Paul Taylor Gala to Honor Alex Katz Painter Who Made Movement Appear Still
By Daniel Cassady
On November 11 at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater, the Paul Taylor Dance Foundation will honor painter Alex Katz, marking yet another chapter in one of the most enduring art-and-dance partnerships.
Katz’s collaboration with choreographer Paul Taylor began in 1960, when the poet and critic Edwin Denby introduced the two for a commission at the Spoleto Festival in Italy. Taylor was redefining the language of movement; Katz, then in his 30s, was already rebelling against what he called the “dark and arty” conventions of modern dance lighting, favoring flat white light and pastel color.
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Their first piece together, Meridian, was a departure from the moody, spotlighted aesthetic of postwar modern dance. It was, as Katz recalled, “a very radical way of doing it. Paul would go with anything.”
Over the next 25 years, the two would create 16 more works together. Their collaborations included Scudorama (1963), Private Domain (1969), Diggity (1978), and Sunset (1983), pieces that dance critic Arlene Croce described as embodying a form of “shimmering ambiguity.” “There were lots of clashes, violent clashes,” Katz later said, “but it was a match made in artistic heaven.”
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At the November gala, the Taylor company will perform Sunset, perhaps the most emotionally charged of their collaborations. Katz conceived it after seeing soldiers flirting with young women in Madrid’s Retiro Park—a scene that struck him as both tender and doomed. Taylor transformed the image into a meditation on war and memory, set to Edward Elgar’s strings and the eerie cries of loons (Katz’s idea). The result, according to the New York Times, is “a dance that reliably makes viewers cry.”
Katz himself has always seen the collaboration as a source of discipline and freedom. “I learned a lot from Paul in terms of gestures and relationships between people,” he once wrote. “I learned from Paul that all your pieces don’t have to be the same. And I learned from Paul never to be complacent toward the public. The one person you don’t want to bore is yourself.”
