Q & A with choreographer and dancer Paul Taylor
World-renowned dancer, choreographer and former Syracuse University student Paul Taylor returned to Syracuse on Tuesday for a question-and-answer session with the student body about his dance company and his legacy in the modern dance world. The Paul Taylor Dance Company will be performing at the Landmark Theatre at 8 p.m. today. The Daily Orange had a chance to sit down with Taylor and ask him a few questions about his time at SU and the changes he’s seen in the dance world:
I went here for three years, and I never graduated because I decided to be a dancer and I went to New York to study dancing. But in my years here I learned a lot about where I wanted to go. I was a swimmer here so my body was in shape, but little did I know that dance training was harder than athletic training. I came here to learn how to paint, but somewhere along the line I found out what I really wanted to do was to be a dancer and later I found out I wanted to make dancers. Here, there was no one to make dancers for me, but friends here in Syracuse, we made and performed them.
Unfortunately for young people who want to be dancers, there are not a lot of jobs to keep up with the numbers of very good dancers. And the dancers’ techniques have developed tremendously since I started. Unfortunately the power to communicate, the passion hasn’t quite kept up with the technical abilities, but you know, it’s there. But my dancers are very developed both expressively and technically.
Technically, they’re better. They can spin more times, and faster. In fact, some of them look like a blur. You know ice skaters who can do the blur spin? They just turn into a blur, you can’t see them. Well, some of my dancers can do that, without skates on a sticky stage. I can ask my dancers to do trickier steps and combinations now. They have more energy and endurance. The life on the road is better, and so is transportation. They get a day off and get paid – that was unheard of when I started dancing. No one expected to get paid, that wasn’t why we did it at all. It was belief in the art form, belief in communication through dance.
I look at them and think ‘do I want to work with this person?’ First I ask them to walk. Just walk across the stage, and then I know if I like them, I can tell. You can tell a lot from a walk – a lot of information. And then I have them do stretches and combinations and things. But there’s so many, I hate to give auditions because there are so many hopefuls, and usually I only need one out of 300 or more. It’s not fun for me. But some of them are just taking the audition for the experience, I know that. But the ones have really high hopes for this particular company, it’s hard to see them go. They don’t cry in front of me, but I’m sure they do in their dressing room, they’re disappointed, and that’s not fun. But it’s part of life, and we might as well get used to it.
Published on March 25, 2008 at 12:00 pm
