Louis Horst, “Paul Taylor and Dance Company Review,” Dance Observer 24.9 (November 1957), 139.
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
—SCOTT ADAMS
As the lights dimmed in Lincoln Center at the start of the evening program, I curled my Playbill and wondered irreverently: Did the woman seated to my left and the young girl to my right have any idea about what happened one of the first times that choreographer Paul Taylor’s company danced, long before they arrived at this famed performance hall, and before the hall was even built? It must have been Taylor’s good nature that saved him from calling that 1957 performance an out-and-out disaster, or the wisdom to know that it would one day become an unheralded advantage. He had debuted his program, 7 New Dances, at the 92nd Street Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall. One of the few people I talked to who did know about it was choreographer Bill T. Jones. The response to it was a scandal, he told me. Few others outside of the field of dance remembered it. But, then again, why would they? The eighty-three-year-old Taylor has held the rotating position of head of the vast dance-making knighthood as “the world’s greatest living choreographer.” With a repertory of over 135 pieces, he is central to American modern dance. His influence is vast. Pina Bausch, Twyla Tharp, and David Parsons, among other giants, all first earned spots in the Paul Taylor Dance Company and then went on to establish dance companies in their own right. Robert Battle, the artistic director of Alvin Ailey Dance Company, was admitted, but he didn’t drop out of his junior year at Juilliard to take his spot. Ailey himself admired Taylor, paying homage to him in a section of Streams.1 Taylor once earned the moniker Martha Graham gave him: the “naughty boy” of dance, but as Taylor recounts in his autobiography, Private Domain, his nicknames became “Sir Paul” after being knighted by the French government, “Master Taylor” after countless honorary degrees, and “Mr. Smarts” after a MacArthur “Genius Grant.”2
“All hot water is is cold water heated,” Taylor once said in an award speech—a comment that his friend painter Robert Rauschenberg told him as they came to understand how close together the extremes of life could be.3 The two men, flat broke and living on optimism before they would go on to be legends, had met by chance in the basement of the Stable Gallery near Columbus Circle. They struck up a conversation right after one of Rauschenberg’s “dirt paintings,” homages to the everyday, fell right off the wall. It could have been a sign about what would happen that night in October 1957. Taylor had saved enough money over the course of years for the chance. He scrapped what he called “dancy dancing” for his own homage to daily life. It was by no means perfect, but he felt sure it would at least be a first.4
Taylor wanted to make gestural dances out of everyday movements and ordinary posture—what most then felt dance certainly was not. He beaverishly catalogued people on the street “doing what they usually did”: waiting, running after a bus then slowing to a walking gait, sitting in a car, or just milling around.5 The “moves” and “stillnesses” of ordinary folks were his “found objects.”6 He broke down these movements into five categories, divided them by their dominant working body part, then began choreographing a new piece.7
A few days before the debut of 7 New Dances, he started to question whether the program’s austere minimalism would sustain the crowd’s interest. The movements for 7 New Dances required such little exertion that muscle memory had barely taken over after eight months of rehearsals. The counts of the accompaniment were also so arrhythmic that learning it was “like memorizing a page of numbers in a phone book.”8 It might have bothered others more fixated on how people would respond, but he was just performing dances he knew he would enjoy (“otherwise, what’s the point?”).9
There were some clues about what might happen that night back in 1957. Questions kept running through Taylor’s mind as he reflected on the dances he created prior to 7 New Dances such as: “There must have been some kind of structure somewhere, but where? What was the point of view, if any? And what was dance in the first place?”10 With this new work, he would posit an answer.
The first piece, “Epic,” was just twenty minutes of Taylor dressed in an everyday business suit (Rauschenberg’s costume direction) standing still then assuming a new posture every ten seconds. At that point, a recording of a woman’s nasal voice would say “at the tone the time will be,” then stated the correct time.
