Forever fresh Paul Taylor is still making dance new BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

Paul Taylor has said that he "reports" what his mind and his heart take in from the natural and urbanized worlds around him. How fortunate for us that he records those observations in one of the most intimate and intense forms of art: dance. A choreographer for almost as long as he’s been a dancer, Taylor jumped into Juilliard and Martha Graham’s school in 1952, presented his first dance in ’54, and became a full member of Graham’s company in ’55.

Next spring, the 73-year-old Taylor will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Paul Taylor Dance Company with the premiere of yet another work, bringing the total of his pieces to 120, with more than three dozen of them still in the company’s repertory. That new dance, Le Grand Puppetier, is set to Igor Stravinsky’s music for the 1911 ballet Petrushka, and will be given a preview performance by the Paul Taylor Dance Company this week at Rhode Island College.

The Russian version of Petrushka is about a puppet in love with a ballerina, but Taylor does not use that particular story in his new dance. Instead, the narrative involves an emperor and his daughter, plus his puppet, his courtier, his "red guardsman," his "pink guardsman," and his subjects — 11 dancers in all.

In a phone conversation this week from his home on Long Island, Taylor did not want to give away the actual "plot" of the dance. But he did wax enthusiastic about Stravinsky’s music: "It’s a terrific score. I’ve always liked it. It’s very dramatic, but nothing goes on for very long at a time. The same kind of thing doesn’t keep repeating over and over."

That gives the ever-inventive Taylor even more opportunity to invent, for he approaches each new dance "like an adventure." Often described as one of the most musical of choreographers in modern dance, Taylor has set pieces to Bach fugues, concerti by Handel, songs by the Andrews Sisters, Schubert’s symphonies (Mercuric Tidings, to be performed at RIC), and Astor Piazzolla’s interpretations of the Argentinian tango (Piazzolla Caldera, also on the roster for RIC).

Taylor’s very musicality in his choreography can often mean swift, intricate movement sequences, such as those in Mercuric Tidings, in which the dancers give visual form to the cascade of notes pouring forth around them. The complex placement of the dancers in Mercuric Tidings caused one critic to term the dance "strictly mathematical."

"I guess they mean the formations, the fugues, the musical forms — I had to do a lot of counting," Taylor remarked, in typical understatement. "The dancers did too. Once they learn that and the steps get into their bodies, then it’s set."

Taylor has noted that his dances sometimes contain light and sometimes darkness and that he likes to alternate — "not two of the same type of thing in a row." He has said that his piece Piazzolla Caldera is about confrontation between the sexes. Yet the dance — as seen in Dancemaker, the 1999 Oscar-nominated documentary by Matthew Diamond about Taylor and his company — has its tender moments as well as its fierce ones. The film takes as its framework the creation, rehearsals, and premiere of Piazzolla. The camera is there when Taylor first reads Pablo Neruda’s impressions of Piazzolla’s music to the dancers, beginning with "the flawed confusion of human beings" and continuing with descriptive phrases that evoke the stench and sweat of bodies in daily toil, "with dreams, wakefulness, prophecies, declarations of love and hate, stupidities, shocks . . . doubts, affirmations."

Taylor admits to his dancers that they might not get all of that in one dance, but it’s clear from their faces that they know he might try. He sets this dance on five women and seven men, which means that in pairing off, two men sometimes partner each other. Later in the dance, however, we also see two women partnering in a tango pose. Taylor deconstructs the hip-swivels, the toe twists, and the head tosses of the traditional tango, and puts them back together embellished with characteristic gusto: breathtaking lifts, wide-sweeping arms, swirling leaps, and dramatic pauses. Taylor’s dancers convey the passion of each moment in Piazzolla Caldera, be it the heat of lust or the coolness of contempt. It’s a stunning and unforgettable piece.

Taylor, a natural athlete and college swimmer, took to modern dance as though he knew the movements from somewhere deep inside himself. He danced with Merce Cunningham’s fledgling company for a year, hung out with artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg — who did the costumes for the earliest work of Taylor’s still in repertory, Three Epitaphs — danced with Martha Graham’s company for six years, and even had a solo made on him by George Balanchine. He continued dancing with his own company through 1974, when health problems forced him to give up performing.

But he never stopped making dances: "You can say things in dance that it’s hard to say in any other way. And I like making dances; I love working with the dancers and they need new dances to do. It keeps me off the streets."

That tongue-in-cheek humor spills forth when Taylor is asked to advise audiences unaccustomed to seeing modern dance how best to appreciate next week’s performance: "Relax. There’s no set way to respond. Try not to walk out in the middle. Don’t stick your feet out in the aisle."

Taylor, along with his award-winning designers Santo Loquasto (set and costumes) and Jennifer Tipton (lighting), will be in Providence for this important preview of Le Grand Puppetier — its first showing as a work-in-progress for an audience. And he’s quite excited about it: "Every new dance seems like I’ve never made one before."

The Paul Taylor Dance Company will perform on Wednesday, October 22 at 8 p.m. the Auditorium at Roberts Hall at Rhode Island College. Call (401) 456-8144.