Taylor's domain.(Paul Taylor, dancer)

A dancer in Paul Taylor's company is not a bona fide "Paul Taylor dancer" until he or she develops a particular curve within a phrase. You see it most readily when the dancer runs in a circle in those little scuffing-slipper steps of which Taylor is so fond --the way the entire body is magnetically flexed to the center, the spine answering that empty space, the chin and shoulder listening, as if the dancer had been turned on a potter's wheel. Except the dancer is not clay but muscle, and the space is not empty at all, but a volume or vacuum with its own agenda. Taylor dancers run and jump, walk and crawl, jerk and twitch. But they are never more Taylor dancers than when they move in circles, even if they are circling themselves in one spot on the stage. It is in circles and rings and centrifugal swings that we see them for what they are: forces of nature.

And yet Taylor dancers don't pirouette. Oh, scour the repertory and you might find some. These would be exceptions that prove the rule. The pirouette of classical dance takes place on pointe or demi-pointe, and is an act of high artifice, generally a three-step structure consisting of 1) a codified preparation in plie (like a deep breath), 2) up on toe and twirl (the final swirls of a Dairy Queen cone or the coloratura's most difficult trill), 3) down and repose (to show you didn't fall). Taylor has no interest in preparations, and he likes falls--his incomparable Esplanade contains a pelting summer storm of flying falls. As for the pirouette, it is something no animal would ever do, and therefore Taylor dancers don't do them either. It's too superego--though he might say prissy or stuffy.

Taylor spent his formative years in the dances of Martha Graham, a mythic realm where superego is constantly grabbed at the heel and pulled down, undermined by id. As a dancer with Graham's company in the 1950s, Taylor knew the fight firsthand, for it is worked into the Graham technique where a dancer's bright breastbone, his or her angelic liftedness, is constantly undercut, halved and jack-knived inward in Graham contractions, hungers of the gut and groin. Martha Graham was Modern Dance, the opposite of Ballet. She dragged dance kicking into a big empty box of sanctified space, then filled it with totems and taboos, mysteries of the couch post-Freud and mid-Jung. Still, Victorian-born, circa 1895, she never let go that golden thread to Heaven.

Taylor severed the thread. Not for him Graham's ancient oracles and high priestess pronouncements which assume, by extension, the divinity of man. "I believe in Darwin," he told The New York Times in March, just before his two-week season at City Center, "and the natural world." And so the tracks and grooves of Taylor technique grow out of the grounded muscularity, the insular physics, of the animal kingdom: the racehorse's heavy tilt into the turn, the big cat's jazzy, deep-shouldered directional shifts within the chase, the concentrated stillnesses of both prey and predator, the easy elegant grazing on grasses. Taylor dancers are always Homo sapiens--descended from the apes--human animals rather than human beings. This is a pro-round distinction.

And it is uniquely Taylor's. Even if he didn't spell it out every once in a while--in Three Epitaphs, where black-masked dancers droop and stoop like the primordial ooze they crawled out of, or Cloven Kingdom, which quotes Spinoza in the program note, "Man is a social animal," and sees four men in tails (evening clothes, not fur) performing a series of chest-beating tribal rites--the Taylor dancer embodies this distinction, spelling it out in his or her musculature: strong calves, solid rear, compact and seamless upper body, and again, that flex and curve within a phrase, as if these dancers were bred for leverage, a bipedal torque and balance that lets them roar within the radius of their own limbs, not needing to transcend their bodies as ballet dancers aspire to do (ballet dancers in Taylor are like helium balloons tied to a rail, tugging toward the sky). When the eight o'clock curtain comes up on a Paul Taylor program, it is a thrill distinct from any other in dance. These breathing creatures braced before us, they may not have moved a muscle but the energy is already flying. And if it's just men onstage, as in Cascade, one of this season's program openers, the thrill doubles, because Taylor men, even those who ride a fine line of chubbiness, are magnificent--the NFL and Michelangelo's David, Man o' War and Mister Ed, all rolled up in one.

Taylor has a New York season once a year, and in that season he usually presents two new works. He likes introducing new works in twos, and there is often an obvious duality in what he's done, one dance savage, the other soft, or maybe acid and ice cream, cutting edge and elegy, sci-fi and slapstick (this March it was Fiends Angelical and Dandelion Wine, sinister and sunny, but both a bit labored). This game of oppositions is yet another pitch and curve within the repertory, as if Taylor is saying he's not subject to any one theatrical tradition or temperament, not placing one ideal above another. Taylor isn't in thrall to any ideal, to any dogma beyond Darwin's: objective observance of the natural world. What he sees is what we get. And he sees like a collector--in genus, in genres, in populations and pools.

This makes great sense for a dance company, which is tribal after all, and it's one of the reasons Taylor has enjoyed such longevity: he never runs out of subjects, specimens. It's also a reason Taylor gets attacked every few years by critics who want more "adult sexuality" on his stage, another way of saying they want more conventional male-female partnering--the R-rated repartee of movies or the only-you romanticism of Balanchine (which is another way of saying they're not getting their quota of vicarious thrill, i.e., self-projection into the clinches). Taylor isn't concerned with the genital stirrings of character A for character B; he's more interested in the group pheromone, as in his megahit of 1992, Company B, in which erotic energies are heightened, enlarged, by WWII and the threat of premature death. Taylor's most recent masterpiece, Piazzolla Caldera, really is R-rated, a rite of spring wearing the black lace of the bull ring, wielding a sharp tango heel, and complete with sacrificial maiden--a girl who's sort of slutty. But again, the soloists who momently come forward in their own dank spotlight, showing us their ache or itch, are always step-locked back into the whole, the teeming backroom pool of vice and desire, where they take their place in the pattern, linked up in the eternal circle.