===== Paul Taylor July 24, 1999 =====


**N&O Dance review: Taylor's latest needs polishing**

By BYRON WOODS, Correspondent

DURHAM -- The steaming cauldron of the sexes was nearly as hot as it ever was, and a black-and-white end-of-century tribute to the culture and the dances of the early 1900s left us with food for thought. But a disappointing "Cascade," the newest of these works by veteran choreographer Paul Taylor, seemed less than ready for its world premiere Thursday night at the American Dance Festival.

This lyrical composition, set to movements from Johann Sebastian Bach's fourth, fifth and seventh concertos for piano and orchestra, opened promisingly, with the company's male dancers dramatically silhouetted against a backdrop of pure gold. Santo Loquasto's set and intricately filagreed gold, black and brown costumes recalled a Spanish ornamental age.

We appreciated the exquisite symmetry of the Larghetto movement. Lisa Viola, Kristi Egtvedt, Richard Chen See and Andy LeBeau invert male and female leads in a movement which gradually unfolds with little less than geometric elegance.

Elsewhere, imprecision in timing and gesture clouded ensemble sequences throughout. The resulting rough edges and asymmetry plagued the first movement, the Presto and the Andante sections, and the close, in a still-promising work -- but one which gave the impression of still being two or three rehearsals away from ready.

"Oh, You Kid," the evening's second work, had been billed as a controversial look back from the end of this century to its beginnings. Response to its Kennedy Center premiere this year touted a chorus line of bumbling Ku Klux Klansmen and a sequence featuring Lisa Viola as an aged "exotic dancer" as evidence of Taylor's engagement, not only with painstakingly researched dances and music of the early 20th century, but with the darker elements of American culture in that period.

Unfortunately, it's a distant engagement at best. The unlikely term "weightless Klansmen" might convey dancers whose costumes don't meaningfully connect, either to developed characters or historical reality. The result is ultimately little more than a one-joke slapstick sequence in which a young woman unsuccessfully tries to join the Klan. So much for social consciousness.

By far the strongest work of the evening was also the oldest: "Piazzolla Caldera," a tribute to the late Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla. This work, which premiered at ADF two years ago, featured crisply drawn characters, open artful warfare between the sexes and razor-sharp choreography in a still-fitting homage to the maestro of the tango. Francie Huber stuns us still as la belle dame sans merci in a work and fully realized world where dancers caught in the lacerating mechanism of attraction and desire, are all, sooner or later, literally flattened by its power.