‘B’ BOPPIN’ : Andrews Sisters and Other Heavenly Bodies Inspire Lively Program of Paul Taylor Works

Choreographer Paul Taylor is retelling a favorite story about the origin of “Company B,” his 1991 pop ballet set to songs by the Andrews Sisters.

Seems he was on his way to the studio without a thought in his head for a new work commissioned by the Houston Ballet, he says over the phone from his home in New York.

“I had very little in mind until I had passed a trash can. A record was lying on top. I picked it up. It was a recording by the Andrews Sisters. I played it and thought, ‘That’s not bad,’ and went from there.”

It’s an engaging story, and Taylor, the charming, down-home, immensely gifted modern-dance figure, has told it to many a journalist. But it isn’t true.

He confessed to a Dance magazine writer last year that he made up the whole thing. “Lying is more fun,” he said then. “The Andrews Sisters are part of my life. Every time I feel glum I put on the Andrews Sisters.”

It’s not that Taylor is, well, a liar. It’s just that, like “Company B,” which Taylor’s company will dance on Saturday and Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Taylor and many of his other works aren’t quite as simple as they might first present themselves.

So be cautious about anything the paradoxical, 62-year-old, still-boyish Taylor ventures.

He says that works such as “Company B” (and his new “Oz,” which premiered in New York at the end of last month but which is not on the bill for Costa Mesa) show “a view of America falling apart, in a pleasant way.” But despite that critical slant in the works, Taylor insists he is “not angry at the country. I’ve never been angry at the country. I always felt lucky to be here.”

But when Taylor was named as one of this year’s Kennedy Center honorees, an award that included a White House ceremony, the choreographer said he was concerned about accepting the award in light of the controversies that plagued the National Endowment for the Arts during the Bush Administration.

“The sole reason I accept the award is for the field in general,” he said at the time. “I do it for the sake of dance.” (The award ceremony will be televised in December.)

“I try not to preach,” he adds. “Of course, many of the pieces are American. They can’t be anything else. But underneath all of them is my hope that they can be interpreted broadly. I have a hope that goes beyond a specific country or time.”

So he’s hopeful? “There’s always hope, I suppose.”

It wasn’t exactly a hopeful time, however, when Taylor was born in 1930, in the midst of the Depression. His mother, struggling to make ends meet, managed a restaurant in a hotel in Washington, where he grew up. Her first husband had died and she later divorced her second husband, Paul’s father, because he “had become overly attracted to her second son,” Taylor writes in his autobiography, “Private Domain,” published in 1987.

A somewhat rebellious, lonely and imaginative teen-ager, Taylor spent time in several foster homes, played football and eventually won a swimming scholarship to Syracuse University in New York, where he began studying art. But the static nature of this art form and the tedium of waiting for paint to dry bored him.

About this time, fortuitously, a friend asked him to partner her in a modern dance concert, and he became hooked on dance. To begin his studies, he went to the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College in 1952, where he met Martha Graham, who later asked him to join her company.

Taylor danced with Graham from 1955-1962 and danced with the Merce Cunningham, Pearl Lang and Anna Sokolow companies, among others. After a precedent-setting shared program between the New York City Ballet and the Graham company in 1959, NYCB choreographer George Balanchine invited him to dance Apollo.

But as early as 1953, he began creating his own work. In 1957, he launched out on his own publicly as a choreographer, only to earn an infamous blank page review in the long-defunct Dance Observer by a major, unhappy dance critic--Louis Horst. One of the new pieces was a duet in which Taylor and a partner (Toby Glanternik) remained motionless through four minutes of silence.

Elsewhere in the program, Taylor used everyday movements and gestures instead of dance “steps.” He was about five years ahead of his time, as the Judson Dance Theater would make this avant-garde experimenting not only acceptable, but recognized as a major advance in modern dance.

Horst’s review, however, did have an impact on Taylor, and he decided that he must consider an audience’s reactions in making any new piece.

Taylor has created more than 80 works, some of which are danced by more than 20 major companies worldwide--including American Ballet Theatre, the Joffrey, the San Francisco, Washington, Cincinnati and Pacific Northwest ballets and the Paris Opera Ballet.

In recognition of this output, Taylor won a $260,000 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” fellowship in 1985.

But besides creating works, Taylor has influenced two generations of choreographers and dancers, including Twyla Tharp, Laura Dean, Pina Bausch, Senta Driver, Daniel Erzalow and David Parsons, virtually all of whom have danced in his company.

The repertory to be danced during the Center engagement spans 30 years of Taylor’s creativity, although, he says, “I didn’t set out to make an overview of my career. That would be sort of hard to do on two programs. I don’t think that’s my job. I don’t sum up and try to put my dances in categories. Other people sometimes do.”

“Esplanade,” which opens the run on Saturday, was created in 1974 to music by Bach. It was Taylor’s first work as a non-dancer, created after he collapsed (suffering from severe ankle injuries, a bout of hepatitis and ulcer-related losses of blood) at the end of his solo as Noah in his “American Genesis” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1974.

The work harks back to those early experimental pieces. It consists, he says, of “a lot of running and walking. These are found materials, not stylized dance steps. That wasn’t the idea.”

In addition to serving as the title of his autobiography, “Private Domain,” on the Saturday program, is a dance that was created in 1969 to music by Iannis Xenakis.

“That’s sort of a private view, an obstructed view,” Taylor says. The set consists of three openings at the front of the stage “which you glimpse the dance through.

“If you want a city reference, an entertainment here (in New York) is to look across at a building, into windows where people pass through the rooms, and wonder what they are up to. It’s a kind of voyeurism. I intentionally place the audience in a voyeuristic position. I suppose that’s not a nice thing to do, (but) obstruction has always interested me.”

In addition to “Company B,” the Sunday program will include “Junction,” “Duet” and “Syzygy.” The latter, created in 1987 to a commissioned score by Donald York, has been described by Taylor as “basically a movement study.”

New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff reacted to the work in a more sublime fashion. “Syzygy,” she wrote after seeing the premiere, “comments on life. The title refers to an alignment of heavenly bodies that may influence tides, and Mr. Taylor uses this implication to create a moment of moon madness.”

What does the choreographer think of that?

“I stopped reading reviews a while ago,” he says. “You hope people will see something like what you intended. It isn’t always possible. If they see something they can connect with, I guess that’s something. . . .

“We bring our own experiences to these things and need to fill in the blanks by drawing on our own resources. I think of dance as a poem which the viewers can read between the lines, if they like. This interpretation game--you can participate or not.”

Over time, Taylor has seen changes in the way people do his dances. “In general, dancers today are a bit different from previous generations,” he says. “They’re cooler. The emotional context, the way they interpret a role, if it’s at all dramatic, I would say, today’s dancers would tend to give it a slightly more removed look.”

But, no, that doesn’t bother him at all. “I’ve never been fond of furniture chewing,” he says.

What

Paul Taylor Dance Company.

When

Saturday, Nov. 28, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, Nov. 29, at 2 p.m.

Where

Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.

Whereabouts

San Diego (I-405) Freeway to Bristol Street exit. North to Town Center Drive. (Center is one block east of South Coast Plaza.)

Wherewithal

$13 to $36.

Where to call

(714) 556-2787.