On November 11, the Paul Taylor Dance Foundation will honor painter Alex Katz at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater, marking another chapter in one of the most enduring arts and dance partnerships.
Katz’s collaboration with choreographer Paul Taylor began in 1960, when poet and critic Edwin Denby introduced the pair at the Spoleto Festival in Italy. Taylor was redefining the language of movement; Katz, then in his 30s, had begun to rebel against what he called the “dark and artsy” tradition of modern dance lighting, favoring pure white light and pastel colors.
Of course, Katz’s current popularity extends far beyond the stage. At New York’s Gladstone Gallery, he is showing 11 new paintings set on a road in Maine; Katz renders the road in bold orange against a white background.
Meanwhile, San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art is hosting “Alex Katz: Theater and Dance,” the first major survey of his collaborative work for the stage, including rare sketches, sets and paintings from more than two dozen works. These include 15 important collaborations with Taylor.
Their first composition, meridianwhich ran counter to the moody, dramatic aesthetic of postwar modern dance. As Katz recalled, “It was a very radical approach. Paul would take anything.”
Over the next 25 years, the two created 16 more works together. Their collaboration includes Skudorama (1963), private domain (1969), Digitization (1978), and Sunset (1983), dance critic Arlene Croce described these works as embodying a “shimmering ambiguity”. “There was a lot of conflict, violence,” Katz later said, “but it was a match made in artistic heaven.”
“They were all single-minded, even aggressive,” recalls dealer Timothy Taylor, who showed Katz’s work for years. “But that tension—the push against each other—left Alex with a lifelong understanding of how bodies move, how energy travels through space. You can still feel it in his paintings.”
For Michael Nowak, the second artistic director of the Paul Taylor Dance Foundation (who was hand-picked by Taylor), the genius of their relationship was how Katz’s paintings became living structures on stage. “He designed what we affectionately call ‘barriers,'” Novak said. “He would actually take up two-thirds of the stage with a curtain or a cube, and Paul had to choreograph around it. It forced a new awareness of space, almost like a collage.”
exist SunsetFor example, Katz blocked off the back and one side of the stage with droplets that resembled branches and leaves—what he called the “kill center”—so that Taylor was forced to rethink how bodies occupied space.
Their creative tug-of-war creates a rare psychological resonance. “Sometimes dance is timely,” Novak said, “but great dances—like Taylor’s and Katz’s—become timeless. They touch something deep in the soul. Decades later, you can still feel that sense of loss, or youth, or wonder about what they were pursuing.”
At the November gala, Taylor & Company will perform Sunsetperhaps the most emotionally charged of their collaborations. Katz came up with the idea after watching a soldier flirt with a young woman in Madrid’s Retiro Park—a scene that struck him as both tender and destined. Taylor transformed this image into a meditation on war and memory, set to Edward Elgar’s strings and the eerie call of a loon (Katz’s idea). result, according to new york timesis “a dance that reliably makes audiences cry.”
Katz himself always viewed collaboration as a source of discipline and freedom. “I learned a lot from Paul about gestures and relationships between people,” he once wrote. “I learned from Paul that all your work doesn’t have to be the same. I learned from Paul to never become complacent with the public. The only person you don’t want to bore yourself is yourself.”
