Event Details
Paul Taylor Dance Company
$62 Golden Circle/$52/$47 Mahaiwe Members/$22 Limited Balcony on Saturday/$12 Youth 18 and under on Sunday
25% discount thru BOX OFFICE sales ONLY when purchasing tickets for BOTH Taylor programs. Phone: 413-528-0100 Wed-Saturday 12-6PM
Paul Taylor Dance Company returns to the Mahaiwe over Memorial Day weekend to celebrate Paul Taylor's 80th birthday with two performances. The programs include Mr. Taylor's two newest dances, Also Playing and Brief Encounters. On Saturday, May 29 at 8pm, the program features the satiric Public Domain, the erotic Brief Encounters, and Taylor's red-hot look at the culture of tango, Piazzolla Caldera.
On Sunday, May 30 at 3pm, the program includes the blissful Brandenburgs, the comic Vaudeville tribute Also Playing, and Piazzolla Caldera. The New York Times says, "There is no other choreographer today whose imaginative range looks so large or so multilayered."
Public Domain, made in 1968, is a zany, comic display of technical prowess set to a musical pastiche by John Herbert McDowell that includes phrases from Mahler's "Titan" Symphony, Sibelius's 5th, Beethoven's 9th, Glazunov's violin concerto and Puccini's "Madame Butterfly." The newly-revived dance returned to the repertoire this season for the first time in many years.
In 1961, Paul Taylor was one of the first modern dance choreographers to confound expectations by setting a work not to a contemporary score but to music composed more than 200 years earlier. Junction - and shortly after, Aureole - were his first dances in what has become a signature series of works set to the driving rhythms of baroque music. Brandenburgs (1988) is a virtuoso showpiece set to the famed Bach concertos.
Mr. Taylor has always displayed a keen interest in the interaction among members of a society - whether they be insect or humans, primitives or contemporary men and women. Piazzolla Caldera (1997) uses music by one of Tango's greatest composers, Astor Piazzolla, to illuminate the culture of the predatory dance that originated in the brothels of Buenos Aires at the turn of the 20th Century. In a dimly lit dive, working class men and women confront each other in sizzling sexual duets and trios: men with women, men with men and women with women. A woman who has searched desperately for a partner but failed to find one, collapses - as if mortally wounded by a night without passion.
Mr. Taylor has often pushed the boundaries of modern dance through experimentation with music's relationship to dance. With Brief Encounters (2009), he returned to a score he first used more than 30 years ago in Images - but this time he used the orchestral version of Debussy's Le Coin des Enfants as opposed to the original version for solo piano. The dance is about people more interested in momentary connections than ongoing relationships.
Also Playing (2009), set to ballet music from Donizetti operas, is an affectionate tribute to Vaudeville and the performers "who went on no matter what." Among the artists in this comic revue are a tap-dancing horse (a true hoofer), a toreador whose sissy bulls are frightened of her, and a dying swan in her lengthy final throes, all admired by a star-struck stagehand who's inspired to take a turn with his broom.
http://www.ptdc.org
Click here for more on Paul Taylor Dance Company!
On Sunday, May 30 at 3pm, the program includes the blissful Brandenburgs, the comic Vaudeville tribute Also Playing, and Piazzolla Caldera. The New York Times says, "There is no other choreographer today whose imaginative range looks so large or so multilayered."
Public Domain, made in 1968, is a zany, comic display of technical prowess set to a musical pastiche by John Herbert McDowell that includes phrases from Mahler's "Titan" Symphony, Sibelius's 5th, Beethoven's 9th, Glazunov's violin concerto and Puccini's "Madame Butterfly." The newly-revived dance returned to the repertoire this season for the first time in many years.
In 1961, Paul Taylor was one of the first modern dance choreographers to confound expectations by setting a work not to a contemporary score but to music composed more than 200 years earlier. Junction - and shortly after, Aureole - were his first dances in what has become a signature series of works set to the driving rhythms of baroque music. Brandenburgs (1988) is a virtuoso showpiece set to the famed Bach concertos.
Mr. Taylor has always displayed a keen interest in the interaction among members of a society - whether they be insect or humans, primitives or contemporary men and women. Piazzolla Caldera (1997) uses music by one of Tango's greatest composers, Astor Piazzolla, to illuminate the culture of the predatory dance that originated in the brothels of Buenos Aires at the turn of the 20th Century. In a dimly lit dive, working class men and women confront each other in sizzling sexual duets and trios: men with women, men with men and women with women. A woman who has searched desperately for a partner but failed to find one, collapses - as if mortally wounded by a night without passion.
Mr. Taylor has often pushed the boundaries of modern dance through experimentation with music's relationship to dance. With Brief Encounters (2009), he returned to a score he first used more than 30 years ago in Images - but this time he used the orchestral version of Debussy's Le Coin des Enfants as opposed to the original version for solo piano. The dance is about people more interested in momentary connections than ongoing relationships.
Also Playing (2009), set to ballet music from Donizetti operas, is an affectionate tribute to Vaudeville and the performers "who went on no matter what." Among the artists in this comic revue are a tap-dancing horse (a true hoofer), a toreador whose sissy bulls are frightened of her, and a dying swan in her lengthy final throes, all admired by a star-struck stagehand who's inspired to take a turn with his broom.
http://www.ptdc.org
Click here for more on Paul Taylor Dance Company!