Taylor Troupe Enlivens Old, New Works

Most of the seven pieces performed by the Paul Taylor Dance Company in two programs over the weekend at the Alex Theatre in Glendale had either been telecast or mounted locally by other companies--sometimes both. If they never lost their freshness or edge in their reappearance here, credit performances at once forceful and meticulous: almost contemptuously proud of prowess yet selflessly protecting and heightening niceties of style, nuance, detail. Credit, too, Taylor’s genius for creating dances that magically evolve from innovative to classic by the second time you’ve seen them.

Inevitably, the two least familiar works became the instant classics of the Alex residency, with the local premiere of “Cascade” (1999) bringing us Taylor’s newest expression of a fascination with Bach that began with “Junction” in 1961. Set to recorded excerpts from piano concertos, this plotless, six-part ensemble showpiece alternated the breezy athleticism of such previous Taylor-Bach masterworks as “Esplanade” (1975) with sections rooted in courtly or geometric formalism.

Glittering and richly ornamented, the costumes by Santo Loquasto evoked the Baroque without weighing down the dancers, while his backdrop and the lighting by Jennifer Tipton put a pearly halo around everyone.

Early on, couples danced with one arm around their partners’ waists and the other extended to form an arch above their heads. At once tender and architectural, this pose became central to the choreography, with upraised arms developing into a major motif. And if severe aristocratic reserve marked one prominent duet for Maureen Mansfield and Patrick Corbin, at many other moments throughout the piece the dancers executed turns that spiraled down to the floor--with everyone rotating on their behinds--and back up again: a gymnastic feat you won’t find in any Baroque dancing manual.

Even at its most footloose, however, “Cascade” defined a love of order, containing its most brilliant surges of group energy in corridors formed by the bodies of other dancers. In contrast, “Syzygy” (1987; music by Donald York) celebrated disorder, abstracting its floppy, flung out, incredibly intricate movement style from contemporary street dance so that the result amounted to an action painting of urban America.

Constant changes of level and direction created the sense of people going nowhere at the highest possible velocity, and only the protean Andrew Asnes looked as utterly at home here as in the civilized precincts of “Cascade.”

However, in the opening section, Michael Trusnovec lashed and twisted his body so unsparingly, before luring the whole cast into similar assaults, that he seemed to be losing and finding himself in a performance that became its own instant classic.

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But if the Alex engagement belonged to anyone it would have to be Lisa Viola and Francie Huber, not so much for “Cascade” and “Syzygy” as other distinctive Taylor challenges. Who else yearns as poignantly as Huber, for instance, whether she’s playing a town girl watching her soldier go away in the bittersweet “Sunset” (1983; music by Elgar) or someone recalling a dead soldier in the alternately nostalgic and satiric “Company B” (1991; music from Andrews Sisters records)?

Even without soldiers to yearn for, she endowed the gangster’s moll in “Le Sacre du Printemps (the Rehearsal)” with strong dramatic values: narcissism, ruthlessness and a fatal compulsion to kidnap infants wrapped in red.

Set to a two-piano arrangement of Stravinsky’s fabled score, this recently revived 1981 dance drama evolved its archaic body sculpture from the style that the original “Sacre” choreographer, Vaslav Nijinsky used in his “Afternoon of a Faun,” but jettisoned the original “Sacre” plot for a jazz-age melodrama told like a silent movie.

At the very end, however, Taylor adopted standard “Sacre” methodology with a dance of death--and here, playing the bereft mother of that doomed infant, Viola looked consumed by anger and grief, furiously matching the percussive rhythms of the music and taking the peculiar narrative from the sardonic to the tragic.

She also floated serenely in Corbin’s arms during the warm, effervescent “Aureole” (1962; music by Handel), with everyone else in the five-member cast intent on savoring each moment. Richard Chen See danced so lightly and lucidly in the opening sequence that even Corbin’s virtuosity couldn’t eclipse him.

Without Viola, Huber, Corbin, Asnes, Trusnovec or Chen See, fine performances still delivered the nasty surprises of the dance parable “Big Bertha” (1970; music from band machines). Orion Duckstein made the father’s descent into savagery especially harrowing. Annmaria Mazzini and Heather Berest strongly played his wife and daughter while Kristi Egtvedt made the title role a credible monster.