Promethean Fire and an homage to Carolyn Adams ignite the Paul Taylor Dance gala

It can’t have been happenstance that Paul Taylor Dance, resident for three weeks at Lincoln Center’s Koch Theater, scheduled its gala on the day after the US presidential election. The mood of New York audiences was going to be jubilation or outrage, both of which tend to spur munificence toward favoured causes. Between dances, the Executive Director of the Paul Taylor Dance Foundation addressed “the tensions that divide the country” and urged patrons to dig deep.

You couldn’t ask for a more perfect dance to mirror those tensions than Taylor’s Promethean Fire. The work is said to have been Taylor’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center (rehearsals for the piece had started on the day the twin towers were struck.) Stokowski’s symphonic transcriptions of Bach turned the storm of his Toccata and Fugue for organ into an apocalypse, and the intensity in the eyes of the 16 dancers practically set the house on fire, fueled by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in the pit. The dancers dashed around in velvet jumpsuits with chevron markings suggestive of okapis (though they leapt like gazelles), solemn and stiffly magisterial even when softly bounding, rolling on the ground, or beating their legs in the air. The marvellously straight-up Taylor spines are here almost exaggeratedly so, like steel girders, the human form abstracted in choreography that at times resembles the framing of a monumental edifice, yet at others implies a population being strafed. Men and women pair up, for mutual protection rather than romance and multitudes of heroic lifts that often climax with the woman in a glorious backbend at perilous heights.

A lead couple emerges, the mighty Devon Louis and livewire Madelyn Ho, and while they’re mostly being superheroes, the quieter, Parnassian moments, when they take turns supporting each other with the lightest of touches, resonate profoundly. In perhaps the strangest and most striking lift of theTaylor canon, Ho wraps herself around Louis’ ribs while he's on his hands and knees, then seamlessly encircles his head as he rises to his feet. He stumbles around, his head shrouded by this figure in a tight foetal position; then in an astonishing feat, he wrests her into the air – like an Imperial Stormtrooper ripping off his helmet to signal his disillusionment with the Empire.

From the monumental to the personal, a solo dedicated to revered Taylor dancer and dance educator Carolyn Adams was offered in a world premiere by Robert Battle, until recently artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and once a student of Adams. Dedicated to You is set to a duet by the peerless Sarah Vaughn and Billy Eckstine, bookended by a Bach violin concerto. A captivating tribute to Adams, who took a bow to an outpouring of love from the audience – and to the radiant Jada Pearman who made the dance her own. In a shimmering cocktail dress with midriff cut-outs, Pearman captured the effortless buoyancy of Adams’ jumps, the fleetness of her sprints, and the grand, humorous sweep of her bows – with nods to roles that Adams originated in Esplanade, Airs and other Taylor works. Movement rippled through her torso, arms like a fountain of energy. From a jump she’d crunch in mid-air then shoot limbs outward in a mini-explosion. The drama of her sped-up Graham falls had an operatic quality, and her leisurely, controlled adagio an air of mystery.

Battle has just been named a resident choreographer, alongside Lauren Lovette who has been in the post since 2022. This feels like a big win for Paul Taylor.

The evening opened with a world premiere by Lovette, Chaconne in Winter, a wisp of a duet for the powerhouse pair of Madelyn Ho and John Harnage, who gave the work some needed heft. Clad in remarkably little clothing for winter – nude one-shoulder unitards sprinkled with crystals – they twirled and ran in circles, undulating their arms, encouraging things to grow from the earth (though it’s winter), frantically fluttering their hands as if sowing seeds or flinging pixie dust at the musicians, and executing impressive horizontal lifts. Violinists Charles Yang and Nicolas Kendall and bassist Ranaan Meyer, collectively known as Time for Three, were marooned on three little elevated platforms, their bows skittering with great flair through a mash-up of Bach and Bon Iver that sounded like neither. Ho and Harnage had fireball mini-solos but the whole enterprise looked like it was improvised that afternoon.

Images of chilling power offered up by Promethean Fire and the defiantly joyful bravura of Dedicated to You were enough to keep the audience fired up. I am told the evening raised about $1 million. As writer Rebecca Solnit just penned, “The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.”