Teaching Taylor in Goa. Celebrating Paul Taylor in NYC.

Photo by Purnendra Meshram

Paul Taylor once said that he planned to live forever, and that sentiment has been publicly interpreted on social media this past week to be a truth found in his dances by those who perform them and those who witness them. As of August 29^th, 2018, those of us who consider ourselves members of the “Taylor Family” became the orphans of Paul Taylor’s mortal beneficence. Now we carry the label of the generation that were “chosen” by Paul. From thence forward, there can be no more dancers, teachers, administrators that will join the Paul Taylor namesake organization who will have his judgement be the deciding factor in their initiation.

Top photo from James J Novak on Facebook. Bottom photo from my archive.

Emotionally, this was a surprisingly hard week for me. I was literally in the air flying to India when Paul Taylor died. And when so many of the Taylor Family and devotees were gathered in Lincoln Center on Monday in New York City to participate in a memorial performance honoring Paul, I was in India teaching, in part due to being a member of the Taylor Family.  There have been so many surprisingly heartwarming and heart-stopping experiences, not least of which was to find tears in my eyes as I said my goodbyes at the end of my five days teaching for the Goa Dance Residency. I walked into this week, quite honestly, with no expectations other than knowing I would need to think and react quickly to people I have never met, and an environment I have not been to before.

Like most of my time in India, I met my fellow faculty and the dancers for the first time when I arrived on location. After my stint working in Delhi, a couple of dancers that had done class(es) with me had contacted Nathaniel Parchment, a dancer-teacher from England that had been working in India for some years to date, about me. Nathaniel proceeded to “friend” me on Facebook, but I have a policy, that if I cannot identify where I have met you in person, that I generally don’t accept such connections. However, I had heard Nathaniel’s name in conversations about what exposure to modern dance was currently happening in India. So before accepting the connection on Facebook, I agreed to have a Skype call with him, as he confirmed we had not met through instant messages.

Oh the joys of modern technology and social media. I think that a lot of people of my generation and older have a begrudgingly suspicious relationship with online communications and social media. However, I admit to using Facebook as a network maintenance conduit to feel, however marginally it might be, like I am still connected to hard-won relationships in my peripatetic life, meeting and working with people around the globe. If I look at the statistics of readers of this blog and how they find it, my links on Facebook are used by the majority, and you are readers mostly from the USA, with a few from Germany, India, Thailand, Canada, New Zealand and Australia that I can conjecture are friends I have in those places. It is interesting to note when I see that people have connected from countries to which I have never been or worked, and I wonder if they are friends who are traveling, or random online “surfers” who happened upon my post.

On the road in Goa.

But back to my story about why I was in Goa. My Skype call with Nathaniel ended with opening up the possibility that I might teach for a week for his second annual Goa Dance 

Residency, dependent on us being able to synchronize a mutually beneficial time-frame. This past week was it, and the discussed intent was to focus my teaching to expose the participants to some of the rigor and context of what I have been teaching in India, under the label of “modern dance in the style of Paul Taylor”. At first I was feeling a little self-conscious that someone I had never met, and who had never seen me teach or work, had openly trusted me to be responsible as the anchor for an intensive week of technique and repertory introduction to Paul Taylor. However, I reminded myself that except for two people, Sumeet Nagdev and Yehuda Ma’or, none of the people or institutions at which I have been working here in India, had ever met me in person before I arrived. Yet somehow, this short stint seemed like much more of an act of faith on the part of Nathaniel. His co-director, Niku, and the other faculty, Hugh, Olivia and Abilash were also unknowns to me, and I could not have been better supported or welcomed by them, especially in light of the fact that Nathaniel himself ended up not being in attendance at the residency this year, and has had to remain in England.

Dancers and faculty watching a short retrospective video about Paul Taylor.

