Lafayette College - Paul Taylor Dance Company

 Williams Center for the Arts

Presenter: Footlights Series

Price: $25/$5 staff and faculty/FREE for Lafayette students

Paul Taylor is the last living member of the pantheon that created America’s indigenous art of modern dance. At an age when most artists’ best work is behind them, Taylor has continued to win acclaim for the vibrancy, relevance, and power of his recent creations as well as for his classics.
The Company makes its third Williams Center appearance with a program that showcases Taylor’s landmark Beloved Renegade. Inspired by Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and set to Poulenc’s Gloria, this dance was praised by The New York Times critic Alastair Macauley as “The best new choreography in 2008. Deeply moving...a work of philosophic as well as dramatic power.”
The program also features Taylor’s loving tribute to sensuous tango culture, Piazzolla Caldera, called “stunning” by Financial Times of London critic Clement Crisp, who praised it as a dance that “seethes and flares with sexuality and develops a huge erotic charge. One of Taylor’s most astonishing (even for him) creations.”
And finally there’s Mercuric Tidings (1982), described by Clive Barnes as “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,” set to the symphonic music of Franz Schubert.