Timeless Taylor

When members of the Paul Taylor Dance Company took the stage June 6 to open the 25th season of the American Dance Festival in Durham, they carried with them the history of a choreographer whose work over the past 47 years has left an undeniable thumbprint on the modern dance world. But moving beyond that history and into the future proved to require something more than Taylor's stockpile of tradition and technique could offer.

The evening opened with Cloven Kingdom, a quirky piece that debuted in 1976. Despite having been around longer than ADF has been in Durham, the piece breathed with vitality and innovation, and like an old woman whose grace and beauty masks her advanced age, it could have easily been mistaken for a much more recent creation. Shifting abruptly between the domesticated motions of civilization and the unleashed frenzy of the animal kingdom, the performance revealed the comedy inherent in both.

The evening continued with 1998's The Word, featuring knickers-and-suspender clad dancers whose militarized movements and identical costumes melded males and females alike into one genderless nation of dancer-soldiers. But the choreography refused to let the line between the sexes disappear entirely, as males and females were paired off with cotillion-style rigidity. This corps of conformity, whether interpreted as military, corporate or otherwise, was broken by a nymph-like goddess in green whose loose, earth-inspired movements sent a ripple through their ranks, but ultimately failed to steer them from their single-minded course.

The final piece, an ADF-commissioned world premiere entitled Promethean Fire, should have produced a fiery climax but was more like a carefully-controlled flame that posed no danger of spreading beyond the conventions of modern dance. Every leap, spin and stretch executed by the dancers was technically flawless, evoking the abstract perfection that has come to serve as the standard for Taylor and those he has influenced over the years. But instead of building on the power of that exquisite technique, true innovation burned a soft flame on an evening where the past seemed more like the present, and the present seemed destined to be forgotten.