Course blog #19 [Sara] Esplanade sets the stage for modern dance

Paul Taylor claims that his inspiration for writing Esplanade came from watching a young girl run to catch a bus on a beautiful day. According to the dramaturgical notes archived by the Paul Taylor Dance Company, much like his contemporaries in the visual art world such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were using found objects to create art, Taylor was using “found movements” and quotidian gesture to re-create American dance.

An esplanade is a large outdoor place for walking and indeed Taylor’s choreography is pedestrian in the sense that it refuses the formal, prescribed gestures of classical dance while still capturing the exuberant poetry-in-motion of the everyday joys of being out and about in the air. I was particularly struck by the irreverence of the movement in contrast to the motivic structure of Johann Sebastian Bach's Concerto in D minor for Two Violins. At first, I was unable to see the expansion or repetition of a dance idea that might coalesce with the music, but in continuing to watch, I began to pick out the lovely return time and again of the solo women—I’m thinking the first, dynamic entrance by the lone female figure, and the delightful image of the small girl bouncing—leaping—bounding? over the line of prostrate dancers. 

From Research IUBloomington: "IU Dance Theatre celebrates 85th Anniversary" 22 Oct 2012.

This playful image finally forced me out of a losing game in trying to match the relationships between the dancers to the contrapuntal relationship between the two violins and instead see the choreography coalescing so beautifully with the music, rhythmically or “aesthetically” independent and yet intertwining, each made richer and more beautiful in their juxtaposition.

A little research at home turned up a lovely intertextuality between this piece and George Balanchine’s ConcertoBarocco, a ballet made on students at the School of American Ballet in 1941 that also used Bach’s Double Concerto. Here, though, Balanchine is using pairs of dancers to evoke the violins and there is much more consonance between the dance form and the music. I don’t feel as enlivened watching this piece as I did Taylor’s, but my experience of it enriched the IU Dance performance project for me—I’m struck that at an anniversary performance in which only four selections were made that Taylor’s playful exploration of the everyday perhaps finds more resonance with contemporary audiences. I do not suggest that there is a one to one comparison between the pieces nor than Balanchine’s work even entered the conversation in a showcase highlighting modern dance forms; however, in light of our recent conversations about certain universal reactions to the particular shapes of human bodies, I’m struck anew by Taylor’s intervention in the world of dance c. 1975. By eschewing narrative and formal abstraction for embodied exuberance and the aesthetic of the everyday, it was Taylor’s work that created a space for the subsequent pieces we witnessed. There is no beauty much less propriety in the tumble on the mattress without first witnessing the beauty in the walk for the bus. As a retrospective, I was happy to begin with Taylor and ponder the journey from formalism to expression, youth to age, public to private. It let in some necessary air, and the light of a beautiful day.