Nothing bespeaks this theme more dramatically than Taylor’s major new work “Company B.” The smash hit of his just-concluded engagement at New York’s City Center Theater, the dance will also be featured on the company’s U.S. tour this winter. Set to nine songs by the Andrews Sisters, “Company B” evokes the exuberant rhythms of the ’40s as well as the grim and persistent shadow of war. But even more vividly, it horrors Taylor’s magnificent dancers. Here is a Taylor we rarely see: joyfully and fearlessly open-hearted.
Bei mir bist du schon Please let me explain Bei mir bist du schon Means you’re grand
This is the first song we hear, and with it the dancers enter soberly, almost as if disembodied, like ghosts assembling on a remembered site. Two of them start a little rhythmic shuffle, others join in, a woman dips into a turn, and now they’re as buoyant as the music-but for the one who slumps suddenly to the floor. Francie Huber and Hernando Cortez launch into a lovely, garish “Pennsylvania Polka,” rollicking around in delight, while behind them a living frieze is slowly etched across the back of the stage as men fall into position ready to kill or die. Mary Cochran, the company sprite, skips and sashays around the stage as a cluster of bug-eyed men ogle her in the teasing “Rum and Coca-Cola”; then, with “There Will Never Be Another You,” the mood changes and Constance Dinapoli dances with an impassive David Grenke. The two barely connect, even when she hurtles herself across the floor to crumple at his feet. Carefully, he disentangles himself and joins a distant procession of the faceless dead, marching silently across the stage.
Some of the most glorious dancing to be seen anywhere bursts forth in the male solos Taylor has made for “Company B.” Andrew Asnes in “Tico-Tico,” dashing and suave but with an undercurrent of anguish; Patrick Corbin in “Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh!”, his eyes glittering as he drinks in the bevy of women around him and rips into a series of dazzling spins; and Jeff Wadlington, the “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (of Company B),” cool and sharp and gaudy-these men hit the stage with an honest blast of masculinity that’s thoroughly refreshing. Their unabashed attack and rhythmic vigor are stunning, and so is their attention to the subtleties involved in a bit of jazzy posturing, or a touch of impudence.
Pop music-which Taylor says he has never used before because he thought it unsuitable for the theater-seems to have freed something in the man often called our greatest living choreographer. Taylor has made rapturous dances before, but the joy has tended to be abstract: it’s built into the movement, not the characters. When the subject is human life, what attracts him most seems to be the underside, the realm of the fantastic and creepy. Among other works in this season’s repertoire is the 1977 “Dust,” a jamboree for hobbling, hunched-over and variously deranged bodies. He calls it “my ode to people with afflictions.” But with the Andrews Sisters as his guide, he has at last embraced the vernacular and with it a sense of his dancers as real-world figures.
Just as impressive, the dancers perform it in that very spirit. Whether it’s Sandra Stone in the romantic reverie of “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” or Mary Cochran’s confident flirt, they tackle this material head-on and wholeheartedly, without a trace of coyness, camp or irony. For all the theatricality of this dance, the sentiment is as real as the stage underfoot; that’s what gives the dance its firm grounding in our hearts. The last song we hear, as dancers fade from view, is a reprise.
Bei mir bist du schon Again I’ll explain, It means you’re the fairest In the land
WHEN PLAYING FAST AND LOOSE WAS FINE JOHN LELAND
In the late ’30s, when the Andrews Sisters were making their first run at the charts, Paul Taylor lived in a residence hotel in Washington. The basement had a canteen of sorts, with a jukebox and space for people to dance. “I remember going down there one time,” Taylor says, “and the place was empty. I put a nickel in the jukebox and heard the Andrews Sisters for the first time.?'
Half a century later, Taylor was putting off picking music for a new work when he played “this old record of the Andrews Sisters I put on whenever I want to feel good, and I couldn’t think of anything else I’d rather use.” It was a done deal. The cheery anachronisms of the sisters-once the stuff to sell millions of records and tickets to B movies, now little more than a footnote to the budding global consciousness of the war years-became the backdrop for Taylor’s period piece, “Company B.”
Multiculturalism was a lot simpler back when the Andrews Sisters–Patty, Maxene and LaVerne–collectively roamed the earth. (LaVerne died in 1967; Maxene and Patty are estranged). The nine selections Taylor uses in “Company B” only hint at the trio’s range, ethnicity-wise. These sisters really got around. Poster kids for heartland middle Americana, modeled after the Boswell Sisters, they launched their career in 1937 with, naturally enough, a Yiddish love song, “Bei Mir Bist Du Schon,” and proceeded to romp the globe in search of personae. They were Trinidadians happily working for the Yankee dollar in “Rum and Coca-Cola,” Brazilians in “Aurora,” heirs to black rentparty traditions on “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” They played fast and loose with cultural identities, but they weren’t alone. Sammy Cahn, who adapted “Bei Mir Bist Du Schon” for the sisters, recalled that he had first become interested in the song when he heard two black singers perform it wholly in Yiddish at the Apollo Theater in Harlem for an appreciative black crowd, It was a small step, then, for three goyisheh Minneapolitans to pitch the song to New Yorkers.
You couldn’t get away with the sisters’ affectionate ethnic dilettantism today, of course, any more than you could perform in blackface. Times have changed. In 1939, Collier’s magazine called the sisters “a three-bangled bazoozie” and three “right nice dolls.” You couldn’t get away with that today, either. If the world is a richer place for both of these developments, it is also a little poorer.