Taylor remembered seeing people in the audience walk out “at a polite but firm pace,” as he was on the stage after just five minutes. At first, he thought that the timestamp repetition just reminded them about some forgotten obligations. That was until he saw the majority of the audience bolt, “accumulate into a solid mass and practically canter up the aisles.” It was a flood. Over half the audience was gone. Inside, he felt like he was sinking. His neck was ticking out of “nervousness.”11
The second piece, curiously titled “Events I,” went off with no more incidents in the front of the house. In the third work, “Resemblance”—the act that Taylor performed with Duchess, a rented dog from Animal Talent Scouts, still foggy from the tranquilizer she got at the dress rehearsal—she was scared by pianist David Tudor performing part of John Cage’s composition, banging down the piano lid and striking it occasionally. During practice, Duchess (“the only one of us who is being paid”) had darted to the theater’s basement as fast as the audience cantered up the aisles. Now, at the live performance, she sat sedated, half-risen on her mat, spying the piano warily. Midway through, her eyes started to glaze over, her ears laid back, and she began creeping off stage. The animal trainer, standing behind a curtain drape, pointed menacingly to force her back onto the mat. Duchess returned at first, then backpedaled, tail between her legs, and tried to sneak off again. Rauschenberg had suggested the animals. A llama would have been his preference, but it was too expensive. What remained of the audience now seemed to stare at the dog. Taylor swore off any more of Rauschenberg’s suggestions for “anything live, even his stuffed angora goat with a tire around it.”12
“Panorama” was next. Its audience-facing mirror-filled set optically doubled the number of empty seats. Taylor had envisioned that the reflection would act as a reminder that the dancer’s pedestrian movements were mimicking the audience’s own. Yet with so few people left, the mirrors doubled an image of the mainly vacant house.
“Duet” followed. The curtain rose. One dancer sat in an evening dress, propped up on one hand. Taylor, dressed in a suit, stood next to her feet. Stage directions called for looking “calm in an exciting way,” then staying motionless for four minutes. They did. The pianist played a counterpart to Cage’s now famous 4’33” composition of silence; he just sat at the piano. The curtain fell. “This time everything has come off perfectly,” Taylor said, relieved.13
By the finale, “Opportunity,” the stalwarts in the house were mainly a few of the dancer’s friends. The manager of the concert hall had also stayed. He waited backstage to tell Taylor never to rent out the theater again.14
Dance critic Louis Horst never did find the words to describe 7 New Dances. He just listed its title and the performance location. Then he signed it at the bottom with his initials—L. H. There was no type whatsoever. Horst, the founder, editor, and chief critic of Dance Observer, printed four nearly square inches of blank newsprint. If Taylor would not “dance,” Horst would not write:
Louis Horst, “Paul Taylor and Dance Company Review,” Dance Observer 24.9 (November 1957), 139.
This rebuke was as creative and singular as the minimalist performance itself. His indifference and dismissal was prominent all the more because of how scant dance coverage was in print. Horst was one of the field’s elders. His magazine was “a voice through which modern dance spoke.”15 He had composed for Martha Graham in the 1930s and established the Dance Observer in 1934 as a forum dedicated to the field’s emerging aesthetics. The prominent magazine was one of a tiny handful dedicated entirely to dance at that time.
Horst was not alone. New York Herald Tribune dance critic Walter Terry, whom Taylor characterized as “a nice guy who can be counted on to like almost everything,” only managed to stay for five of the seven pieces of flamboyant minimalism.16 For his efforts, Terry’s review stated: Taylor was “determined to drive his viewers right out of their minds.”17
Terry expected more of this new sprout on the landscape with talent for miles. Taylor had danced with Merce Cunningham’s company, but got fed up with the arbitrary, everyone-gets-an-object-that-someone-pulls-out-of-a-basket routine that happened onstage. It was an influence from Cage’s philosophy on chance that determined who would dance on any given night for the piece Dime a Dance.18 It offered Cunningham a relief from bouts of creativity-stifling indecision.19 It meant that Taylor rarely got a chance to dance. Taylor had also danced with Graham. He later formed his own company, founded in 1954. It has evolved into the company that still exists in his name today.
He had been performing to gain experience in quarterly events through Dance Associates at Henry Street Settlement House. This was back when modern dance performance production costs were often managed through what could be found in dime stores and with donations, rehearsal space was whatever they could sneak into, and the concerts that came with no notice in any newspaper were “performed practically in secret.”20 The Kaufmann Concert Hall production was a major outing.
