Poetry in Motion

To hear Paul Taylor tell it, he never really planned to be a dancer. He didn’t set out to become a choreographer. And he made no conscious decision to start his own dance company.

“I was in college on a swimming scholarship and trying to learn to paint,” Taylor said. “I didn’t think I would ever be a real painter. And I had this idea about dancing and thought that sounded good.”

If ever a career was destined, Taylor’s was. He enrolled in a summer dance school in 1952, landed in a class taught by Martha Graham, who invited him into her company as an understudy in 1953. “She saw something in me, I guess, and before I knew it, I was off on an around-the-world tour,” said Taylor.

Since then, the 67-year-old has been awarded six honorary degrees, three Guggenheim fellowships, a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” fellowship and the U.S. National Medal of Arts. He has choreographed more than 100 works. His own troupe, the Paul Taylor Dance Company, has done dozens of its own around-the-world tours.

The company’s current tour includes a stop at the Alex Theatre in Glendale on Sunday night. On the program are three works never seen before in Los Angeles: “Brandenburgs,” “Eventide” and “Offenbach Overtures.”

The newest work, “Eventide,” premiered in February in New York. Arranged to music by Ralph Vaughn Williams, it consists of five duets that explore love and loss. New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff called it “undisputably a dance poem, an ode to remembered emotion.” Taylor, too, said it’s a romantic memory piece. “It’s not one of those pyrotechnic dances,” he said. “It’s simple. It’s not always slow, but it’s not full of fireworks in the steps.”

“Brandenburgs,” interpretations of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos, is a revival of a 1988 work. Kisselgoff called the work “a clinker” back then, but looking at it again this year, she commented that in this work Taylor “takes a more formal approach and is concerned primarily with structure but also with unexpected gesture.”

The “Offenbach Overtures” are more lighthearted, “faster and footsier than I usually ask for,” Taylor said when it premiered two years ago. It features a duel and passing reference to the can-can dance for which Offenbach is known.

Until his dancers--whom he brags about like a proud parent--return from the tour, Taylor is waiting at his home in Mattituck, on Long Island, a painter with no paints.

Though he won’t choreograph without the dancers around, that doesn’t mean he is the collaborative type. To the contrary, he’s been known to call himself a dictator. “Placement, as in painting, is important to me--to keep a kind of balance or use of space,” he said, recalling his collegiate studies. “That’s one of the things that interests me. My dancers are trained to the half-inch as to where they’re going to be and when.”

Taylor himself got a late start as a dancer, but threw himself into it fully in his early 20s. When he wasn’t dancing with Graham’s company, he studied at Juilliard, or would rent a “ratty little stage somewhere” to perform his own works.

Now, 40 years later, Taylor represents the tradition of modern dance, not its cutting edge. But that is, perhaps, what has kept his work so popular, and his company so long-lasting.

“I like to think it’s because I’ve been able to make an effort to communicate,” he said. “A lot of dance, it seems to me as a viewer, isn’t always clear about what the intent is, what they’re trying to communicate. . . . If my work has been appreciated, I think it’s because people get it.”

BE THERE

The Paul Taylor Dance Company performs Sunday at 7 p.m. at the Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale. $22.50-$32.50. (800) 233-3123.