Paul Taylor Dance Company showcases works of grace and light

It’s more than 20 years since the Paul Taylor Dance Company performed in the UK, and the great storm that whited out America’s east coast did its best to prevent their arrival this time. The dancers landed in London hours before their first performance. Yet they breezed on to the tiny stage of the Royal Ballet and Opera House’s Linbury theatre with the buoyancy for which they are famous.

Taylor founded his company in 1954; his last of 147 works for them was made in 2018, the year of his death at age 88. Many are characterised by a sense of lively symmetry as Taylor forged a style of movement that was at once naturalistic yet shaped. When you think of his work, you think of grace and light. Brandenburgs, to movements from the 3rd and 6th of Bach’s concertos, which opened the first of two programmes, is a case in point.

Choreographed in 1988, it begins with its nine dancers classically posed, men on one side of the stage, women on the other, surrounding a central group. As the music begins, weaving its patterns, they respond with movement that matches the notes, flying in high jumps and open arms, responding to one another with smiling courtliness. The steps are expansive, angled, like a fabric cut on the cross, flowing through the space. The piece’s emerald velour costumes make it look slightly old-fashioned, but there’s no resisting its exuberant musicality, its sense of joy in dance itself.

Piazzolla Caldera from 1997, to music by Astor Piazzolla and Jerzy Peterburshsky exudes a smoky kind of energy. Like Brandenburgs, it is lit by Jennifer Tipton who creates the mood of a dingy bar, and it uses some of the conventions of tango to colour a sequence of smouldering dances in different configurations. The best is a cartwheeling grapple for two drunken men, collapsing across the stage; the rest are enjoyable and the dancers are outstanding, but it feels less radical now than it perhaps did when authentic Argentine tango had not been so widely exported.

Conscious of the need to stay up to date, the company also commissions new work. Robert Battle’s Under the Rhythm looks back to the jazz age but feels rigorously relevant as the choreographer, the former director of the Alvin Ailey company, underpins fast-moving vaudeville and jazz inflected steps with more pensive passages of love and longing.

Set to a jukebox that mixes Steve Reich’s Clapping Song with Mahalia Jackson spirituals and Ella Fitzgerald’s scat, the piece is like Sinners without the vampires, a tribute to the spirit and importance of Black music. The company again looks wonderful. Here’s hoping it’s not another 20 years until they return.

Photograph by Ron Thiele