PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY
In the 1987 Syzygy (which immediately followed Roses), Taylor smashes up the movement. Every line that can be broken is: the dancers bend at the neck, the waist, the knee, the wrist, so we see tossed heads, flipped hands, jutting hips. And it’s all done so quickly the dancers are like marionettes on fast forward. Just as he breaks up the dance spatially, Taylor breaks it up temporally: a dancer in the midst of a Saint Vitus’s jig comes to a complete halt or begins to move in slow motion. Donald York’s commissioned score has the eerie, spun-glass sound we’ve come to expect in music for movies about outer space, and one dancer sometimes moves around another as if orbiting her; but the references to astronomy seem a mere footnote to the dancing itself, which takes on an avid sexuality in a series of duets near the end.
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Women come off, in the lyrics and the choreography, as foolish man chasers. In “Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh!” a gaggle of women swirl around Patrick Corbin, ogling him with glazed, coy looks. In “Joseph! Joseph!” three women pursue three men, crouching and attacking like predators, while the Andrews Sisters brightly describe women’s desperation to marry. In the more serious duet “There Will Never Be Another You” David Grenke steps out of the prostrate Francie Huber’s encircling arms as coldly as a sleepwalker. The hottest dancing comes in solos for men: “Tico-Tico” and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” And in “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” we see a woman longing for a man who apparently longs for another man. This is the vision of a gay male in a world that doesn’t acknowledge homosexuality, and certainly not in the armed forces: lone men are radiantly attractive, and women a crowd of nuisances.
