March 14, 2006

The delightful and daring Paul Taylor Dance Company to perform at UCSB Campbell Hall

Summary Facts:

• Paul Taylor Dance Company
• Fifty years after making his first works, Paul Taylor is revered as one of the world’s greatest choreographers
• Wednesday, April 26 / 8 pm
• UCSB Campbell Hall
• General public: $40 / UCSB students: $19
• Tickets/information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535

The “intelligent, stylish and physically magnificent” (New York magazine) Paul Taylor Dance Company will perform on Wednesday, April 26 at 8 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall. Led by the giant of modern dance in the U.S.—indeed a living legend—this troupe leaves audiences ecstatic. For 50 years, the Paul Taylor Dance Company (PTDC) has performed its founder/ director’s work in 60 countries and more than 450 cities. In classics like Esplanade as well as gorgeous newer work like Cascade, Taylor’s imaginative choreography, rare sense of beauty and superb musicality—not to mention the brilliance of his dancers—are beyond compare. The San Francisco Chronicle claims, “The American spirit soars whenever Taylor’s dancers dance.”

PTDC will perform a program of Spring Rounds, Nightshade and Promethean Fire. Spring Rounds, set to music by Richard Strauss after Couperin, was first performed July 5, 2005. Alan Riding of The New York Times wrote after the work’s debut, “So springlike that it might well have been designed to chase away stormy skies...The 14 dancers, moving in leaps and turns like birds and butterflies hypnotized by Strauss’s romantic music, capture the optimistic and seductive mood of sap rising.” Nightshade, a work from 1979, is set to music by Alexander Scriabin. Anna Kisselgoff of The New York Times claims, “Taylor’s deliciously Gothic romance is a work to take along when stranded on a desert island. A mock Victorian melodrama that makes for some uneasy laughter, it is about sexual repression and false innocence. Taylor is often at his funniest when he as at his most serious.” Promethean Fire from 2002 is danced to music by Johann Sebastian Bach. Alan Ulrich in Voice of Dance calls the work “dazzling...a 25-minute maelstrom of controlled energy flooding the stage with an economy, passion and invention that reaffirm Taylor’s mastery—it belongs on any short list of his great dances. What the work possesses beyond its craft and artistry is an awesome integrity one associates with the first, pioneering generation of American dance makers, a conviction that dance really could change the world.”

Paul Taylor grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. He studied painting and was a member of the swim team at Syracuse University before arriving in New York City, where he studied dance at Juilliard. From 1955 until 1962 he was a soloist with the Martha Graham Dance Company, while presenting his own work with members of the Company he began in 1954. To help support his fledgling company in this period, he worked on window displays at Tiffany’s and Bonwit Teller’s with his friend artist Robert Rauschenberg. In 1966 the Paul Taylor Dance Foundation was created to help Taylor bring his works to the largest possible audience, facilitate his ability to make new dances and preserve his growing repertoire. Among his numerous accomplishments, he has been awarded the National Medal of Arts, a Kennedy Center Honors Award, the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest honor, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Paul Taylor’s autobiography, Private Domain, originally published by Alfred A. Knopf and, in paperback by North Point Press, has been re-released by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The book was nominated by the National Book Critics Circle as the most distinguished biography of 1987. Taylor and his Company are the subject of Dancemaker, Matthew Diamond’s award-winning, Oscar-nominated film, hailed by Time magazine as “perhaps the best dance documentary ever.”

Laura Shapiro once wrote in Newsweek, “Short course in modern dance: in the beginning there was Martha Graham, who changed the face of an art form and discovered a new world. Then there was Merce Cunningham, who stripped away the externals and showed us the heart of movement. And then there was Paul Taylor, who let the sun shine in.”

Concert-goers are invited to stay after the performance for a Meet-the-Artists discussion.

Members of the company will teach a Community Dance Class on Tuesday, April 25 at 7:30 pm at the Santa Barbara Ballet Center, 1019 Chapala Street, Suite #B. It costs $15 for participants and $5 for observers. This event is sponsored the Santa Barbara Dance Alliance; for information and to make a reservation, please phone (805) 966-6950.

Paul Taylor Dance Company is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures in cooperation with the Santa Barbara Dance Alliance and sponsored by the Hotel Marmonte. Educational outreach support is provided by The Towbes Foundation. PTDC’s residency is funded in part by the Community Events & Festivals Program using funds provided by the City of Santa Barbara in partnership with the SB County Arts Commission. Tickets are $40 for the general public and $19 for UCSB students who must show valid ID at ticket purchase and the evening of the show. Ticket prices are subject to convenience fees. Tickets are on sale now and can also be purchased at the door, if still available.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.