When Taylor saw Horst’s review, he confessed, “My first reaction is outrage.”21 “Louis’s review wasn’t even a very big blank,” he said.22 “Folks have indeed misinterpreted my beautiful ABCs of posture as being a nightmare alphabet.”23 What he considered a near win looked to others like failure.
He wasn’t the only one with that frustration. “I loved it of course. I wasn’t bored,” dancer Aileen Passloff told me about watching 7 New Dances. “I didn’t get restless. It was alive. Oh, it was beautiful. He changed how we thought about time, about stillness. It imprinted on me.” She clutched her heart with her left hand, leaning forward with her right on her leg, and nearly fell out of her chair with enthusiasm. “You know,” she said, pausing to reflect on it more, “people just got uptight back then if it wasn’t wanton frolicking.”24
Word of Taylor’s blank review traveled. A year later, he was in the landlocked Umbrian town of Spoleto for his engagement at its month-long dance festival. Everyone was running late on the night of the dress rehearsal in the small theater of Caio Melisso. Pina Bausch couldn’t fit into the mysteriously stitched-up armholes of her costume. The musicians had left for a favorite café. Taylor was adding new dances at the eleventh hour. The festival’s founder, Gian Carlo Menotti, warned that the critics were getting impatient. What critics? Taylor didn’t know the custom in Italy of reviewing rehearsals. He tried to accommodate them on the fly, located the musicians, and prepared the company to start. When the curtain rose, Taylor stepped out onto the stage, was confused that no sounds were coming from the pit, spied that the musicians still weren’t there, and signaled for the curtain to come down. The critics broke for the exits. They thought they had seen another of Taylor’s minimalist pieces. To ensure that the critics didn’t miss Taylor’s actual dance, the ushers had to secure the doors until the company regrouped.25
Like flypaper, the blank review stuck. Nearly fifty years later, the octogenarian dancer said, “I’ve never lived it down.”26
There are reviews and there are reviews. All artists are bound to feel the sting of a blistering critical attack from some quarter. In 1966, the London-based Evening Standard review of a work read: “Three girls, one named Twyla Tharp, appeared at the Albert Hall last evening and threatened to do the same tonight.”27 Some of the best performers have started off with audiences as small as the one that Taylor was left with after they flooded out.
If all art is an exchange, an inner idea made manifest and delivered to the outside world, the blank review says that the offer wasn’t just condemned. It was refused. Yet the blank review also offers a gift along with its barb.
The problem couldn’t have been Taylor’s dedication. To rent the Kaufmann Concert Hall, he had saved money while living on a meager budget, camping out illegally in an apartment with no bathroom, no water, no heat, and large holes in the roof from a fire. He covered them in plastic, trying to imagine that he had skylights. He didn’t use the fridge in winter—the whole place gave off the same icy chill.28 He also wrote in pencil—ink would only freeze and crack the bottles—and he rarely used the cast-iron gas stove; he feared that the fumes from the neighbor’s piles of garbage and cat urine would set off an explosion.29 His furniture? Things he picked up off the street—“objects trouvés,” as he liked to kid.30 Money ran low and he took to pilfering what he thought would go unmissed from supermarkets: cans of dog food—immoral, but a necessity, he said—and caviar “for dignity.”31 At least he could laugh at himself looking at a mouse on his table one night, stingily refusing to give it a crumb, as he had in earlier days—he had nothing to give.32
In that icy studio, he and his three dancers, Donya Feuer, Toby Armour, and Cynthia Stone, had rehearsed for eight months through the winter in hats and coats.33 They found time late in the day, after he worked at odd jobs that paid little and for too short a time to collect unemployment when each stopped.34 Taylor worked so many jobs that he considered it a feat to just remember his schedule and make it to rehearsals on time after school—Juilliard, after first studying at Syracuse on a swimming scholarship—before he dropped out to dance with Cunningham and Graham. Still, he was content. He had enough room to rehearse his own routines.
