Paul Taylor Dance Company
Mimi Ohio Theatre at Playhouse Square
Cleveland, Ohio
Saturday, January 20, 2024

By Steve Sucato

To kick off the celebrations of New York City-based Paul Taylor Dance Company’s 70^th Anniversary, the company returned to Cleveland this past Saturday night with a triple bill of riveting dance works. The performance at Playhouse Square’s Mimi Ohio Theatre featured two of late choreographer Paul Taylor’s critically acclaimed works plus a 2022 commissioned work by choreographer Amy Hall Garner.

Presented by DANCECleveland and Tri-C Performing Arts, the iconic dance company, now led by Artistic Director Michael Novak, has appeared more times than any other in DANCECleveland’s 68-year history.

Their program began with Paul Taylor’s “Airs,” a work interestingly originally created on Cleveland’s own Tom Evert, a Taylor Dance Company member from 1977 to 1985, and was premiered by American Ballet Theatre in 1978.   

Performed by a cast of seven dancers to music by George Frideric Handel, the vibrant dance work blended ballet technique and Taylor’s signature classical modern dance movement. Swirling bodies in circling patterns opened the piece with energy and delight.

While primarily an up-tempo, joyous piece with bounding jumps and leaps, Taylor’s choreography reflected the changing moods of the music soundtrack that could be somber at times or in the case of a two later duets in the work, having the feel of a jaunty Irish jig for one and another danced by Madelyn Ho and Alex Clayton having a courtly elegance to it tinged with humor.

“Airs” concluded with the cast forming a picturesque tableau that seemed an acknowledgment of and thank to the audience.

Next, Garner’s “Somewhere in the Middle,” owing to its title, took the middle spot in the evening’s offerings. Also reflected in its title, the work fell somewhere in the middle of appearing like a classic Taylor work and that of something contemporary and new.

Like many legacy dance companies centered around the work of a single choreographer, the Taylor Company nowadays is looking to strike a balance between carrying on the legacy of works by its founder, and infusing their repertory with new choreographic voices. With “Somewhere in the Middle,” Garner gave us a Tayloresque structure, patterning, and feel but danced in a contemporary movement style. The result was a marvelous dance work that perfectly fit in with the other Taylor works on the program and also stood out for its different way the Taylor Company’s dancers moved.

Set to a big band music soundtrack including classics by Count Basie, Sarah Vaughn, and Duke Ellington, the group piece for eight dancers in color and breezy costumes was a perky, fun-loving, athletic romp.

Like “Airs,” the work alternated between exuberance and seriousness in its sections. Any early duet in the work featured dancers Devon Louis and Maria Ambrose in an adroitly danced back-and-forth of little jumps, spins, and partnered holds that spoke of relationship drama. While a quirky, freeing solo by dancer Jada Pearman reflected the work’s joy with her spritely dancing and mischievous smiles.

In the end, Garner’s “Somewhere in the Middle” proved a delightful addition to the company’s repertory and its evolving legacy.

The program closed with one of Taylor’s late-career masterpieces, 2002’s “Promethean Fire.” In a 2005 interview I had with Taylor, he said of the work: “It’s about rejuvenation, falling down and getting back up again. The music by Bach was very much on my mind when I made it. What I heard in the music I tried to visualize through the dancers.”

A work for the entire company of sixteen dancers costumed in Santo Loquasto’s black unitard bodysuits with accent stripes, Taylor pulled out all the stops in terms of imagery. A dramatic pageantry of dancer groupings and formations, the piece was a moving, morphing, series of tableaus that spoke to Greek mythology’s god of fire, Prometheus and the destruction and rejuvenation that comes from flames, falling, and rising in a breathtakingly beautiful way.

Led by Louis and veteran company dancer Eran Bugge, the company performed the work brilliantly, giving it the weight and movement precision it deserved. Louis and Bugge also shone in a tension-filled duet of colliding bodies, clenched fists, and soaring desolation.

At its conclusion, and as if pre-ordained, the stellar work, and the company’s performance of it, was given a standing ovation with two curtain calls by the Ohio Theatre’s appreciative audience.