Dancing with partners

The earliest hints that a new Paul Taylor dance is about to emerge occur when the master choreographer begins a private dialogue with his choice of music. After this extended period of careful listening, the piece takes shape during an intensive rehearsal process with Taylor’s company of 16 dancers. But before a new work is ready for the stage, the choreographer relies on two other longtime collaborators -- lighting designer Jennifer Tipton and set and costume designer Santo Loquasto -- to intuitively grasp its essence and complete its look.

The results, as anyone who has sampled even a small portion of the extensive Taylor repertory knows, are varied and unpredictable. Each work has its own specific tone, whether hauntingly mysterious, gently nostalgic, luminously affirmative or demonically disturbing. The program that the Paul Taylor Dance Company will bring to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion next weekend -- three works spanning more than half the company’s 50-year history -- includes one of his most exultant, expansive pieces, the 1982 “Mercuric Tidings,” as well as the 1975 “Runes,” in which the dancers seem to emerge from some distant, primal realm to enact unpredictable moonlit rituals.

For the third work, the company will present the first Los Angeles performances of “Promethean Fire,” a powerful example of Taylor’s mature craftsmanship and richness of invention. Created in 2002 during a period when he was often turning to popular American music of various decades, it is set to what initially seems an unlikely choice: Leopold Stokowski’s super-sized (some might say bombastic) orchestrations of three Bach scores, including the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, used previously in Disney’s “Fantasia.”

A full-company piece that operates on a grand emotional scale, with dense, intricate patterning but also moments of searing intimacy, “Promethean Fire,” with its fierce solemnity, burnished glow and stark black-on-black palette, also vividly showcases the seamless collaboration between Taylor, 73, and what has become his exclusive design team.

As he has since 1966, Taylor trusted Tipton, who comes to see his pieces in the studio only when they are completed, to find a way to cut to the heart of the dance with her sensitive, flexible lighting. “She’s seen my work for so long that I don’t have to explain anything to her,” Taylor said during a phone interview from his home on Long Island. “There’s very little conversation between us. She understands my work very well. I can trust her absolutely. Her contribution to my work is phenomenal.”

Tipton always makes herself available when Taylor has a premiere, despite a busy, far-flung schedule of commitments in dance, theater and opera. In recent weeks, she has been lighting productions for South Carolina’s Spoleto Festival USA and in Hong Kong. “Paul and I have always seemed to understand each other’s work,” she said from her hotel in Charleston, S.C., where she was lighting a new piece by choreographer David Gordon.

At 67 one of the eminences in her field, Tipton got her start as a lighting designer in the 1960s with the fledgling Taylor troupe. She was a modern dancer herself, performing with a group called the Merry-Go-Rounders, when fellow dancer Dan Wagoner introduced her to the choreographer on the New York City subway.

“I found him impressive as a person and as a performer,” she said. “I came to love the dances Paul was doing at that time.” She also became the company’s stage manager, responsible for re-creating the lighting plots of her mentor, Tom Skelton, as she toured with the troupe for seven years. Eventually, she graduated from being Skelton’s assistant to designing the lights herself. Her first assignment was a daunting one: Taylor’s 1966 “Orbs,” a two-act work set to the late quartets of Beethoven. Since then, she has lighted every work he has choreographed.

The two are clearly artistic soul mates who share an affinity for nonverbal communication. “Since the beginning of my professional life, I’ve found that I am more articulate with light than with words, and I think Paul is more comfortable speaking through the dance -- although he has a beautiful way with words,” she said. And whatever other demands fill her calendar, Tipton remains devoted to the theatrical domain where she honed her craft. “The space of the dance is made by light. In theater, the space is more often made by scenery. It is in dance that one often finds the opportunity to paint with light -- a very satisfying challenge.”

Loquasto, whose work encompasses theater (he is a multiple Tony Award winner) and film (he has been the production designer for two dozen Woody Allen films), has a similar loyalty to Taylor, with whom his collaboration dates to 1988. “I had worked with Jennifer for quite a few years, and I would go see Paul’s work with her,” Loquasto said from his New York studio. “So my introduction was through her.” Taylor remembers admiring designs Loquasto had created for choreographer Twyla Tharp.

Setting the mood

The two first collaborated on “Counterswarm,” in which Loquasto put two hostile, aggressive insect-like groups of dancers in bold, harem-style costumes of rich purple and red. A year later, his imposing yet ambiguous set and costume designs, in muted shades of beige and gray, enhanced “Speaking in Tongues,” one of Taylor’s most expansive and provocative works.

Loquasto, 59, said he observes a new work in the studio as it’s in progress and also listens to its music extensively. If it’s one of Taylor’s quasi-narrative works, he finds appropriate looks to delineate the characters, and if it is one of the choreographer’s frequent forays into popular music, he looks for ways to evoke a time and place without letting things get too specific. For the now classic “Company B,” which Taylor choreographed in 1991 to songs of the Andrews Sisters, “I had a sense of a look that evoked the era -- trousers and a washed-out Hawaiian shirt look, because it needed to be like a faded recollection.” He remembers “Company B” as involving a particularly close collaboration by the team. Certainly Tipton’s subtle lighting added to the aura of a joyful era recollected wistfully: She opened and closed the work with the dancers appearing and receding in subtle silhouette.

At the time he embarked on “Promethean Fire,” Taylor said, “I had been working with a lot of popular songs, and I just started listening to Bach again. I have tons of Bach recordings. I love the orchestrated versions of these pieces. It’s much more theatrical, for one thing. It’s fuller -- and louder! For years, I avoided using full-orchestra pieces. I was afraid they would swamp the dance. But this time I thought, ‘Why not? Be brave, and see what happens.’

“Because of the music, I wanted it to be a large-scale piece, and I wanted a variety of emotional colors. It’s about getting up, rejuvenation. Therefore, the ‘Promethean’ idea I thought might be appropriate. It sounded big,” he added with one of his frequent bursts of laughter. “It wasn’t meant to be about a specific event, in my mind, but you can relate it to events at different times.”

The monumental orchestrations of Bach’s soaring Baroque lines inspired the wealth of complex, dense patterning that at times creates the illusion the stage is filled with far more than 16 dancers. Taylor seems surprised himself at how quickly the choreography took shape; he spent a total of 24 hours in the studio working on it. “It was because the dancers were all on the same wavelength. There was no wasted time with explanations about the style. It just went so fast,” he said.

It was Tipton’s task to illuminate the rapidly shifting groupings and to alter the focus for the heart-rending intensity of the central duet. “The ensemble sections were perfect for a grand sweep of light, and the duet seemed right for a much more spare approach,” she said. “The title led me to think of that grand sweep, and also of red light, which comes into play when the relationship ‘sours’ in the duet.”

For the costumes, Loquasto, who had to take into consideration the sudden dramatic lifts in the choreography, settled on a uniform, nearly unisex look of stretch velvet unitards with diagonally crossed strips. “I thought the piece should be black on black, something that would catch light and be responsive to changes in the light,” he explained.

Indeed, Taylor noted that it was entirely Loquasto’s idea to have not only black costumes but “a black floor and black background. He said that to me almost immediately after the first time he saw the dance in rehearsal. I said, ‘Great, that’ll be interesting. It will give Jenny something to worry about!’ ”

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Paul Taylor Dance Company

When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

Price: $15 to $50

Contact: (213) 972-0711