Paul Taylor burst upon the dance world in 1957, but not quite in the way he had hoped. At 27 he was a member of Martha Graham's troupe and already experimenting on his own. Specifically he was trying to strip away the "dancerly" elements in the modern style, to get down to the basics. He and his hardworking group of three performed the results at the YM-YWHA in Manhattan, and a few weeks later Louis Horst in the influential Dance Observer weighed in with the definitive review: four inches of blank space followed by the author's initials.
Thirty years later the master choreographer still glowers in behalf of the novice he once was: "The review wasn't even very long," he fumes. But the showman in Taylor is able to put it in perspective. "There is," he remembers, "what no amount of paid advertising could have brought -- immediate notoriety." The two coexisting reactions -- of the egocentric artist and the canny producer -- reveal a true man of the theater, and in Private Domain Taylor has written one of the best and most candid theater books to appear in a long time.
There have been several dance autobiographies recently, many of them extolling or punishing George Balanchine along the way, but none is as intelligent or funny or shrewd as this one. Taylor's insights on fellow artists -- Graham, Balanchine, Robert Rauschenberg -- are unusually trenchant and fresh. The book is blessedly free of the cleaned-up quality that such memoirs often have, which inevitably makes the childhood chapters the only interesting, trustworthy ones. Talk about warts and all! For readers who want to hear about pressures and strains on the professional dancer -- the drugs, the drink, the penury -- they are all here, far more eloquently stated than in the lurid confessions of Gelsey Kirkland's Dancing on My Grave.
Today Taylor is probably America's greatest living choreographer. He has received most of the major awards, including a MacArthur "genius grant." He has a town house in Greenwich Village. But before the adulation and creature comforts came decades of very hard scrambling. He was born near Pittsburgh in the depths of the Depression, and his parents separated when he was a small boy. Mama was too busy managing hotel dining rooms to spend much time with her son. Still, he recalls, "I don't remember ever being lonely -- I had health, privacy, and a mother I was wild about." Early on he recognized the "beautiful curse" of solitude, "the one without which I doubt all other patterns would have grown."
Taylor discovered his vocation while at Syracuse on a swimming scholarship. It came as an inexplicable flash, "telling me that I'm to become a dancer -- not any old dancer, but one of the best." The flash was tardy; college is dangerously late to start serious dance training. But Taylor worked on technique, pushing his "instrument" -- as modern dancers like to call their bodies -- ruthlessly, and he was soon studying with the likes of Graham and Jose Limon. Graham became a powerful influence. Much to Taylor's approval, she called her instrument the "bodaah," and he was transfixed by her witchy pronouncements and "oracular eyes."