Paul Taylor Plants Perennials : The choreographer’s ageless pieces are being performed by 22 leading companies; now he looks forward to nourishing future dancers

NEW YORK —  Choreographer Paul Taylor lives in the southern part of Greenwich Village in a small, old, brick house on a street of similar residences and a seedy old theater-turned-movie-revival house. Despite the onset of autumn, there’s still a bit of color gleaming in his two window boxes of portulaca. “I planted the seeds about 15 years ago,” he says. “They keep coming back.”

Much like his dance pieces.

Taylor, whose company will be performing programs at UCLA’s Royce Hall Friday and Saturday and Nov. 13 at Symphony Hall in San Diego, lives a rather solitary life, whether in New York or at his Long Island retreat. But his work is continually revived and is known to an enormous public.

Taylor’s dances are currently being performed by about 22 major companies worldwide--including American Ballet Theatre, the Joffrey, the Pittsburgh, Ohio, San Francisco, Washington, Cincinnati, and Pacific Northwest ballets, the Basel Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, Les Grand Ballets Canadiens, Bat Dor in Israel, and the Gulbenkian Ballet in Lisbon. “A lot of companies are doing the same pieces, though: ‘Aureole,’ ‘Esplanade,’ ‘Airs,’ ‘Arden Court,’ ” he says modestly. “Although Ohio Chamber Ballet took ‘Big Bertha’ last year. Usually the ballet companies want the pretty ones.”

Royalties go to Taylor, but they don’t represent big bucks. He says he gets about $100 to $175 per performance. But there’s an initial fee Taylor receives for mounting the work, usually from $12,000 to $17,000, depending on the piece. (A retired Paul Taylor Dance Company member does the actual staging.) “That’s where my income comes from mainly. My salary from the company is small, but it’s made up for by selling the dances,” Taylor says.

Standing in the doorway of his small-scale Village house, Taylor seems particularly tall. He is all in blue--chambray shirts, low-slung blue work pants, blue sneakers. His dog, Budd, a 2 1/2-year-old Springer spaniel that obviously still thinks he’s a puppy, bounds with maniacal energy and fiendish curiosity and nearly manages to leap outside. Spring he has plenty of. Taylor says he named him for Billy Budd. “They’re both sweet, but killers.”

For a moment, Taylor’s face--with its ingenuous blue eyes--seems morose, its lines all turned down, and almost looks his age--59--but when he smiles an instant later, his face becomes impossibly boyish.

“I love my house,” says Taylor, who has furnished its modest, low-ceilinged rooms plainly, and revels in the precociousness of the star magnolia in the shady little back garden that comes into bloom before anything else on the block.

He bought the house a few years before he stopped dancing in 1973. “It must have been ‘70, or something like that,” he says. “Things were a lot cheaper then. It’s like a regulation Federal town house, modeled after the English ones.” A plaque on the front gives its date: 1823.

“With what I would have been paying for an apartment, it made sense to buy. I never thought of it as an investment--I just wanted a place to live, and I figured that it would pay for itself in a very short time if I rented out three of the floors.” Now he just rents out the ground floor, which is a sort of semi-basement--in his words, “half in and half out of the ground.”

The year he stopped dancing, he bought a retreat on Long Island’s north fork, about a 2-hour drive from downtown. “I really needed to get away and be quiet somewhere out of the city, and I was very fortunate to get it. It was a real fluke, way below the going rate for waterfront. I go there every chance I get. It’s paradise.”

When Taylor first had a company 35 years ago, his dancers were, in many ways, his peers. Now, of course, that relationship is quite changed. He gets older, but the dancers remain around the same age. “Like in school, the teacher gets older but the students don’t,” he says. And since he’s not touring, he doesn’t spend quite so much time with the dancers. “There’s a much greater distance personally than there was before. It’s good. There’s nothing like performing, you know, but I had lots of that so I don’t feel gypped.”

Is he still turned on by making dances? “Yah,” he admits, a little vaguely. “But it’s different than it used to be. I’m more accustomed to it. I don’t fret as much. And it seems more like my work , what I do and not such a scary thing. It’s not that I don’t get nervous anymore.”

