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PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANYNew York premiere of "Banquet of Vultures"City Center, West 55th Street, between Sixth and Seventh avenues; (212) 581-1212. Season runs through March 19.
POINTS of light slither across the stage, a sound of unearthly music; now bodies are slowly revealed dressed in battle fatigues - men and women.
That's the hypnotic opening of Paul Taylor's "Banquet of Vultures," given its New York premiere by the Paul Taylor Dance Company at City Center on Friday night, to Morton Feldman's eerily suggestive score, "Oboe and Orchestra."
It is a Dance of Death foreshadowed by such Taylor works as "Last Look" and "Dust," but also, more remarkably by Kurt Jooss' famous 1932 antiwar masterpiece "The Green Table," revived here only last year by American Ballet Theatre.
Taylor has suggested in interview that some aspects of his central figure of Death (not so called in Taylor and dangerously and brilliantly performed by Michael Trusnovec) comes from the demonic Gothic figure of Death that dominates the Jooss work.
But the take is fresh, and the methodology totally different. Unlike "The Green Table," this "Banquet of Vultures" is strictly nonspecific. The only character - and he is as much as symbol as anything - is this Death figure, dressed in a natty suit, white shirt and red tie. Dressed, indeed, for his business.
At first the battle figures are fighting sometimes with one another, sometimes with a hidden enemy, often collapsing and coalescing into one of those writhing, grotesque piles of bodies that Taylor often uses in his darker ballets.
From black chaos emerges this menacing figure of Death, controlling, killing with an impersonal touch, his robotic presence shaping a squalid destiny. Trusnovec moves with an awesome, graceful angularity and power.
This is not Death as Jooss' medieval fright-figure but a 21st-century urbane killer out of any boardroom or governmental office. In a sense, he combines Jooss' bogeyman with the suave gun-toting diplomats whose masked machinations open and close "The Green Table."
Eventually Taylor's Death figure is involved in a seemingly personal battle with one of the women soldiers (a poignant Julie Tice), and he apparently carries her off as one of the spoils of war.
No sooner has he left the scene, than at the back of the stage, first dimly lit, can be seen another similarly clad figure (splendidly danced by Robert Kleinendorst),
who moves forward and continues his journey
through the endless killing fields.
Perhaps Taylor's imagery - apart from his machine-like Death - is at times too shadowy. The background, cunningly lit by Jennifer Tipton and neatly costumed by Santo Loquasto, suffers somewhat from the very nonspecificity needed to make the generality of his pacifist point.
But the work certainly expresses the words by John Davidson printed in the Playbill as a epigraph: "And blood in torrents pour / In vain - always in vain, / For war breeds war again!"
And "Banquet of Vultures" is from a choreographer who once said he never wanted to make a dance with a message. There is perhaps more of Kurt Jooss in him than he once envisaged.
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