The issue couldn’t have been Taylor’s talent as a dancer. Back at Graham’s dance company the year following 7 New Dances, Taylor was singled out for acclaim despite his small role in Graham’s masterpiece Clytemnestra. He triumphed in the premiere. Lincoln Kirstein, the cofounder and director of the New York City Ballet, asked Taylor to dance with George Balanchine’s company in Spoleto in a new ballet, despite being a staunch opponent of modern dance, especially what Kirstein described as Taylor’s “maverick talent for oddball dancing.” Kirstein didn’t extend the offer that way. “Geek, you big piece of irrational pulp, you’re getting another chance” is how he invited Taylor.35
If there was an issue back in 1957, it was a common artistic state that can look like failure to others. Taylor was dealing with the stretch to clear the gap that Leonardo da Vinci described, and many other artists know: the crevasse “when your views are in advance of your work.”36
Coming to the edge of this gap between work and intentions can be an engine-house of all kinds of artistic practice. It’s the edge that made artist Mel Chin confess to me that, years ago, he stole away into his tony Midtown gallery just off Fifth Avenue during the night of his opening, while his guests were at his celebratory dinner, just to take back a painting to keep working on it. It is the place where August Wilson found himself when his poems didn’t have the form he needed to express his ideas and turned to plays instead.37 It’s the period where Ezra Pound tossed failed novels into the fire as he realized that he was trying “to get the novel cut down to the size of verse” and turned to poetry.38
It is the state of development that Pound described unmercifully to poet Hart Crane after his submission to The Little Review. Pound served as the foreign editor. This is “all very egg,” Pound said, “there is perhaps better egg. But you haven’t the ghost of a setting hen or an incubator about you.” Crane, just around eighteen years old, was in the middle of a gap. All that he had was still raw; it hadn’t yet congealed. The first book of Crane’s poetry contains a picture of Pound, an advertisement for Personae, and the coincidence revealed what Crane’s letters showed. Crane had kept Pound’s rejection letter throughout his short life, “like a kind of diploma that in some way he was a member of modern poetry” as Crane scholar Langdon Hammer put it, since Pound had taken the time to write while Crane was in the crevasse.39
Trying to bridge the gap between work and vision can be like hearing the notes to a song without being able to finish hearing the complete tune. As with earworms, snippets of songs that we hear and then repeat in our minds, the unfinished scenario often crops up in our thoughts over and over again until we discern how to complete it. It is a bit like unconsciously living out the Zeigarnik Effect, the experience of replaying notes in an attempt to try to piece together an entire melody. This phenomenon, researched by Bluma Zeigarnik and Kurt Lewin, isn’t the result of the mind “nagging” us to follow through on things until we complete them, as people once thought.40 Ruminating on the incomplete snatch of a song or an overdue task is the unconscious posing a repeated question to the conscious mind: Can you please “make a plan” to resolve this incomplete endeavor? “The unconscious mind apparently can’t do this on its own, so it nags the conscious mind to make a plan with specifics like time, place, and opportunity. Once the plan is formed, the unconscious can stop nagging the conscious mind with reminders.”41
We can sense the Zeigarnik Effect, though we would rarely refer to it that way. Expanding, stretching to cross the chasm between ambition and proficiency, is an internal, invisible process. It is like the Catalan saying that Joan Miró once mentioned about artistic endeavors—it’s a parade, but it marches inside you.
At the gap, artists are in competition with themselves, like brilliant painter Jennifer Packer. Once in the MFA program at Yale University, Packer, who used to compete against Goya, now tries to best her own works with each successive painting, hanging the current victor up on her studio wall.
Closing the gap means coping with the blank review. It diagrams the riddle that can come after an artist takes a risk. Artists have to learn to shield themselves from criticism. They also have to know when to engage with criticism to see their work anew.
