Paul Taylor (choreographer)

Paul Taylor
Taylor in 1960, photo by Carl Van Vechten
Born	July 29, 1930 (1930-07-29) (age 86) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Education	Juilliard School (B.S. 1953)
Occupation	choreographer
Years active	1954–present

Paul Taylor (born July 29, 1930) is an American choreographer. He is among the last living members of the third generation of America’s modern dance artists.

Taylor was born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, and he grew up in and around Washington, DC. He was a swimmer and student of painting at Syracuse University in the late 1940s. Upon discovering dance through books at the school library, he transferred to Juilliard, where he earned a B.S. degree in dance in 1953 under director Martha Hill.

In 1954 he assembled a small company of dancers and began making his own works. A commanding performer despite his late start, he joined the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1955 for the first of seven seasons as soloist while continuing to choreograph on his own small troupe. In 1959 he was invited by Balanchine to be a guest artist with New York City Ballet.

Taylor's early choreographic projects have been noted as distinctly different from the modern, physical works he would come to be known for, and have even invited comparison to the conceptual performances of the Judson Dance Theatre in the 1960s. For Duet (1957), a completely motionless work that was part of Seven New Dances, Martha Graham called him a "naughty boy". Though with his landmark work Aureole (1962), he departed from such an avant garde aesthetic, the performance was still intended to provoke dance critics, as he cheekily set his modern movements not to contemporary music but to a baroque score. A choreographer as concerned with subject matter as he is with form, many of Taylor's pieces and movements are pointedly about something. Some movements are related for his love of insects and the way they move. Other movements are influenced by his love of swimming. While he may propel his dancers through space for the sheer beauty of it, he more frequently uses them to illuminate such profound issues as war, piety, spirituality, sexuality, morality and mortality. He is perhaps best known for his 1975 dance, Esplanade, but other well-known and highly regarded or controversial Taylor works include Big Bertha (1970), Cloven Kingdom (1976), Airs (1978), Arden Court (1981), Sunset (1983), Last Look (1985), Speaking in Tongues (1988), Brandenburgs (1988), Company B (1991), Piazzolla Caldera (1996), Black Tuesday (2001), Promethean Fire (2002), and Beloved Renegade (2008). Some of these dances, performed by the Paul Taylor Dance Company, are also licensed by such companies as the Royal Danish Ballet, Miami City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.