To date, here in India, I have been called upon, pretty equally, to teach ballet and modern classes, plus some Taylor choreographic excerpts to exemplify and contextualize how the modern technique I teach serves a particular genre of dance. However for this week, I was focused entirely on modern dance technique and Paul Taylor’s work. So my enduring question to myself is, “How does the technique I teach evolve to serve an end, such as a piece of choreography?” Classical ballet variations serve conservatory training as a benchmark of a young dancer’s ability to apply their technique with finesse and artistry. So it stands to reason that a challenging modern variation or excerpt might serve a similar purpose in conjunction with the Taylor-focused technique I have been teaching in India.

The blessing of working with Paul Taylor’s choreography as a point of departure, is that the variety and scope of his choreographic works defy any singular categorization, while also providing me with multiple points-of-entry approaches to use with both dancers that have no experience with formal technical dance training, and dancers looking to launch professional careers; as was the case with my dancers in Goa. In contrast to my teaching approach in Mumbai and Delhi, where I had more weeks to work with the dancers, for this past “accelerated” week I tested a few theories on how I could adjust my teaching to maximize access to what I was hoping to draw out of the dancers. I typically challenge dancers to learn a fair amount of movement material and vocabulary, but I will also challenge them to recognize and use the underlying principles of how my class material progresses. In Goa, I opted to do more repetition of less material, but with a progression in my directives as the dancers executed successive repetitions of the same material. I also put a far greater emphasis on “how” movement is initiated and how to focus on dynamic action, while still passing through prescribed shapes or points in space. The different ways in which the dancers evolved through the week seemed strongly correlated to their understanding of “why” they wanted to dance, which ranged from simply “experiential” to expanding their “performance” fluency.

My resident hosts in Goa included Mr Mouse, Ms Lizzy, and Mx Amphib.

Before I left Goa, I had the pleasure of catching up with another person in India, that I have known from before I arrived last year, Gautam. He was a student of mine at Peridance who then went on to get his Master of Fine Arts in Dance from Hollins University, where I had received my MFA in earlier years. At a later date, I will write about my observations of the many people and conversations explored during my time in India. The mention of Gautam here is illustrative of how little non-work social interaction I have had for six months. This is not to say that we did not speak of dance “shop-talk”, but there was no imperative to move any work I have been doing here forward. He coordinated my stay in a luxurious private compound within walking distance of Benaulim Beach, and hosted me graciously and considerately with tours of local foods and locations. My weekend was a vacation break to visit friends!

Contrast in Goa, from Karma Royal Palms to Jungle Dance.

I wrote my last post in at the airport in Mumbai waiting for my flight to Goa. Now I am at the airport in Goa waiting for my flight back to Mumbai. It is the last flight I will be taking from an Indian airport before I depart India at the end of this sojourn in less than two weeks. I have to do my final reports for Fulbright on my time and activities, and this blog is proving hugely helpful to recall and reflect on all that I’ve been able to do.

At various times in my life I have been encouraged to keep a “diary” and I have made feeble attempts that quickly fall by the wayside. To date, I have become comfortable with writing as I feel the necessity, however, this exercise in a weekly essay about the current events in my life, has given me even greater respect for daily bloggers, weekly column writers, and authors on the whole. With this renewed focus on the discipline of writing, news of fellow Fulbrighters publishing books or working on research for future books jumps out at me. Similarly, social media friends that highlight or share the writings of past and contemporary novelists and poets, seem suddenly to be proliferating, but I suspect it is just my own personal bias that pointed my focus their way. Whatever the case, these past six months for me has highlighted that there is no honest discussion of life without death, movement without stillness, or words without thought.

Benaulim Beach.

I don’t know that I will continue this blog, but I try not to predict the future. And I have not planned where I think either my writing or my time in India might lead. I have learned to trust that my life experience as a teacher and dancer is “embodied” in my ongoing teaching and staging practices; and that my anxiety at the start of every day, class, meeting, trip, et cetera, is my way of being alert, present and engaged in living the life I have today.