Paul Taylor Dance Company Returns to the Williams Center for the Arts with ‘Aureole,’ ‘Company B’ and ‘Eventide’
Paul Taylor Dance Company’s Lehigh Valley residency is part of a three-year Mellon Foundation “Choreographers on Campus” award.
The critically acclaimed Paul Taylor Dance Company brings Taylor’s first major success, Aureole, to the Williams Center for the Arts, Lafayette College, at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 7. The evening’s program at the Williams Center includes Taylor’s exuberant Company B, and Eventide, regarded as a masterpiece of modern dance.
Tickets: $25, available through the Williams Center for the Arts ticket office, open Noon – 2 p.m. and 4 – 5 p.m. weekdays, and one hour prior to performance; and by phone at (610) 330-5009.
Aureole (1962), set to music by George Frideric Handel, was the first piece in which Taylor combined his trailblazing modern style of movement with baroque music, and is widely considered his first major success. Company B, a seminal work of Americana choreographed in 1991, recalls a turbulent era at the dawn of the 1940s when the country was drawn into the Second World War. Through the hit songs of the Andrews Sisters, Taylor depicts a nation surging with high spirits, yet millions of men were bidding farewell to wives and girlfriends, and many would never return from battle. Eventide, Taylor’s 1997 masterpiece set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, is a tribute to remembered love.
On Monday, Oct. 6, Paul Taylor Dance Company members will teach a series of master classes at Lafayette College, DeSales University, Moravian College and the Lehigh Valley Charter School for the Performing Arts, as part of Lafayette’s three-year “Choreographers on Campus” grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Paul Taylor, one of the most influential choreographers of the 20th and 21st centuries and the last living member of the second generation of America’s modern dance artists, continues to shape the American art of modern dance that he has helped define since he became a professional dancer and choreographer in 1954. Taylor has made 140 dances since then, many of which have attained iconic status.
The Paul Taylor Dance Company has traveled the globe many times over, bringing Mr. Taylor’s ever-burgeoning repertoire to theaters and venues of every size and description in cultural capitals, on college campuses and in rural communities. The Taylor Company has performed in more than 540 cities in 64 countries, representing the United States at arts festivals in more than 40 countries and touring extensively under the aegis of the U.S. Department of State.
Beginning with its first television appearance for the “Dance in America” series in 1978, the Paul Taylor Dance Company has appeared on PBS in nine different programs, including the 1991 Emmy Award-winning Speaking in Tongues and The Wrecker’s Ball – with Company B, Funny Papers, and A Field of Grass – which was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1997. In 1999 the PBS American Masters series aired Dancemaker, the Academy Award-nominated documentary about Mr. Taylor and the Taylor Company.
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Photo courtesy of Lafayette College; photography by Paul B. Goode
Higher resolution photo available, https://flic.kr/p/ptcNmm
Kathleen Parrish
Associate Director of Media Relations
Lafayette College
Communications Division
Easton, PA 18042
parrishk@lafayette.edu
www.lafayette.edu