Dance Reviews

Jul 2, 2000 - Paul Taylor 2 Dancers Enthrall as Reno's Artown Festival Opens

By Jack Neal

The fresh, zestful and exceptionally disciplined Paul Taylor 2 Dancers opened Reno's ARTown festival Saturday night (7/1/2000) before nearly 2000 people at the Wingfield Park amphitheater on tiny Belle Isle nestled in a small fork of the Truckee River. What a joyous evening of dance it was.

The six young dancers (three male, three female) are terrific. But what else could one expect from any company embracing the name of the legendary American choreographer Paul Taylor? Taylor has been an icon for American and international dance for over a half century.

What is always most impressive about the Taylor experience is the choreographer's rapturous mating of music and movement. Seldom is the collaborative world of dance and music so eloquently blended as it is with Taylor's work. And so it was once again last evening under the stars on the banks of Reno's Truckee River.

The dancers, Annmaria Mazzini, Michelle Fleet, Susan Dodge, Patrick Corbin, Jared Wootan and Joseph Gallerizzo, are that happy combination of individualism, each does extraordinary solo turns, and ensemble, never a movement out of place, that brings the art of dance into focus as expression beyond words that touches the intellect as well as the heart.

In a nicely balanced program of three works, "Airs," a classical piece inspired by excerpts from Handel's Concerti Grossi, Op. 3, "Runes," a hypnotic avant-garde rendering of the mystically occult based on original piano music of Gerald Busby, and "Company B," a walk down memory lane featuring songs sung by the Andrews Sisters, the Taylor 2 Dancers weave an exotic and lyric tapestry of movement that is never anything less than joyous.

Clad in a pale French blue costumes (by Gene Moore) "Airs" plays itself out in eight sections and is a model for classic, barefooted dance a la the modern-dance idiom. With plaintive, demure looks off to one side or another, the ensemble is used as a living backdrop as one of its soulmates in dance dazzles with pyrotechnics perfectly in sync with Handel's glittering Baroque utterings. The look is equally radiant, enhanced as all the Taylor 2's presentations are by Jennifer Tipton's lighting, which gives all of the company's offerings a warm wash of soft coloration.

"Runes" is somewhat reminiscent of Balanchine's "The Cage" except that "Runes" is much subtler in its use of the body as a sexual entity. Set to the seemingly at once percussive and dissonant and lyric and harmonic sounds of Busby's music, there is a hazy quality to "Runes" that plays with impressive clarity to what the program eludes to as "secret writings for casting a spell." The cast, dressed in pale brown costumes (by George Tacet), parlay the story of death and rebirth through intriguing posturing and movement, some of it magnetic bursts of bonding, that is itself spellbinding.

All well and quite terrific, but who on an American weekend embracing the Fourth of July could possibly resist Paul Taylor's glorious and nostalgic "Company B"? The piece, actually a suite of Andrews Sisters hits, touches so many bases of dance as well as the heart it's irresistible.

With the teenage attractiveness of Jared Wootan and the bobby-soxer cutes of the girls in the cast "Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh!" was simply a delight. Michelle Fleet turns the sexual tables with the men of Taylor 2 for a fun-time fantasy romp through "Rum and Coca Cola" that's sensational. Susan Dodge (also sensational in "I Can Dream, Can't I?") and Joseph Gallerizzo are the most rhapsodic of young couples in "There Will Never Be Another You," Patrick Corbin cuts entirely loose for an astonishingly animated "Tico-Tico," and last but clearly not least the "Pennsylvannia Polka" is given the old razzle-dazzle by Annmaria Mazzini ands Jared Wooten.

Razzle-dazzle, sensational, fresh and simply terrific the Taylor 2 Dancers are as captivating a dance troupe as any I've seen. Bravo to Nevada Festival Ballet for presenting this superb troupe of dancers as the opening act of Reno's ARTown festival.

Reno's ARTown festival continues tonight (7/2/2000) with the cult antics of filmdom's "Rocky Horror Picture Show" and its accompanying costumes and histrionics. The fun begins at 5 p.m., the movie at dark. The location is Reno's Wingfield Park and environs. It's free.