‘Churchyard’ and ‘Tablet’ Review: Irreverence and Resurrection

Paul Taylor isn’t commonly discussed as a religious choreographer, but religious themes run through the nearly 150 dances he made across six decades. That his perspective was usually irreverent doesn’t mean it was unserious. William Blake, explaining why Satan has the best lines in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” wrote that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Taylor’s dances often seem to suggest that we’re all of the devil’s party and that it would be hypocritical to pretend otherwise, but also that the implications of that truth could be very dark.

Take “Churchyard” (1969), one of the two works that the Paul Taylor Dance Company has reconstructed for its run at the Joyce Theater this week. It starts with a woman wearing what looks like a nun’s wimple, her palms pressed together in prayer. The accompanying music sounds medieval, and the actions of the dancers who soon join her are both prayerful and pastoral, almost Edenic.

Halfway through the dance, though, these images are replaced with the cavorting of devils or maybe the damned. Now with bulges like tumors in their costumes, the dancers fling themselves around in gnarled, twisted positions, jumping like frogs and scratching themselves. The men carry the women upside down, and the woman from the beginning, now a siren-like figure in a cape, swings her head to slap the ground with her braid. It’s like a Hieronymus Bosch painting with touches of go-go dancing.

Taylor called the work’s two sections “Sacred” and “Profane.” But the sacred half isn’t pure. The score — by the semi-forgotten avant-gardist Andrew Sarchiapone, who called himself Cosmos Savage — mixes in sounds of storms, which could also be a bowling alley next door. The innocent interactions between men and women are so chivalrous that they’re arch, with hints of lust and trouble in paradise. The perversity of the choreographer-god seeps in with impossible-to-hold balances (set to fast music) and cruelly slow descents to the floor.

The profane section is more fun, with naughty bits. But it is fun for us, not for the lost souls. There’s desperation in their frantic activity. They seem compelled. And if their fate is ours, this memento mori of a dance is a nightmare.

“Tablet,” a duet from 1960, isn’t as much of a revelation. The work is notable for being Taylor’s only collaboration with the artist Ellsworth Kelly and for being made for Pina Bausch during her brief tenure with the company. Against an abstract backdrop resembling a drawing of radio waves radiating from an antenna, the man and woman (Devon Louis and Kristin Draucker) wear white face paint, though the center of the woman’s face is clean.

The clown makeup suggests commedia dell’arte, as do the work’s bendy posing and gender differentiation. The woman, manipulated by the man, is a coquettish doll, blowing kisses, flirting with her shoulders and covering her mouth with her hand. Their final pretzely pose is in the shape of a heart.

The Taylor company’s recent effort to reconstruct half-lost works is a valuable, fruitful endeavor. Beyond being interesting and paradoxically novel themselves, the revivals resonate with other, more familiar pieces in the Taylor repertory. If you know that body of work, the reconstructions help fill in gaps. You can see how the revivals fit in, but also how they might have fallen out, replaced by newer, better Taylor works, the kind there will be no more of. (Taylor died at age 88 in 2018.)

In one of the two programs at the Joyce, you can notice echoes of “Tablet” and “Churchyard” in “Esplanade,” the Taylor classic that turns 50 this year. The difference between “Esplanade” and the others isn’t just its crowd-pleasing joyride. It’s how it seems to contain everything — the internal echoes, how the same steps keep changing from light to dark and back again. You can watch it over and over, year after year, and always see something new. That’s why it never grows old.