Paul Taylor Dance Company

Paul Taylor Dance Company: Michael Novak, Artistic Director

Dancemaker Paul Taylor (1930-2018) first presented his choreography with five other dancers in Manhattan on May 30, 1954. That modest performance marked the beginning of a profound, uninterrupted creative output that shaped the future of American modern dance and continues to this day.

Since its earliest days, the Paul Taylor Dance Company has toured to venues throughout the United States and around the globe, from college campuses and rural towns to the world’s leading opera houses and performing arts centers. The Company has performed in more than 600 cities in sixty-six countries, including landmark tours and engagements in North and South America, China and the Far East, Great Britain, Eastern and Western Europe, Scandinavia, Africa, India, and the Middle East.

Paul Taylor’s 147 dances, spanning 64 years, stand as testament to his devotion to modern dance’s most beloved and prolific artists and to his genius as a dance maker. He had a special relationship with those he chose to dance for his Company and created work that, though deeply rooted in his own history and collaboration with other modern dance pioneers (Louis Horst, José Limón, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham), consistently pushed the boundaries of modern dance. His love of painting, poetry, and nature provided a rich palette for exploring the human condition, and he used each to demonstrate and depict its dark and light elements in transcendent ways. His works continue to move audiences to this day, lending them new perspective on the joy, pain, humor and tragedy that bind us together.

Critics and audiences are drawn to and astounded by his relationship to music of all genres, ranging, from classical and early jazz to original abstract scores and popular music. Yet, it was his unique mastery of classical music, particularly of baroque composers, that resonated most powerfully within his repertory. His breakthrough Aureole, which he set to Handel, established a singular voice that married the freedom and abstraction of modern movement to classical music. This marriage of modern dance and classical music by composers from Bach to Feldman continued to be amplified over decades in masterworks like Esplanade, Images and Dust, Airs, Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal), Arden Court, Mercuric Tidings, Sunset, Roses, A Musical Offering, Eventide, Promethean Fire, and Beloved Renegade.