A Note on Paul Taylor’s “Company B”

American Ballet Theatre in "Company B." Photo by Andrea Mohin, from the New York Times.

American Ballet Theatre’s “All-American” program, which had its final performance on July 3, is an impressive tribute to American twentieth-century ballet and late-modern dance. The three works are certifiable masterpieces, each in its own right, and the dancers look great in them. Twyla Tharp’s “Brahms-Haydn Variations” is a plotless, classical ballet set to Brahms’ “Variations on a Theme by Haydn for Orchestra,” and a tribute to Balanchinean structure and counterpoint, with a touch of post-modernist insouciance. “Fancy Free,” the best-known piece on the program, was Jerome Robbins’ first ballet, a huge hit that led to a musical (“On the Town,” another hit) and a movie. It is also an example of an almost magically symbiotic collaboration between a choreographer, a composer, and a designer. Are such collaborations still possible in this time of over-committed free-lance artists jetting around from place to place, trying desperately to remain relevant and at the top of their game? Unlikely.

The third piece, Paul Taylor’s “Company B,” is another marvel, in its own way. Taylor made it for the Houston Ballet in 1991—after which his own company also took it into its repertory. ABT performed it for the first time two years ago. I’ve also seen Paul Taylor’s smaller, second company, Taylor 2 dance a reduced version. Each time, I’ve been amazed by its structure and layers of meaning. Truth be told, the Met stage is a bit large for this very human-scaled work; it “read” more clearly, and had more of a punch, when ABT performed it at the City Center (or when I saw Taylor 2 dance it at the Joyce a few months ago). But still, its sophisticated layering of American cheeriness over despair and the cold, dark presence of death, filters through.

Simone Messmer in "Company B." Photo by Rosalie O'Connor.

Set to popular melodies from the forties—American ballads, boogie-woogie, as well as songs based on the polka, calypso, and Brazilian choro—as sung by the Andrews Sisters, “Company B” progresses as a loosely-linked revue, with solos (“Tico-Tico,” “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”), duets (“Pennsylvania Polka,” “There will Never Be Another You”) and ensemble pieces (“Bei Mir Bist du Schön,” “Joseph! Joseph!”). On the surface, the mood is gosh darn, Jiminy Cricket cheery. The dancers, wearing rolled-up khaki trousers or skirts (no pointe shoes, of course) and flowered collared shirts, and with hair done in forties fashions, look like something out of “From Here to Eternity,” but without the glamour. They’re kids, just having fun. But Taylor quickly reminds us that somewhere, just beyond the edges of the stage there is a war, and that these kids are just the right age to fight, and die. From the opening number, in which the dancers wander onstage as if in a dream, they fall to ground, dead, and then get up as if nothing has happened. It’s so subtle at first that one doesn’t quite realize what’s going on. During the first, happy-go-lucky duet (“Pennsylvania Polka”), as two kids tape their heels and toes and gallop around with gusto, the silhouettes of five men file across the back of the stage, marching, shooting, and falling. In “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” an exhausting solo filled with multiple jumps and no time to rest (danced on July 3 by Joseph Phillips), the chipper soldier is blown off his feet by a silent, invisible explosion on the final note. After a brief blackout, he is still lying there, along with several other men. The sultry, sunny calypso “Rum and Coca Cola” begins, and the boys touch their bodies carefully, as if testing their wounds. A pretty girl (the lovely Misty Copeland, in this case) dances on, moving her hips sultrily, and the boys seem to recover, trying their best to look up her skirt as she raises her leg up high or does a yawning split on the ground. At this performance, I finally realized something I had not picked up on before: these boys are still dead, it’s just that they’re in heaven, and this is what their heaven looks like. Add to that the double-entendre of the lyrics: “Since the Yankee come to Trinidad / They got the young girls all goin’ mad / Young girls say they treat ‘em nice / Make Trinidad like paradise. / Drinkin’ rum and Coca-Cola / Go down Point Koomahnah / Both mother and daughter / Workin’ for the Yankee dollar.” The key word, of course, is “paradise.” The mixture of innocence and corruption—the song is about the corrupting effect of the dollar in the hands of American soldiers on leave—is really something. Luciana Paris, a member of the corps who is especially good in American twentieth-century works with a “popular” edge, like Tharp’s “Sinatra Suite,” manages to imbue this number with a particular sweetness that renders the pill even more bitter to swallow.

There are other hidden messages: In “I can Dream, Can’t I?” a girl dances longingly for her man, off at war, whom we see in an intimate tête à tête with another man. In the nostalga-filled ballad “There Will Never Be Another You,” another woman, incisively-danced by the limpid Simone Messmer, has a ghostly pas de deux with a young man who seems not to see her at all. It turns out that he’s a figment of her imagination; at the end of the song, he steps over her prone body and joins a row of soldiers in silhouette marching in slow motion at the back of the stage, out of reach. Paul Taylor wasn’t kidding around.