At this point, there are about 35 years of solid evidence that he actually knows how to make dances. Besides the dances themselves, that evidence includes the Scripps Award, the Dance Magazine Award, half a dozen honorary degrees and a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 1985. He was elected last year to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and, come January, he is to be elevated to the rank of commandre of France’s Ordre de la Legion d’Honneur--he’s currently a chevalier.

“I keep telling myself I know how to do this,” Taylor says. “Except, when I start each time I think, ‘What do I do?’ But that’s nice. I’ve sort of trained myself to forget so I don’t get bored. I can’t remember a step. I try to approach each new piece a little differently. I mean, choreography offers so many possibilities that it seems like wasting time if you keep doing the same kind of thing. I know my dances fall into certain categories, but nevertheless I try to approach each one another way.”

You’d think a world-renowned choreographer at the pinnacle of his profession would be able to relax and breathe easy, but, to Taylor, security is an alien notion, though he doesn’t act as if there’s any imminent financial threat.

“We’re surviving. Every year the board is faced with all this money they’ve got to raise to meet all these bills,” he says. “We keep talking about an emergency fund, but emergency bills always swallow that. Our income is only about half the costs. There seems to be a couple of million dollars a year deficit. It’s just not a money-making proposition. That’s the way it is.”

Happily, he no longer has to do the fund-raising himself. That’s the board’s role, he says. He appreciates that his board doesn’t try to dictate what kind of piece he should make. “In a ballet company, it’s not unusual for the board to make specific demands of the choreographer,” he says.

But Taylor is eminently practical in his approach to choreography. “I rule out just any old whim. I usually think: What can we afford to do? What does the repertory need? What do the dancers need? How much time do I have? So only after a lot of practical restrictions do I come around to the imagination. And things don’t just pop into my mind out of nowhere. I circle the ideas, and I don’t get too close at first because I don’t want to know what the idea is yet. I creep up on it. And you have to block it out. You don’t want it to spring yet. It has to vegetate. And the way I get it to vegetate is I do gardening.

“I chop down trees, or I do some dumb job that doesn’t require too much brain work. A lot of boring jobs. So your mind wanders while your hands are working. But you’re not really thinking.”

And then what? “Then you start rehearsals. Suddenly it’s time to go to the first rehearsal and there’s no idea at all . But you don’t let that bother you. You just pretend you know what you’re doing. You say, ‘You three men go around that way, and the rest of you follow me.” And then pretty soon you actually know what you’re doing.”

Does he do much demonstrating?

“Very little. I get very annoyed when I have to get out of my chair. I sit a lot. Or I stand at the tape machine and try to look at those little numbers going around, and I can’t see them quite and try to cope with the dog that’s barking, and I can’t hear the music because fire engines are going by. Or somebody has to go to the bathroom, or two other people are out sick just when I need them. You know. The usual.”

At the moment, Taylor is working on a full-length piece (his first since “American Genesis” back in 1973) which will incorporate “Syzygy” (which is being presented on one of the Royce Hall programs). “Lately, some of my pieces have been real long. Last year, ‘Speaking in Tongues’ was 45 minutes--no, almost an hour. I was going to say that Don York, who’s writing the music, talked me into doing a full-length piece, but I think it was my idea. I like to change scale and I just finished a really short piece to Dukas’ ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’--a slap-happy version called ‘The Sorcerer’s Sofa.’ The sorcerer is a phrenologist, and it’s all Alley Oop style--you know, cave men.”

Taylor seems to be thinking of it as a companion piece to his “Snow White.” Maybe there’s a full evening of Disney knockoffs in his future.

Weekends, when the company doesn’t rehearse, and whenever it is away on tour, Taylor is on Long Island. What does he do there? “Lately I’ve been playing lumberjack,” he said. “I’ve been clearing a lot of trees to broaden my view to the left. I’ve taken down about 40 with a chain saw. It’s great fun--except I learned lately not to cut down trees when the wind is blowing because who knows what might happen. I was pinned under for a little while.

“I garden a lot and do house improvements. I’m always busy and I come back to the city much tired-er than when I left, but it’s my form of exercise. I could never stand to do exercise, and when I stopped dancing, I just stopped doing plies or anything . But I have all this work to do out there, and that keeps me on my feet.”

