of what I hoped each dancer might be doing at any given point in time and movement. Once the sequence is clear to the dancers, it becomes a matter of coaching them to be their best artistic selves as they find meaning and musicality in the choreography.

I find this process fascinating, and also similar to my approach to teaching ballet and modern dance disciplines. The more I can get to the heart of where in the body a movement might start, it is easier to imagine the infinite possibilities of "taking the next step". Ballet has a relatively, recognizible lexicon, yet its execution can be considerably different from one style to another. However, if you are well versed in a style, you have all of the components needed to adapt to the demands of a sequence of steps.

Modern dance has often been about creating/finding/building a NEW vocabulary of movement and modulating the execution to achieve a new style, or to illustrate a specific intent. The volume and breadth of Paul Taylor's repertoire provides me with clear objectives of both technique and attention to detail, to provide tools for dancers to embrace and enjoy his choreography within the structure of a dance class, not unlike the structure of a ballet technique class.

But preparing and teaching a class is a little different than getting a whole dance together and ready for performance in front of an audience. However, the very beginnings of that preparation is very much the same for me. Classes are meant to have achievable goals within each session. Dances are expected to take dozens of sessions to achieve their goals!

I hope you will find an opportunity to see the extraordinary dancers of Paul Taylor Dance Company in a theater near you, if you are not able to see them here in New York City!

Kristin Draucker & Devon Louis in Tablet at the Joyce Theater in NYC. Photo: Steven Pisano

Along with another dance "Churchyard" (1969), these two dances have not been performed since 1976, and they have started their most recent run by the current Taylor dancers at the Joyce Theater here in NYC through this coming Sunday, June 22, 2025. 

Jessica Ferretti, Alex Clayton, Elizabeth Chapa, John Harnage, Emmy Wildermuth in Churchyard
at the Joyce Theater in NYC. Photo: Steven Pisano

My contribution to these revivals is generously included in an article in the NY Observer 'Tablet' is an archaic courtship...

The NY Times has already published a preview 'Raw and Untamed' and a review 'Irreverence and Resurrection'

It is always exciting to be involved in bringing dance to life with performances by dancers today! While I never had the opportunity to perform "Tablet", I did have access to what little record and resources there are around the dance. And I was able to call upon my own personal experiences with Paul Taylor alongside the original cast of Dan Wagoner and Pina Bausch!

At Taylor Dance West in midtown Manhattan, my classes in Adult Beginner Ballet (Tuesdays at 6:00pm) and in Open Taylor Technique (Saturdays at 2:00pm), continue to grow, and I hope more of you will join me in the months to come! However, I will be away in Mumbai, India for three weeks in July to teach a Paul Taylor based summer intensive program alongside the Taylor School Manager, Amanda Stevenson. More about this in future posts...