Paul Taylor Biography Quotes 11 Report mistakes

Early life and education
Paul Taylor was born in 1930 in Pennsylvania and grew up in and around the Washington, D.C. area. A gifted athlete and a keen observer of people, he initially pursued painting and competitive swimming. While studying at Syracuse University he encountered dance, a revelation that redirected his ambitions. He moved to New York City and enrolled at the Juilliard School, where he studied with influential figures who shaped mid-20th-century concert dance. Among his formative mentors were Antony Tudor, whose psychological ballets stressed nuance and restraint; Martha Graham, whose modern technique fused breath, contraction, and mythic narrative; Louis Horst, the formidable composition teacher who demanded structure and rigor; and the renowned ballet pedagogue Margaret Craske. This mix of classicism and modern experimentation gave Taylor a broad set of tools and an appetite for testing convention.

Formative years as a performer
By the mid-1950s Taylor was performing with the Martha Graham Dance Company, an experience that placed him at the center of American modern dance at a pivotal moment. With Graham he absorbed a sense of dramatic stakes and theatrical scale. He also intersected with other giants of the era. In 1959 he appeared as a guest with New York City Ballet in Episodes, a rare collaboration between George Balanchine and Graham that brought modern dance and neoclassical ballet onto the same stage. He crossed paths with Merce Cunningham, whose chance procedures and flattened theatricality offered a different model of choreographic thought. These encounters sharpened Taylor's artistic compass, convincing him that modern dance could contain multiplicity: narrative and abstraction, rigor and play, continuity and rupture.

Founding a company
Taylor formed his own ensemble, the Paul Taylor Dance Company, in 1954. Early resources were scant, but he compensated with inventiveness and a circle of collaborators who believed in his vision. The painter and designer Robert Rauschenberg, part of the downtown avant-garde, created costumes and lighting for several early works, including the haunting Three Epitaphs. Rauschenberg's wry, resourceful designs aligned with Taylor's appetite for the unexpected, and their partnership helped situate Taylor within a broader conversation in American art that included visual artists and experimental composers.

Experiments, setbacks, and a breakthrough
Taylor's earliest dances ranged from spare to iconoclastic. In 1957 he presented Seven New Dances, a suite so austere that it provoked one of the most famous reviews in dance history: critic Louis Horst responded with a mostly blank column, suggesting that the choreography offered nearly nothing to see. That same season Taylor unveiled Duet, in which he and a partner remained motionless while music sounded, a pointed challenge to inherited assumptions about movement and time. These provocations cost him support in some quarters, yet they announced a choreographer willing to risk failure in public.

A decisive shift arrived in 1962 with Aureole, set to music by Handel. Where the early work could be confrontational, Aureole flowed with buoyancy and lyric grace, rendering everyday weight into flight. Audiences and presenters embraced it, and the dance became a gateway to a career in which Taylor could move freely from romantic clarity to satiric bite. Over time he created more than 140 works, and his repertory entered the lexicon of international concert dance.

Signature works and style
Taylor's range was exceptional. Esplanade (1975), set to Bach, used walking, running, sliding, and falling to reveal the eloquence already embedded in common movement; it became one of the great masterworks of the 20th century. Cloven Kingdom (1976) applied sharp wit and social anthropology to formal dance gatherings, exposing the animal within the civilized. Arden Court (1981) teased out courtly pattern and pastoral lilt; Sunset (1983) traced the tenderness and fragility of men at the edge of war; Company B (1991), set to songs popularized by the Andrews Sisters, placed the sunny harmonies of the home front against the shadows of conflict. Later works such as Black Tuesday and Promethean Fire showed his responsiveness to American history and collective trauma without surrendering choreographic clarity.

Taylor's craft was musical yet unsentimental. He balanced counterpoint with crystalline group design, layered irony beneath charm, and mingled pedestrian gestures with virtuosic phrasework. He prized dancers who could act through movement without theatrics, and he shaped his company in their image.

The people around him
The company drew strength from a remarkable constellation of artists. Bettie de Jong, a central performer in the 1960s, became rehearsal director and guardian of style for decades, translating Taylor's sensibility to new generations. Carolyn Adams, whose musical intelligence and quicksilver presence made her a touchstone for the repertory, inspired many of his most lyric passages. In later years Michael Trusnovec emerged as a paragon of Taylor classicism, carrying the repertory with unwavering musicality and stamina. Lighting designer Jennifer Tipton refined the visual world of the dances, creating atmospheres that deepened their emotional logic. Across the decades Taylor's circle extended beyond modern dance. George Balanchine exemplified the standards of musical precision that Taylor respected; Martha Graham's authority and dramatic rigor remained an ever-present benchmark; Merce Cunningham's experiments in structure and chance offered a counterexample that Taylor answered in his own voice. Robert Rauschenberg's inventive support in the early years was an act of artistic solidarity that Taylor never forgot.

Writing, leadership, and mentorship
Alongside choreographing, Taylor wrote with candor about his life and art. His memoir, Private Domain, captured the insecurity, discipline, and astonishment of a life in dance, and it has remained an essential document for dancers and audiences seeking to understand his process. In the studio he was exacting but curious, tending to ideas as much as to steps. He mentored dancers into leadership roles, ensuring that institutional memory would persist. In 1993 he founded Taylor 2, a small ensemble designed to bring key works to communities and venues that could not accommodate the main company, and to cultivate younger dancers in the technique and style.

Expanding the frame
Late in his career Taylor sought to preserve the lineage of American modern dance while fostering new creation. He launched an initiative at his company's Lincoln Center seasons to present masterworks by other choreographers alongside his own, drawing repertory from artists who shaped the field. In doing so he created a home where living choreographers and preservations of classic works could be seen in dialogue, accompanied by live music when possible. This curatorial turn echoed his life's experience: he had been formed by encounters with Martha Graham, had shared a stage with George Balanchine, and had been challenged by Merce Cunningham. By making space for a broader community, he honored those relationships and ensured audiences could grasp the continuum of American dance.

Reputation, honors, and reach
Taylor's repertory entered companies worldwide, including major ballet and modern ensembles, a testament to his gift for stitching modern dance sensibility into classical technique and vice versa. His work earned him some of the highest honors available to a U.S. artist: a MacArthur Fellowship in the 1980s recognized the originality and durability of his voice; the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts acknowledged his standing in the national culture. These awards mattered less to him than the daily task of making and refining dances, but they signaled how fully he had enlarged the possibilities of American concert dance.

Later years and succession
Taylor stopped performing in the mid-1970s but continued to choreograph prodigiously, shaping seasons that balanced new premieres with revivals. He maintained a tight-knit creative environment, drawing on the patience and expertise of colleagues like Bettie de Jong and Jennifer Tipton to keep the repertory vivid. As he contemplated the future of his institution, he designated dancer Michael Novak to lead the company he had built. Taylor died in 2018 in New York City at the age of 88, leaving behind an ensemble capable of transmitting his dances with the same directness and intelligence that first won audiences.

Legacy
Paul Taylor stands as one of the central architects of American modern dance. He absorbed currents from Martha Graham, George Balanchine, and Merce Cunningham and, with help from collaborators such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jennifer Tipton, forged a body of work unmistakably his own. He revealed the eloquence of ordinary movement, unmasked the ironies of social ritual, and found beauty in spaces where gentleness and danger coexist. Through the dancers he trained, the leaders he mentored, and the repertory that continues to tour the world, Taylor's art remains a living argument that modern dance can be both rigorous and welcoming, both timeless and awake to the present.

Our collection contains 11 quotes who is written by Paul, under the main topics: Music - Meaning of Life - New Beginnings - Investment - Fitness.