Bringing a dance back to life is detective work. Just what was on Paul Taylor’s mind when he was choreographing “Churchyard,” a work of angelic beauty and distorted horror, more than 50 years ago?
Separated into two sections, “Sacred” and “Profane,” “Churchyard” reflects Taylor’s unsettling way of weaving together dark and light. Set to medieval-inspired music by Cosmos Savage, the dance becomes increasingly sinister, so much so that by the time “Profane” rolls around, the dancers’ unitards are filled with lumps. The Black Death is coming.
Michael Novak, the artistic director of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, is determined to get the reconstruction of “Churchyard” right. Or at least as right as he can make it. Part of the company’s season at the Joyce Theater, which begins June 17, “Churchyard” (1969) will return with another early revival, “Tablet” (1960), a duet with design by the artist Ellsworth Kelly.
Taylor, who died in 2018, had discussed reviving “Churchyard,” but there was a problem: memory. Bettie de Jong, the statuesque centerpiece of the dance (and later, the company’s rehearsal director), insisted that Nicholas Gunn, who joined the Taylor company the year “Churchyard” was made, needed to be involved.
“Now I know why,” Novak said. “Nick is kind of the key. It was the first dance he was ever in, and usually I have found, the first dance you go into, you remember it so well because you’re so scared. You want to do a good job.”
Gunn has been working with the Taylor company at its Midtown studios to reconstruct the dance. It’s a group effort. At a recent rehearsal for the work’s male trio, Novak wondered about a step.
“So this is crawling?” he said, bending forward, pawing his hands.
Gunn, with a rippling, contorted torso, reached his arms forward in alternating strokes. “It’s an undulated crawl,” he said. “It’s about wanting to eat Bettie.”
The crawl became an eerie, savage slither. It felt like Taylor. It looked like Taylor who, at one point, changed the title of “Churchyard” to “Apocalypse.”
Taylor was more than adept at making pretty dances, but the ugly ones — “Scudorama,” “Big Bertha,” “Last Look” — have their own ominous appeal. In “Churchyard,” a stamina test for the men, certain passages of “contraction, contraction, release, just took your breath away,” Gunn said. “What I remember clearly was we’d never gotten through it in the studio. Honestly, it made you sick.”
It was more aerobic for the men than for the women. Carolyn Adams — now Taylor’s director of education — was one of the original women and she has helped with the reconstruction. “The first section was very linear,” Adams said, “and then the second section was very contorted — broken lines, percussive, odd positions. There’s some movements in this dance that didn’t make it into any other pieces.”
While grainy video exists of a stage rehearsal from 1974 — by that time, a solo for Taylor had been eliminated — and a lecture-demonstration of the men’s trio from 1971, restoring “Churchyard” is a group effort. Madelyn Ho, a company dancer who is assisting Novak, has combed through Taylor’s notes, which aren’t entirely legible. She and Novak have spent hours watching the rehearsal video.
“I found that the longer I watched the video, the more I could see through the static,” Novak said. “I started to be able to see little shapes, and once my eyes got used to it, then it just told me more.”
He would devote himself to studying an individual dancer through the entire piece, creating a list of questions for alumni. Things like: “Can you confirm this happened?” “It’s this person?” “This is the transition?” “In some cases,” he said, “I was correct, and some cases, I was not.”
Novak and Ho are also making decisions based on their experience of performing Taylor dances created around that time. Occasionally, what’s on the video — it was a tech rehearsal so steps might have been adjusted — seems wrong. Novak and Gunn had a moment when they agreed: “Paul wouldn’t do that,” Novak said. “It doesn’t fit his vocabulary. What I like about that moment is that we’re two different generations of Paul. We see the same thing and can be, ‘That’s not him, he wouldn’t do that.’”
Novak, who makes the final decisions, knows he is interpreting Taylor’s art, not replicating it. “So there is a sensitivity that’s needed,” he said, “and an intuition that underlies all of this.”
Intuition is important, he said, “especially with Paul’s work, because I think it needs to be weird. We have to embrace that.”
In the “Profane” section, Taylor shows parts of the body that weren’t emphasized in concert dance of that time. Legs are splayed; buttocks are on view. Some of the partnering resembles more of a dead lift than a romantic carry. The women, by way of handstands, throw their legs over the men’s shoulders. It’s clunky and ferocious at times, which contrasts with the more angelic “Sacred” opening.
“It’s raw, it’s untamed,” Novak said of “Profane.”
“And I think that’s important to protect and to own it,” he added. “Not everything he made was pretty and beautiful and lovely.”
Adams described the choreography as “very bound, even in the ‘Sacred’ section.”
“It’s not floppy,” she said. “In fact, that’s one of the challenges in the reconstruction, because there’s a lot of articulation, but it’s not loose.”
Both she and Gunn remember some scenes clearly because, as Adams put it, “They were so horrible.”
Meaning they were impossibly hard. In one, which the dancers nicknamed “the flying nun” — the women don headwear resembling a nun’s veil — three dancers perform a promenade sequence in relevé that eventually swivels and lowers the body all the way to the floor. It remains diabolical and still infuriates Adams — and Gunn too. “It was hideous,” he said, adding later, “Nobody ever went up there and stayed.”
The dancers, inevitably, would fall out of their relevé balances. “The three men are laying on our backs, sort of upstage” — he broke into laugher — “to watch it.”
The dancers complained; Taylor ignored them. “It just felt like he did it to be mean,” Gunn said. “It didn’t add anything to the piece.”
Both Adams and Gunn said the revived “Churchyard” feels like the dance Taylor created. All the same, Adams is experiencing something she can’t quite put into words: “The atmosphere and the context in which it’s being done feels very different to me from what I remember,” she said. “Could be lots of things. Could be that Paul was in it. There’s something around the atmosphere that feels like another thing.”
The steps may be the same, but they’re performed differently. Ho said that today’s dancers are more lyrical; in the 1960s they were closer to the lineage of Martha Graham, with whom Taylor danced and whose forceful approach was more severe.
Also, Novak said, the company’s style had not yet been codified. Taylor was still dancing — he called his role in “Churchyard” a “warped warlock” — but beginning in 1975, the movement took on a different look. “Before that, everyone’s dancing with him,” Novak said. “So I think they’re looking at him be wild, and I think they’re trying to replicate that.”
Neither Gunn nor Adams know why “Churchyard” didn’t stick around in the repertory, but there is a reason it’s such a mystery: It was never taught to the next generation. Passing on a dance, Adams said, is “so much a part of why you remember things.”
But the dance is taking shape. “If you know Paul’s work really well, when it starts you’re like, ‘Oh, this is interesting,’” Novak said. “‘This is curious. OK.’ And then there’s a moment you’re like, ‘Oh, this is Paul.’ It has all the hallmarks. I think people will feel really at home in it.”
As artistic director, Novak views himself as being in a relay race. “Paul had the baton and he conquered things that I’ll never have to conquer,” he said. “He ran as fast as he could with that baton and he handed it to me. My job is to use all my energy to get as far as I can to give it to the next leader.”
And as a former company dancer, he had a direct line to Taylor: “Making sure that that legacy is the wind behind our back rather than an anchor is really important to me,” Novak said. “I don’t believe in abandoning history. I think it’s very dangerous.”
Going back to earlier works like “Churchyard” isn’t just about reviving dances. “It’s important for me to connect with Paul when he was younger and finding his voice artistically and to see the lessons that he learned,” Novak said. “I think it’s important for dancers who never danced with him or for him to be in these worlds. It’s the closest to the source that they can get.”
Gia Kourlas is the dance critic for The Times. She writes reviews, essays and feature articles and works on a range of stories.
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