Happy 96th Birthday Paul Taylor!

Paul Taylor's birthday is today! He would have been 96...

A birthday butterfly from Paul

There was a particular kind of privilege that many of us who worked with Paul Taylor enjoyed. It was to receive one of his handmade pieces of art on our birthdays. Often these gifts featured a butterfly, or more, that he had netted himself in eastern Long Island. 

Papilo Brevicanda ♀ (tiger swallowtail) Mattituck, NY, USA '94

Inscribed: "Dear Richard - You are a beaut. Happy Birthday! from yr. admiring bug-catcher"

I also discovered that seven years ago, today was designated "Global Tiger Day", so it seems appropriate to be sharing Paul's Tiger Swallowtail butterfly gift here. 

online graphic from pngtree.com

It is easy to think that being in the dance field means being active and physically moving in a studio or helping dancers work with their bodies. However, the type of work that has been keeping me busy of late is the meticulous, time-consuming notation of dances, professional networking, taking stock of current inventory of data/documentation and what needs to be addressed/expanded and how to do so! Before long, I will not have time to be buried in these tasks, and I will find myself back in studios working with dancers. But the latter does not exist without the former!

Maximizing the use of studio and stage time does not happen spontaneously, and there may come a day when much of the documentation of dances as they are created and re-constructed might live in the domain of sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI). But I have not found any real shortcuts to the human preparation needed to create dances and get them in front of audiences near and far.

Dancemaker clip of rehearsal in Broadway studio

As a dancer, studio time for me with Paul Taylor was always in the studios that once existed on Broadway between Prince and Spring Streets in SoHo, NYC. It turned out that my last rehearsals as a performer with the company would be the last ever for the company in those spaces. However, due to a particular scene from the 2000 movie Center Stage, the actual studio was memorialized for audiences beyond the 1997 documentary on Paul Taylor, Dancemaker. What is fascinating to me is how the main Taylor studio was "dressed" to be a more generic dance studio for open classes in NYC. 

Clip from Center Stage of Taylor Studio in SoHo posted on Facebook.

Things in the scene that lived in the Taylor Studio were all of the different chairs that lined the perimeter, and the arm chair with green upholstery was Paul Taylor's chair on which he sat at the front of the room. In addtion, Taylor used to use a reel-to-reel deck for recorded music which is sitting covered next to the column at the back of how the studio was shot. That was our piano in its location by the fire escape, and even our clock is up on the wall. I kind of love that so much of "our" stuff was used in the movie setting.

What we did not have was mirrors! As a general rule, Paul did not want mirrors in his studios, and we always worked facing him sitting with his back to the windowed wall. The neon signs of "Broadway Dance Studio" and the posters were all movie "dressing". The last shot in the above clip was taken from the offices of Scholastic, which occupied the building across the street from our studios.

Creative Domain clip of LES studio

The 2014 documentary on Paul Taylor, Creative Domain, was shot on location in the next studio home of the company in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And now, we have expanded to having Taylor Studios in midtown Manhattan on W 38th Street as well! 

Paul's company always provided an advanced level modern class each morning that was open for the public to take, and it would typically be taught by current and alumni company members. In my generation, Paul also invited a few of his teachers from Martha Graham to lead the morning classes. However, it was not until we opened the LES studios that daily dance educational programming fully blossomed under Raegan Wood (whose background and pedigree deserves its own blog). Our current offering of studios both in midtown and LES allows us to grow our offerings of classes in many different styles of dance and fitness, in NYC. And our privilege is having the legacy of how Paul Taylor brought together ballet and modern dance in his extensive body of work, carving his own path that continues to influence choreographers and dancers today!