Taylor knew how and when to ignore critique. Up until this point, as he tells it, his attitude after rejection had been that obstacles could be solved by disregarding them. If he didn’t push through obstacles, he had let them drift off into the air. He did this through a ritual with Rauschenberg after their first collaboration, Taylor’s premiere public performance—Jack and the Beanstalk in 1954. The audience “just sat there. No boos, no clapping, nothing,” Taylor said.42 The two men went to the alley behind the theater. As they let loose the balloons tethered on a string—Rauschenberg’s beanstalk stage set—the two talked about how wonderful it was that dances were so fleeting. Rauschenberg agreed. The painter had, after all, embraced impermanence in his own way, famously erasing a celebrated Willem de Kooning drawing that he had received the year before. Taylor thought that “the main idea was to flush a painting or a dance out of your system and then go on to the next one.”43
An artist’s act of refusal, deciding to ignore criticism, isn’t always the same as obstinacy. Often, it is an act of integrity. To some, insisting on an inner vision amidst a chorus of complaint can seem like madness, especially when declining opportunities that might lead to greater popularity. Despite the criticism of 7 New Dances, Taylor was offered countless chances to engage full time with other dance forms such as ballet, after an invitation from Balanchine to join his company. The “flabbergasting” honor would have meant broader popularity, he said, but “I have to keep heading in my own direction.”44 “Modern dance is what I set out to do . . . come whatever.”45
Like leading an orchestra, you have to know how to turn your back to the crowd, as the saying goes.46
Taylor’s dances still have those pedestrian movements at their core, no matter how kinetic the piece. They occur in his best works. “There’s no question these dancers are virtuosos,” New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay said, but “it’s remarkable how frequently basic features recur in many of his finest works: walking, running, falling, tilting, kneeling . . .”47 In the 1982 piece Lost, Found and Lost, Taylor returned to the terrain he laid for himself in “Epic” and “Events I” from 7 New Dances: Dancers lined up single file, popping their hips, slouching and shifting their weight before stepping offstage, nailing the feeling of fidgeting and frustration on an interminable queue all set to Mantovani Muzak. It mimed everyday movements in just the way that Taylor hoped to show back in 1957.
Ignoring criticism as Taylor often did requires keeping others out. Part of the creative process requires “undisturbed development” in what poet Rainer Maria Rilke described as some “dark” and “unsayable” place. While speaking to young poet Franz Kappus about the importance of learning how to immunize creative work from criticism, he emphasized that “each embryo of a feeling” should have the benefit of this cocooned space.48
I saw it as a new Critic on the faculty at Yale School of Art in the artists’ studios I would visit. Completed paintings, or at least ones in a confident state of incompletion, were out for discussion. Others would be back-turned, hidden in plain sight. As I would restrain myself from asking to see tucked away works in studios, I often imagined the story about an event that occurred in Rodin’s studio in 1904. Rodin gave Virginia Woolf and her friends permission to look at any work, but not what was under the sheets. Woolf cheekily tried to lift the linen on a sculpture. Rodin slapped her hand.49
Back-turned paintings and sheeted sculptures are often how artists give their process amnesty from premature critique. They create safe havens for good reason, sometimes to preserve innovation. Innovative ideas, after all, are often so counterintuitive that they can, at first, look like failure.
We make discoveries, breakthroughs, and inventions in part because we are free enough to take risks, and fail if necessary. Private spaces are often where we extract the gains from attempts and misses.
