Creative Process: The late, great Paul Taylor’s Three Dubious Memories
By Rachel Silver Maddock
In Paul Taylor: Creative Domain, director Kate Geis and her team remarkably capture the creative process of late American modern dance master Paul Taylor. The 82-minute documentary (released in 2015 and recently re-released on streaming platforms and DVD) records the process of Taylor choreographing a single dance, Three Dubious Memories (2011), from start to finish through rehearsal footage and interviews with Taylor and his company dancers.
The film gives the audience a privileged window into a world that usually only choreographers and dancers see — from initial casting to the unpredictable sweep of the creative journey, as Taylor (in his 80s at the time) teases out his own vision. It is thrilling to watch a career choreographer at work, and glimpse the inner life of an artist who started making dances in 1954 (and was an early member of both the Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham dance companies). In one memorable scene, Taylor sits at his desk, a cigarette in hand, and flips through his notebook for Three Dubious Memories. It feels strangely intimate to view the ideas, counts, and diagrams that brought the work to life.
Geis’ documentary style has a refreshing directness that reflects the artist’s own attitude toward dance-making. In the studio, Taylor is all business. He knew exactly how much he had to accomplish (one minute of choreography per day) for the four weeks of rehearsals. “I talk as little as possible in the rehearsal, it eats up time,” he says.
Perhaps without meaning to, the film also documents a way of working in the dance industry that has largely passed into history. As choreographer, Taylor supplied the vision, the movement, the music, the blocking — everything. He says it best himself in the film: “I don’t see myself as a collaborator; I do what I do and [the dancers] do what they do.” Even in 2011, this was old school; young dancer Michael Novak (who Taylor would later choose as his successor) observes: “To see Paul come in with an idea, with music; he’s open to change but you can tell he knows what’s happening, when it’s happening… It’s a very different process than what I’m used to.”
Taylor’s movement vocabulary might at times feel antiquated, perhaps cliché to the contemporary viewer (a fight scene in the work includes gestural blows), but that isn’t the focus. Like letters in an alphabet, Taylor uses the material of modern dance (triplets, leaps, sculptural shapes of classically trained bodies) to build his idea in the studio, and successfully communicates that idea to the audience.
You get the sense that the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 2011 was a well-oiled machine, churning out dances. It is a brief but enthralling journey from the first rehearsal to watching the characters develop, to seeing the costumes sketched and sewed to then lighting the piece in the theatre. After the premiere (which is shown in full at the end of the film, and feels cathartic), we jump abruptly back into the studio to see Taylor starting a new work.
Admirably, Taylor seemed at peace with his own process even though he knew a dance would never be exactly what he envisioned. At the dress rehearsal of Three Dubious Memories, Taylor remarks, “It’s not perfect, I know … I’ve missed something… But that’s what keeps me going.”
