Paul Taylor Influence On American Dance

Paul Taylor was born on July 29, 1930, in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. He attended Syracuse University through a swimming scholarship. Later after reading books about dance in the university library, he took up dance training under modern dance greats like Martha Graham and José Limón and joined the Graham Dance Company as a soloist in 1955. He also worked with choreographers Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine. Dance became his all-consuming passion. He henceforth transferred to The Juilliard School in New York City and choreographed works of his own, starting his own dance company in the mid-1950s.
Paul Taylor, one of the influential (seminal) artists of the 20th and 21st Centuries, continues to shape the American art of modern dance that
Taylor has made 142 dances since 1954, many of which have attained iconic status. He has covered a breathtaking range of topics, but recurring themes include life and death; the natural world and man’s place within it; love and sexuality in all gender combinations; and iconic moments in American history. While some of his dances have been termed “dark” and others “light,” the majority of his works are dualistic, mixing elements of both extremes. And while his work has largely been iconoclastic, he has also made some of the most purely romantic, most astonishingly athletic, and downright funniest dances ever put on stage.
Hailed for uncommon musicality and catholic taste, Mr. Taylor has set movement to music so memorably that for many people it is impossible to hear certain orchestral works and popular songs and not think of his dances. He has set works to an eclectic mix that includes Medieval masses, Renaissance dances, baroque concertos, classical symphonies, and scores by Debussy, Cage, Feldman, Ligeti and Pärt; Ragtime, Tango, Tin Pan Alley, Barbershop Quartets and The Mamas and The Papas; and telephone time announcements, loon calls, and
Ingalls, Jasper Johns, Alex Katz, Ellsworth Kelly, William Ivey Long, Santo Loquasto, Gene Moore, Tharon Musser, Robert Rauschenberg, John Rawlings, Thomas Skelton and Jennifer Tipton.
As the subject of Matthew Diamond’s documentary, Dancemaker, which was hailed by Time as “perhaps the best dance documentary ever,” Mr. Taylor has shed light on the mysteries of the creative process as few artists have.
Mr. Taylor has received nearly every important honor given to artists in the United States. In 1992 he was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors and received an Emmy Award for Speaking in Tongues, produced by WNET/New York the previous year. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton in 1993. In 1995 he received the Algur H. Meadows Award for Excellence in the Arts and was named one of 50 prominent Americans honored in recognition of their outstanding achievement by the Library of Congress’s Office of Scholarly Programs and much