Paul Taylor loved his dancers, but Carolyn Adams must have been in another league. In his autobiography, Taylor recalled his reaction to her audition for his company: She was “a sure bet, a gold mine.”
Adams went to that audition with no intention of getting the job. A senior studying dance at Sarah Lawrence College, she had offered to drive some of her friends to the audition. It was a Friday in January 1965. She had her father’s De Soto.
“It’s almost embarrassing to tell this story,” Adams said. “I kept waiting to get eliminated.” There were 200 people at the audition. “But I have to say that there was a certain point when we were moving across the floor — I thought, Oh, this dress fits kind of nice.”
Taylor’s movement, in other words, suited her physicality. But before she could join the company, she had to finish school. Taylor made an agreement with Bessie Schönberg, the director of Sarah Lawrence‘s dance program, that Adams would be released during certain hours so she could learn repertory. “That didn’t happen back then,” Adams said. “You didn’t walk in and out of school.”
Adams danced with the Taylor company until 1982 and is now its director of education. On Wednesday, she will be honored at the company’s gala program at Lincoln Center with a new work by Robert Battle: “Dedicated to You,” a solo (to be danced by Jada Pearman) set to Bach and Sarah Vaughan. Battle, the former artistic director at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, was Adams’s student at Juilliard and considers her an important mentor.
Bach reminds Battle of Taylor, who made memorable dances to his music, and also of Adams, by way of Taylor. And Sarah Vaughan is one of Battle’s favorite singers. “As much as I love Sarah Vaughan, I’ve never wanted to choreograph to the music because I feel so close to it. But I felt this was a moment where I could kind of be a little more vulnerable in my thank you to Carolyn.”
Adams is hesitant about being the center of attention. She isn’t fond of, say, being stared at while people sing happy birthday to her. But she is grateful. “To be 81 and still championing somebody who hired me when I was 21, I understand that that’s a big deal,” she said. “I also think it’s a celebration of the loyalty that an organization could have toward a dancer.”
In the time she was with the company, Taylor seemed to see Adams as its glue. “I think he really depended on me in some ways to be even tempered,” she said. “Although he did say, ‘Her eyes are sometimes defiant but never bleak.’ I love that.”
She originated parts in some of Taylor’s most beloved dances: “Esplanade,” “Airs,” “Cloven Kingdom,” “Arden Court” and “Big Bertha.” “Whatever the role,” Taylor wrote of Adams, “her dancing was unmannered and wondrous. To put it poetically, she was an elegant nectar laced with warm delicacy, easy and effortless.”
He continued, “To put it less poetically, she never heaved, let her tongue hang out, or even sweated” and “she was one of those dancers who jump from the small bones of the foot without any understandable preparation.”
Her seamless quality can still be seen in the solo Taylor created for her in “Esplanade” (1975), which is part of the company’s Lincoln Center season. The dance had its beginnings when the company was in residence in Lake Placid, N.Y.; Taylor was choreographing “Runes,” which Adams was not a part of, and during her time off she took lessons at the skating rink. “He found out and freaked out,” she said. “‘You’re going to get hurt. And what’s so great about skating?’ I said, ‘Moving backward, and circles.’’
In “Esplanade,” a Taylor classic based on everyday movement — standing, walking, sliding and falling — Adams’s running solo, which winds and curves like silk, remains a breathtaking highlight. “He gave us little pedometers as an opening-night gift,” she said. “That made such an impression on me because that was my metaphor — go the distance and cover space.”
As she pointed out, “I was a jock in high school.”
She played field hockey and basketball along with her sister, Julie Adams Strandberg, another important educator who was the founding director of dance at Brown University. “I had a good layup shot, and I was fast,” Adams said. “Basketball was a big deal for us. And, field hockey. That was really all about speed.”
Adams, who is married to married to another former Paul Taylor dancer, Robert Kahn, grew up in Harlem with her sister and parents. Her mother was a pianist and composer, and her father was a writer and journalist. (He was managing editor of The Chicago Defender and The Amsterdam News.) “I was a cartwheel-in-the-street kind of kid, a little tomboy,” she said. “I remember being heartbroken — I think it’s in fourth grade when they separate the boys and the girls in gym. The worst day of my life.”
She doesn’t really remember how she started dancing. But her mother put her and her sister in ballet classes. On television, she saw a group on “Your Show of Shows” performing a dance that “was somewhat jazzy, but it looked like modern,” Adams said. “I said, ‘I want to do that.’ So my mother researched and found out who the choreographer was. It was Nelle Fisher.”
Fisher didn’t teach children, but Adams, then 10, was allowed to take adult classes at her studio in Carnegie Hall. Her father didn’t understand modern dance — not many parents do — but he knew his daughters were entranced by it. “He said, ‘Girls, whatever you do, do it well,’” Adams said. “‘Learn how to teach it and how to talk about it and learn how to write.’ So those were the tools. That’s very grounding right there.”
Dancing with Taylor was like nothing else. She said it never felt like he was performing. “If he looked in your eyes, you could not fall off relevé no matter what,” she said. “It was that kind of purpose.”
When he stood in the wings, she said: “You never felt like you were being watched and judged. He was looking. Very unthreatening. I mean, I’ve heard of choreographers giving notes while onstage! It was the complete opposite of that.”
Dancers, as Adams knows, spend much of their career being told what they’re doing wrong, “even if it’s in the most positive voice — ‘fix this, fix this,’” she said.
As an educator, she decided early on that such an approach wasn’t useful. What is more important for a dancer is clarity of purpose. “Then you are able to learn at the highest level and not start thinking about what’s not happening,” she said. “That became a core value for me.”
Now, she said, she tells her students: “‘We didn’t come here to fix you. Nothing’s broken. We’re here to make changes. Maybe to make discoveries.’”
As she sees it, in Taylor’s work the dancer lives inside the environment of the dance. “I never felt like I was projecting to the audience,” she said. “I was very aware of this architecture of the dance in the space.”
It’s as if, she said, the dance takes place inside a sculpture or a painting, and the dancer navigates through it. “You get into the form in a very intricate way, and then what happens is sort of everything else,” she said. “People say, ‘I’m going to make it my own.’ No. It’s already your own. Just try to do the step. Rather than trying to imitate somebody, the deeper you get into the detail, the precision, the more you emerge.”
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