Taylor 2 Flexes Its Muscles

Paul Taylor’s choreography explores the junction between the everyday and the eternal, sometimes mocking our fads and gestural lingo with wicked irony, sometimes immersing us in altered states: lost worlds, processes of nature, formal geometry, pure emotion. His current company numbers 16, but its touring adjunct, Taylor 2, dances his large-scale works with a cast of six, using adaptations by Taylor himself that often intensify his expressive and technical demands.

Two Taylor 2 programs at Occidental College over the weekend surveyed his creative range and tested the company’s talent for radical shifts of style--sometimes within the same work. In the familiar “Company B,” for example, Orion Duckstein danced two roles that belonged to different soloists when this evocation of World War II Americana was new in 1991. He proved terrific at the crumbling self-control and puffed-up machismo of “Tico-Tico,” but not ideally suited to the constant balletic jumping required in the “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” showpiece. Similarly, Amy Marshall delivered the double-edged come-on of “Rum and Coca-Cola” more effectively than the progressively crazed ardor of “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” Annamaria Mazzini expertly handled several subsidiary assignments before exuding more elegiac fervor than any previous “Another You” dancer seen in the Southland.

In “Funny Papers,” a collaborative 1994 comic suite set to some of the silliest pop records ever made, the performance started effortfully--Taylor whimsy as hard labor--but grew endearingly playful by the time Robert Kleinendorst and Chad Levy bounced through “I Like Bananas Because They Have No Bones.” It reached full glory, however, with Mazzini and Duckstein leading the cornball self-celebration of “I Am Woman.”

Taylor’s sense of social satire also shaped “3 Epitaphs,” a 1956 vision of lumbering, anonymous figures, hooded in black, who remained all too human in their relationships. Moreover, this piece demonstrated Taylor’s knack for formal movement design, the focus of “Profiles” (1979), with its flattened-out body language that made the dancers seem to be moving in lateral tracks or grooves as dimensionless cutouts. Shown at its purest here, this language returned as an expressive statement in the “March of Time” friezes of “Company B” and the Grecian-urn poses of “Images” (1977), one of the most complex and mysterious of Taylor’s works, with its Minoan-style costumes, atmospheric Debussy piano score and feeling of archaic ritual.

Sometimes downright uncanny, the Taylor 2 performance of “Images” emphasized how strange and ultimately unknowable the past can be--as opposed to “Company B,” which made it startlingly immediate. In the “Moon Reflections” duet, for example, Duckstein and Amy Young danced in isolated emotional orbits, looking at once so beautiful and so remote--from us and from one another--that they might have been statues coincidentally sharing a gallery. Less idealized but equally remote: the primitive rites evoked in “Runes” (1975), a work suggesting a cycle of burial and rebirth, but with plenty of enigmatic quasi-archeological evidence for the audience to connect. Somewhat deficient in atmosphere, the Taylor 2 production capitalized on primal modern dance movement values: deployment of weight, connection to the floor, extreme flexibility throughout the body.

In contrast, “Airs” (1978) represented the kind of modern dance that ballet companies love to acquire: warm, elegant Taylor-on-the-run, a style infinitely inventive in its response to its Handel accompaniment, but also linear and even courtly enough to keep ballet dancers and audiences comfortable. Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris, eat your hearts out: There is no more imaginative all-American modern dance neoclassicism than this--and Mazzini, in particular, seemed to savor every step of it.

Part of an ongoing Paul Taylor residency centered at the Alex Theatre in Glendale, the appearance of Taylor 2 at the Keck Theater on Friday and Saturday marked the last scheduled dance event for the year at Occidental College, an institution that previously sponsored the award-winning “Feet Speak” summer series, plus programming during the school year that gave its students access to the best achievements of the local dance community. A victim of fiscal cutbacks, the loss of dance at Oxy is thus a loss to both those students and the community as a whole.

* The Paul Taylor Dance Company performs different mixed bills on April 24 at 8 p.m. and April 25 at 2 p.m. in the Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale. $15-43. (800) 233-3123.