Private domains—created by time away or time within—can last years. Celebrated soprano Renée Fleming recalls that it took a decade before she could sing anything in front of anyone, then another five years before she could sing consistently. “It wasn’t until my late thirties that I could get on stage and reproduce what I was doing in the practice room,” she said.50
Philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco creates havens anywhere by learning to inhabit the “empty spaces in our lives.” He can detach from his surroundings at will and focus, even if just for a few minutes, on a problem he’s working through, even while standing on line at the grocery store. Here is Eco: “Say you are coming over to my place. You are in an elevator and while you are coming up, I am waiting for you. This is an interstice, an empty space. I work in empty spaces. While waiting for your elevator to come up from the first to the third floor, I have already written an article!” These empty spaces in life are massive, just as they are in the universe. “What will happen if you eliminate the empty spaces from the universe, eliminate the empty spaces in all the atoms? The universe will become as big as my fist.”51
No haven, room, or back-turned painting is required to shield work from premature critique in the improv of jazz. There, it happens naturally. In this state of play, the brain generates a barricade from self-judgment. This is what Allen Braun and Charles Limb, a neck surgeon who is also a saxophonist with a recording booth in his office at Johns Hopkins Medical Center, have found in studying jazz musicians’ minds as they improvise. Together they devised a study to replicate it as closely as possible. They invited musicians to the National Institutes of Health, asked them to memorize a piece of music, and then to improvise to the same exact chord changes while hooked up to an fMRI imaging scanner. During improvisation, areas of the musician’s brain involved in self-expression lit up and parts that control self-judgment were suppressed, freeing up all generative impulses. Neuroscientists describe this permissive state where the mind allows for failure without self-condemnation as disassociation in the frontal lobe.52 The rest of us call it a basic tenet of improvisation in jazz—not to negate, but to accept all that comes and add to it, the foibles, the mistakes, the exquisite beauty and joy. Playing jazz is “like a conversation,” Wynton Marsalis said. “You can’t evaluate yourself while you’re having it. You’re playing in time.”53
The closest the mind comes to this state is during reverie-filled REM sleep; to ignore judgment amounts to living in “a waking dream.”54 Suppressing judgment of yourself and others has translated into the legend of the jazz musician’s self-assurance. We’ve seen it so often that it has resulted in the age-old saying that jazz musicians are cool. I remember seeing it in my grandfather, painter and jazz and blues bass player Shadrach Emmanuel Lee. Little could ruffle him, down to his last days in his eighties. Ill and in a place of pain, he never let on. There are echoes of what I saw in my grandfather in the testimony of sons and daughters of bluesmen around the world. “The scuffling jazzmen around my father were so self-assured,” Marsalis remarked, “they didn’t mind you knowing who they were.”55 Quelling self-judgment, “jazz leads you to the core of yourself and says ‘Express that,’ ” Marsalis continued. This means that every player has the ability to convey their own unique sound, to use that personal language to communicate how the world feels to them. They learn to accept all that comes, keep their equilibrium in the midst of it all, and do it in the time signature of swing.
Safe havens sometimes mean shielding the work even from our own overgrown self-censors. In a Paris Review interview, August Wilson recalled the moment when a waitress at a restaurant noticed he often came in and wrote on a paper napkin. She asked, “Do you write on napkins because it doesn’t count?” “It had never occurred to me that writing on a napkin frees me up,” the playwright said. “If I pull out a tablet, I’m saying, ‘Now I’m writing,’ and I become more conscious of being a writer. The waitress saw it; I didn’t recognize it, she did. That’s why I like to write on napkins. Then I go home to another kind of work—taking what I’ve written on napkins in bars and restaurants and typing it up, rewriting.”56 His napkin became an incubator, a safe haven, a way of silencing the brash inner critic before it was time for it to have its say.
Some force themselves into a physical isolation of extreme kinds to silence unwanted commentary. Other artists incorporate mistakes to silence their own inner critics. Brooklyn-based artist Shane Aslan Selzer makes what she calls “single-session sculptures” where she doesn’t go back and let herself edit, persevering with the same commitment to continual process as Ellsworth Kelly’s single-line drawings, where we see no unbroken mark, no inner critic that forced the hand to a halt.57
Knowing when to ignore criticism is a riddle.
In a world where we are increasingly blasted by the stories of others, retreating to recover our own is more vital than ever before. The critic, whether internal or external, who speaks up when the work isn’t coming together is a healthy part of the psyche and our environment. The inner critic, Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés says, has a role to play when it is not overgrown, and “can be useful when it poses such questions as: How will this work best? Or how does this fit with that? Or I think you made a false start here, begin over again.”58 It is perhaps what a lab study cannot fully account for, but our life stories can—how the act of playing in time allows for jazz musicians to be permissive enough not to condemn themselves for a mistake, but reflective enough to know when they’ve made one.
