From apocalyptic and soul-crushing to droll and cartoonish: Paul Taylor Dance fans are used to the Taylor mood swings in a program. In that vein, Sunday’s matinee paired Speaking in Tongues with Offenbach Overtures. The former was beautiful to look at, eerie and exhausting; the latter was also winsome but dragged out the merriment and mayhem for at least one overture too long.
That said, the audience displayed great stamina and enthusiasm for this double bill – and as far as dance audiences go, the Taylor Company’s cannot be beat. Their three-week engagement at the Koch Theater has seen packed houses at every show, populated not only by long-time fans but by a young cohort who are there largely under a generously-funded development initiative that draws in hundreds of New York City schoolchildren and their families. American dance audiences probably looked a lot like this before the right-wingnuts forced a dramatic scaling back of federal funding for arts education starting in the 90’s.
The right wing being dominated by the hypocritically devout, I imagine Speaking in Tongues enraged them. The unspooling of the plot continues to mystify me but the basic premise is one that has played out across the American south and wherever else fundamentalist creeds have taken root: that of a vulnerable congregation in thrall to a Man of the Cloth. They had internalized his moral strictures and rained punishment down on anyone in the congregation who transgressed, even their own child. Acts of violence and an orgy were depicted quite literally, that is, theatrically, whereas waves of repression and shame – as well as love and blossoming self-awareness – were abstractly rendered in dance terms. The act of speaking in tongues translated into full body convulsions.
When the curtain rose on the congregation in Speaking in Tongues, they were moving in ecstatic abandon, hungering to be swept up in a transformative experience. The Holy Spirit seemed to go through the crowd like the Mexican wave sweeping a football stadium. But as soon as A Man of the Cloth appeared in the illuminated doorway, rather like a portal to another (holy or satanic) dimension, they immediately slipped into a submissive, anxious mode.
To someone who is hooked on police procedurals, the vagueness of the relationships between members of this doomed congregation and the slipperiness of the timeline of events, was irritating. I had the urge to step on stage with a notebook, flash a badge, and ask each dancer where they were on Saturday night at 1am. But one can accept that the work veers between reality and hallucination, warping the concept of time, and that the congregation had given birth to this monster as much as the monster had imposed his will on them.
Lee Duveneck turned in a chilling performance as A Man of the Cloth, less fire and brimstone, more cyborg, with dead eyes. His limbs jutted sharply; he spun and jumped without visible momentum, and whenever he reached out to touch someone my mind went to Novichok.
Santo Loquasto’s forbidding backdrop was finely lit by Jennifer Tipton in a way that periodically illuminated then darkened scraps of biblical exhortations engraved on the dreary timber paneling. Fragments of raspy sermonizing were heard in scratchy recordings layered on the moody electronic score by Matthew Patton. But it was the folding chairs and their imaginative use that struck me most – at first, as a step to bring you closer to heaven, then as a barricade to hide behind, and a sign of shame to drag with you wherever you go. And finally, as the lid to your coffin.
Speaking in Tongues may have outraged the evangelicals but the daffy Offenbach Overtures outraged the French, whose presenters would not allow it to tour France. Presumably, the sight of men in fire-engine red tank leotards and tights, sporting Napoleonic bicornes, hussar shakos and extravagantly curly moustaches, partnering a tipsy ballerina, squaring off for a duel that became a dance-off and that ended with the duellists falling in love, was considered too grave an insult to Offenbach.
Lighthearted parodies of the waltz and can-can, of classical ballet and its partnering conventions were delivered with impeccable comic timing. The elegant ensemble patterning, Taylor’s trademark, was punctuated by equally elegant pratfalls. Lisa Borres Casey made dancing while drunk look easy when in reality having to do ballet with deeply wobbly knees and a teetering torso is no mean feat. Duveneck and Devon Louis made an uproarious pair of duellists but their seconds, John Harnage and Austin Kelly, whose own playground squabble escalated into fisticuffs, may have stolen the show. The orchestra under Tara Simoncic seemed to be having a blast. Designers Loquasto and Tipton made the color red great again.
