Hot 'Diggity' Dance

Dance

By JOEL LOBENTHAL
March 17, 2008

This season, the Paul Taylor Dance Company danced the choreographer's 1978 work "Diggity" for the first time in New York since 1994. At Saturday matinee's performance, the audience started to chuckle the moment the curtain rose. The stage was seeded with little cutout silhouettes — made by Alex Katz — that were modeled on Mr. Taylor's dog Deedee. "Diggity" makes paramount Mr. Taylor's interest in flora and fauna, which sometimes seems to be more openhearted than his response to the human race. One feels that he finds us a little disappointing.

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Jack Mitchell

Lisa Viola and Joao Mauricio in Paul Taylor’s ‘Diggity.’

Mr. Taylor puts the eight-member cast on all fours a good deal of the time. The piece takes its cues from the slang exclamation, "Hot diggity dog!" It is permeated with the faux-homespun rhetoric of carefully crafted mass entertainment. There seem to be Hollywood references, but they are scrambled and framed with ironic asides, as well as pokerfaced put-ons. Donald York's score is 1940s pastiche. Mr. Katz's mise-en-scène derives from Pop art and its ambivalent use of commercial brands and emblems. In "Diggity," the live dancers are in their own ways colophons as well. There's the perky pixie Julie Tice, who kicks off the piece, and Amy Young as an Alberto Vargas drawing come to life, prancing out wearing only her lingerie.

Throughout this engaging caprice, Mr. Taylor's choreography is finely structured, even as he seems to be going along for the ride navigated by the musical score, sets, and props (which include a giant cabbage that is brought out with a kitchen-garden Venus). Toward the end, things get winsome for a while as the score evokes Aaron Copland in a twilight-coming-down mood. Michelle Fleet and Robert Kleinendorst drew in the audience as they danced alongside each other on Saturday, each questing for something that the other might be able to provide. High spirits resumed once their duet was done. When the entire cast broke out into barks, we knew where Mr. Taylor's heart lies.

When Mr. Taylor's dancers aren't imitating the noble traits of man's best friend, they are often caricaturing the vagaries and vicissitudes of human interaction. Sometimes the caricatures have a savagery worthy of Jonathan Swift. Sometimes they take on the deceptively innocent coloration of a marionette show. In the latter category falls Mr. Taylor's "Antique Valentine," which followed "Diggity" on Saturday. It was made in 2001 to a hodgepodge of greatest classical hit tracks rendered quaint by being played on an assortment of demotic music-making devices. Cuckoo clock sounds introduce a stage full of human wind-up toys. Costumes by Santo Loquasto further miniaturize the participants by submerging them in outlandish poke bonnets and striped tights like the French Incroyables of the Revolutionary era. The eponymous valentine is passed between Lisa Viola and Mr. Kleinendorst. Ms. Viola is the more aggressive active party in the wooing, as she frequently is in the comic works Mr. Taylor has made for her.

Eventually, we see only Ms. Viola and Mr. Kleinendorst left standing, as everyone else onstage is flat on his or her back. The two lovers wend their way through their supine colleagues, who then stagger to their feet and carry the nuptial pair on their shoulders to the tune of Mendelssohn's Wedding March. All fall down, and then all get up again. It's a maladroit but invincible species we're watching.

Mr. Taylor has great powers of sleight of hand. His "Esplanade," which closed the Saturday matinee, is often described as consisting of entirely untutored movement, such as walking and running, the universal locomotion of untrained human bodies. But it is extraordinary how much like dance Mr. Taylor makes the pedestrian look. And it is interesting to see the way he makes us aware of the common cognate between sophisticated dance steps as well as quotidian and "natural" movement. A number of times throughout "Esplanade," he slyly inserts an almost identical facsimile of a textbook balletic step, but we have been so lulled into the ostensible non-theatricality of what we're seeing that we hardly notice them.

In Saturday's performance, the climactic last movement of hurtles and crashes and running leaps into miraculously awaiting arms was especially vigorous and brilliant. When Mr. Taylor came out for his curtain call with the dancers, he gave them a gave thumbs-up which they heartily deserved.