Art has long been created in private domains, but creation requires feedback of some kind. Seclude yourself away from most criticism for too long, and you can distort your perceptions entirely. One artist serves, for me, as a cautionary tale—Jacopo da Pontormo, whom Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici secured to paint the frescoes in the chapels and choir of Florence’s Basilica of San Lorenzo in 1545. Pontormo labored over his commission, a biblical postdiluvian flood scene, and forbade anyone to view it. Like Balzac’s protagonist Frenhofer in “The Unknown Masterpiece,” who painted a portrait for a decade in isolation to deleterious effect, Pontormo worked on his piece for eleven years behind various enclosures and coverings. When Pontormo died, he had not completed the commission. None of it survives today. The Italian painter, writer, and Renaissance-artist biographer Giorgio Vasari described Pontormo’s painting as a distortion of forms, positioned in ways that were so entangled, so jumbled, that if he had to live with the work for eleven years, Vasari said, “I believe that I would drive myself mad with it . . .”59 Pontormo had imprisoned himself with his work through extended isolation and, like a bird caged too long, plucked his feathers out.
A few days before I went to see Taylor’s company at Lincoln Center, all of the tickets were priced at $3.50 for one day only. In 1962, this was the top price of admission to see Aureole. Forty years later, that won’t even buy a round-trip subway ride to Lincoln Center to see the ever-present pieces that took Taylor’s company around the world. Aureole made dance history, signaled Taylor’s seminal place in the field, and was the final piece that he performed before retiring from dancing altogether in 1974. In Aureole, he learned what to listen to and what to ignore. It was a conduit he used to express his artistic vision that remained after 7 New Dances. “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote.60 Many audiences have seen Taylor’s thoughts, rejected by others (but always accepted by him), take their place in his work.
This dance had none of the sharp breaks and stillness for which he was skewered in 1957. Yet the pedestrian vocabulary he put out on the Kaufmann stage—the kneeling, walking, running, the extended hold on a position, the exaggerated swinging of arms and rushing forward—was intact. He found a more fluid approach. He set it to selected movements from Handel’s Concerti Grossi, as much of a contrarian compliment to modern dance as were his selections for the 1957 piece, the sounds of everyday life: heartbeats, wind, rain, and often silence. Aureole is the essence of Taylor’s basic lyric vocabulary.
With the exception of compliments from Merce Cunningham and José Limón, who came to the Aureole premiere, the roar from the crowds that came after its debut was lost on him. “I wasn’t doing it for them.”61 When people were applauding the celebrated 1962 piece, Taylor felt that they were also, without knowing it, acknowledging the painstaking work to create the less-acclaimed, even panned dances that had come before. “I couldn’t forget how relatively easy the dance had been to make and how previous dances, both larger and smaller scaled, had stretched my goals much further. Aureole had been child’s play compared with others that I had to dig for, grapple with, and slave over, ones that had a more developed craft to them but weren’t as popular.”62
What Taylor needed were “seed steps,” as Horst called them—signature moves repeated with variation in sequence, speed, and direction. Horst had taught Taylor composition at the summer American Dance Festival at Connecticut College just before Taylor went to Juilliard. Taylor appreciated how open-minded Horst had been about his work despite their stylistic differences—he had reviewed Taylor’s earlier pieces in Dance Observer before 7 New Dances—no mean compliment given the draconian style of Horst’s exceptional drills.63 (At the American Dance Festival, Horst’s students dubbed him “the resident ogre.”64 He was known for pushing his students just enough. Dance critic John Martin argues that through Horst’s rigor, Martha Graham clarified her technique: “Without Louis standing there beside [Graham], day in, day out, adamantly refusing to let her improvise . . . she would have changed the choreography . . . until it finally became diluted.”65) Taylor saw that the seed steps would give him a more “kinetic” movement to communicate his idea.66
Taylor, unsurprisingly, twisted Horstian rules. In his hands, they were “unreasonably transmuted beyond recognition.”67 His deliberate misinterpretation of Horst was the kind, as Harold Bloom explained, many artists engage in to “clear imaginative space for themselves.”68 In his classic text The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom develops his idea of this strong misreading, where an often younger figure sees the work of a previous master and bends that work into a new form that fits the immediacy of his or her moment. An intentional misinterpretation can also lead to a unique approach perhaps not otherwise pursued. Sticking to our own views might be best achieved by finding lessons from the people who oppose us.