Taylor’s year falls into a predictable pattern governed by the company’s touring schedule, though he rarely travels with the group unless he wants to observe his new dancers or needs to see how new pieces work in performance.

“There’s the fall tour and the winter tour, and then the company’s month-long spring season at City Center, and then the summer tour,” Taylor said. Altogether there are about 18 weeks of touring, not counting the New York season with three rehearsal periods a year.

“Two 6-week periods and one 2-to-3-weeks period before the spring season, and that includes everything: making new pieces, changing casts in the repertory, getting old pieces back,” Taylor said. “I could use a lot more time. I’d like to turn out more pieces.”

In terms of planning, Taylor figures out the entire program--usually six different evenings--for the New York spring season first. When that’s wrapped up, he makes up the touring programs out of those pieces.

“You need a calculator,” he said. “For one thing, I don’t want to overload any of the dancers, and I don’t want to leave anyone with too little to do. Ideally, they should each be in two pieces a night, and that’s very hard to balance. And then you want programs that make some kind of sense. You don’t want three ballets with all white costumes. So there are all kinds of restrictions. And if you’re touring, you can’t take three pieces with a lot of paraphernalia. There are many kinds of considerations, and it takes time to figure it all out.

“And then, Bettie (de Jong, the company’s rehearsal supervisor, who’s been with Taylor for 27 years and who stopped dancing about four years ago) notices some terrible flaw or the sponsor doesn’t like the program because it’s exactly what they didn’t want, so you have to start juggling again. It’s not one of my favorite jobs.”

Lately there’s been a lot of turnover in the company. “It usually goes in batches,” Taylor says. “Instead of one going, several leave at the same time. And then several years will go by. But I have some wonderful dancers right now. One of my greatest strengths has been the dancers. I’ve been very fortunate.

“Who they are and the kind of dancers they are gives me strength because I care about them and I like working with them. It’s why I don’t directly work with other companies. I’ll go in and clean up a little, but I don’t choreograph on people I don’t know because I have the ones I love to work with. I’ve made that decision.”

Three years ago, Taylor began to present works by company members on his programs. The first two seasons featured short pieces by company men, and, last year, works by company women. How come? “It just seemed like a good idea,” he says, with a kind of ingratiating naivete.

“There were several who were doing choreography anyway, and I thought, if they do something nice, why don’t we just show it? I’ve got to have approval so I have a little bit of control, but I don’t usually . . . make them make a lot of changes. Dancers who’ve tried choreographing themselves set another kind of understanding. Somehow they’re able to work with me in a more helpful way.”

Maybe Taylor’s dancer/choreographers will be happier to stick around. “Well, they’re going to leave anyway,” he says fatalistically. “Maybe it makes them more content to stay, but, who knows? This might speed up their departures.”

At least choreographing under the company’s auspices gives them a studio to rehearse in, dancers to use and audiences who will see the work, even if the pressure of showing work alongside Taylor’s is not negligible.

“You know,” he continues in his dreamy, deceptively innocent manner, “I’ve been thinking about having a choreographic workshop built on my property in the country, for young people to come and make dances in the summers--if I can get some grants,” Taylor said. This idea has been brewing for a year and a half. He has the building planned and a contractor lined up.

“It’s not a complicated architecture,” he says. “It’s rather barn-like, with a lot of bedrooms upstairs, a big studio downstairs, an eating area, kitchen, bathrooms, lounge, and it has to have its own well and electric line. That shouldn’t take long to build. One builder’s ready to go. He’s someone I’ve worked with before and his estimate is fantastically low. I think he estimated something like $30,000--or maybe it was $50,000. I have the figures in the country.

“I’ll just supply time and space. If they want me to look at their pieces I will. I’ll give them a deadline, when they have to finish something, but I don’t think I’ll teach. I think they have to teach themselves. I figure we’ll be able to put up about 10 people. Now there may not be any great choreographers that come out of this. They’re very rare. One or two in a generation. But it’s worth trying.

“We have to think ahead,” he says, as if puzzled that his willingness to share the privacy of his hideaway isn’t surprising. “It’s the younger generation that’s going to take over, and, if you love dance and care about what happens with it, you can’t help but want to help. And I think this is the way I could do it best.”