Paul Taylor Dance Company: "Mercuric Tidings," "A Field of Grass," & "Piazzolla Caldera."

Description

A perennial PS21 favorite, Paul Taylor Dance Company captivates audiences with its athleticism, emotion, and daring. The company returns with three of the choreographer’s masterworks: Mercuric Tidings (1982), A Field of Grass (1993), and Piazzolla Caldera (1997).

 

In 2021, the company was in residency at PS21 for three weeks, recreating Kurt Jooss’ 1932 anti-war masterpiece, The Green Table, and in 2022, the company returned to PS21, performing Airs, Cloven Kingdom, and Syzygy. 

 

View the program.

 

Piazzolla Caldera

Neruda wrote of poetry that mirrors “the flawed confusion of human beings,” poetry “worn away as if by acid by the labor of hands, impregnated with sweat and smoke, smelling of lilies and of urine, splashed by the variety of what we do, legally or illegally… as impure as old clothes, as a body, with its foodstains and its shame, with wrinkles, observations, dreams, wakefulness, prophecies, declarations of love and hate, stupidities, shocks, idylls….” He might have been describing the predatory dance that originated in the brothels of Buenos Aires at the turn of the 20th Century: tango. The music of tango – with Spanish, Italian, Indian, African and Jewish influences – was taken to new heights by Astor Piazzolla. Without a single authentic tango step, Paul Taylor captures the essence of tango culture. In a dimly lit dive, working class men and women confront each other in sizzling sexual duets and trios: men with women, men with men and women with women. Two men too drunk for conquests perform a loopy dance as lamplights sway dizzily overhead. A woman who has searched desperately for a partner but failed to find one, collapses – as if mortally wounded by a night without passion.

 

“Stunning. Taylor looks at the attitudes implicit of the tango – as sexual game, as social identity – and reshapes them. Seethes and flares with sexuality and develops a huge erotic charge. One of Taylor’s most astonishing (even for him) creations.” – Clement Crisp, Financial Times of London

 

 

Mercuric Tidings

“Danced for the sheer joy of it, the controlled expenditure of animal energy, poetry expressed as a time and motion of study, young people cavorting with the kinetic propensities of young godlets.” – Clive Barnes, New York Post

 

 

A Field of Grass

“A master of mixing dark and light, Paul Taylor outdid himself in A Field of Grass, a stunningly succinct recreation of the apocalyptic 1960’s and the decade’s appetite for love, death and drugs.” – Jennifer Dunning, The New York Times

 

 

Venue Details

PS21 Open-Air Pavilion Theater

2980 New York 66
Chatham, New York 12037

PS/21 Inc