Saturday night I saw Paul Taylor’s 2008 dance, Beloved Renegade, which is having its New York premiere this season, receiving rave reviews from the critics and bloggers (some of which I linked to here).
I liked but didn’t love it and it could have been because my expectations were high, or because part of it reminded me of his earlier Company B, which I loved (and which I believe is his masterpiece). It’s set to Gloria (choral music) by Francis Poulenc and I found it to be an expressionistic piece based on poet Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. At the top of the program notes on the dance, are Whitman’s words from Leaves: “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” And each section is titled after a section of that long poem: “I am the poet of the body and I am the poet of the soul,” “I sing the body electric,” “I bend to the dying lad, his eyes open, a half-smile gives he me,” etc.
There’s kind of a poetic figure, dressed in all white and danced by the very compelling Michael Trusnovec, who mainly, for the first part, watches others dance — a young, playful couple, an older couple, — and it’s like he’s reflecting on his own life, or keenly observing the lives of others to record, reflect on, analyze (which is what writers do, after all). It doesn’t seem as if he knows what will happen beforehand, and he seems devastated when the boy of the young couple dies — perhaps in the war. There’s a sad scene where several soldier-types crawl on the ground toward Trusnovec’s poet. He helps one halfway up, cradles him in his arms, before he dies. Whitman was a medic in the Civil War so this section is likely an expression of that.
And that’s where I couldn’t get Company B out of my mind.