Paul Taylor Gala to Honor Alex Katz, Painter Who Made Movement Appear Still

On November 11 at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater, the Paul Taylor Dance Foundation will honor painter Alex Katz, marking yet another chapter in one of the most enduring art-and-dance partnerships.

Katz’s collaboration with choreographer Paul Taylor began in 1960, when the poet and critic Edwin Denby introduced the two for a commission at the Spoleto Festival in Italy. Taylor was redefining the language of movement; Katz, then in his 30s, was already rebelling against what he called the “dark and arty” conventions of modern dance lighting, favoring flat white light and pastel color.

Katz’s current visibility, of course, stretches well beyond the stage. At Gladstone Gallery in New York, he’s showing 11 new paintings based a single road in Maine; Katz has rendered that road in bold orange against a white ground.

Meanwhile, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego is hosting “Alex Katz: Theater and Dance,” the first major survey of his collaborative work for the stage, including rare sketches, sets, and paintings from more than two dozen productions. Among them are 15 key collaborations with Taylor.

Their first piece together, Meridian, was a departure from the moody, spotlighted aesthetic of postwar modern dance. It was, as Katz recalled, “a very radical way of doing it. Paul would go with anything.”

Over the next 25 years, the two would create 16 more works together. Their collaborations included Scudorama (1963), Private Domain (1969), Diggity (1978), and Sunset (1983), pieces that dance critic Arlene Croce described as embodying a form of “shimmering ambiguity.” “There were lots of clashes, violent clashes,” Katz later said, “but it was a match made in artistic heaven.”

“They were both single-minded, even combative,” recalls dealer Timothy Taylor, who has shown Katz for years. “But that tension—each pushing the other—gave Alex a lifelong understanding of how the body moves, how energy travels through space. You can feel it in his paintings still.”

For Michael Novak, the second artistic director of the Paul Taylor Dance Foundation (he was handpicked by Taylor), the genius of their relationship lies in how Katz’s paintings became living structures on stage. “He designed what we lovingly call ‘obstacles,’” Novak said. “He’d literally take away two-thirds of the stage with a curtain or a cube, and Paul would have to choreograph around it. It forced a new kind of spatial awareness, almost like collage.”

In Sunset, for example, Katz blocked off the back and one side of the stage with drops painted to resemble branches and leaves—what he called “killing the center”—so that Taylor had to rethink how bodies occupied space.

Their creative tug-of-war yielded work of rare psychological resonance. “Sometimes dances are timely,” Novak said, “but the great ones—like Taylor and Katz’s—become timeless. They touch something deeper in the psyche. Decades later, you still feel that sense of loss, or youth, or wonder they were reaching for.”

At the November gala, the Taylor company will perform Sunset, perhaps the most emotionally charged of their collaborations. Katz conceived it after seeing soldiers flirting with young women in Madrid’s Retiro Park—a scene that struck him as both tender and doomed. Taylor transformed the image into a meditation on war and memory, set to Edward Elgar’s strings and the eerie cries of loons (Katz’s idea). The result, according to the New York Times, is “a dance that reliably makes viewers cry.”

Katz himself has always seen the collaboration as a source of discipline and freedom. “I learned a lot from Paul in terms of gestures and relationships between people,” he once wrote. “I learned from Paul that all your pieces don’t have to be the same. And I learned from Paul never to be complacent toward the public. The one person you don’t want to bore is yourself.”