Incorporating criticism can benefit from pressure. Enclosure builds an intensity that can become an aid. Taylor began Aureole in Paris at the Théâtre des Arts, a nineteen-show engagement that gave him free time and full access to a stage during the day. He could work for the first time and get perspective from the audience’s vantage point, where he started to notice the effects of distance and stage lighting on movements and even facial features in a way he hadn’t before. Yet he scrapped it upon seeing it in New York light.69
Aureole, a piece that would have five parts, lacked a finale days before the rehearsal for its debut at the American Dance Festival. He tried to eliminate it. He had envisioned it as a solo that would feature him, a piece done largely on the left leg and that would be full of adagios, one of the ways that he wanted to change what was considered contemporary dance. But a rehearsal visit from friend and champion, poet and influential dance critic Edwin Denby, who suggested that the piece needed an ending, changed Taylor’s mind. With little time, he refused to use the same “old used-up steps.” He crafted his finale’s steps out of “the first that come to mind. A bunch of dizzy tilts, turns, breakneck cavorting.”70
Head to a retreat, give yourself a deadline, make it nearly impossible to get something done, and a new reservoir can often open up. As composer Leonard Bernstein said, “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”
There is a reason why so many residencies are successful, ritualistic places for artists to work: time is in short supply. In artist residencies—such as MacDowell, Skowhegan, and Yaddo in the United States—each has a condensed time frame that allows for an ameliorating shift, “a move from the creative process to art-making” as choreographer Liz Lerman calls it.71 In the beginning, all ideas are let in, more or less. “We talk, we listen, we generate, we gather, we teach, we make stuff, and it is all okay.” Then there comes a point when you start to shut down the gates of what ideas get to be realized. She calls this the phase when you “flip the funnel” and whittle down your work to a more polished piece, a refining point where art making can become “excruciating.”72 The structure that a residency gives turns the process of making—a step into an inevitable unknown—into a kind of frame.
Author and neurologist Oliver Sacks, in a fit of desperation, once made a lethal dare with himself: He would write his book in ten days or else commit suicide. The hypothetically mortal threat terrorized him, he said. He had gone for months without writing anything. After the dare, he began to stitch together ideas in unexpected ways, and to take a sort of inner dictation as if he was just the “bridge,” just “the transmitter,” finishing the book a day early.73 Handling such limitations can result in breakthroughs, as it can create a sense of uncertainty that often leads to more creative solutions.74 Under pressure, we can see creativity when we expect to see regression.75 Steve Jobs put this productive constraint on himself his whole life. He told his colleague John Sculley, “None of us has any idea how long we’re going to be here, nor do I, but my feeling is I’ve got to accomplish a lot of these things while I’m young.”76
At the end of Taylor’s show that night at Lincoln Center, I walked up the diagonal Broadway blocks and passed another Kaufman Center on an unusually tiny block, 67th Street, where Broadway dives toward Amsterdam. I stopped in front of that Kaufman Center’s glass-walled entrance. It gives a view of audience members milling around, coming in or out of the sunken entryway. To jot down some notes about Taylor’s show, I reached into my bag and pulled out my blank-paged, curved-cornered, leather Moleskine notebook. I started buying them about eight years ago. They had me when I heard that the notebooks’ design is based on ones that Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Bruce Chatwin used. I’ve since found out that this advertising pitch was a slight exaggeration.77 Not that I believed it anyway. But I liked the reminder that everyone needs to sort out how to handle starting anew, that we all confront a blank page. I still use them. Now they remind me of Taylor.
Whenever we deal with blankness, we are in lineage.
“If I did a perfect dance, I think I’d quit, you know?” Taylor said.78 Even the title of his dance Lost, Found and Lost hints at this cycle.79
Managing the gap between vision and work, which often looks to others like being swallowed by failure, is a lifelong process. It is perhaps the one thing that any artist or innovator can control. As the sage dancer reminded us on the eve of his fiftieth anniversary celebration of Aureole, “You never know how a dance is going to go with an audience. I never know. I never care as long as I think it’s what I wanted to make. It’s nice if they do like them, but that’s not why I do it. I just like to make things.”80