Review of Paul Taylor's: Company B

The San Francisco Ballet's performance of Paul Taylor's Company B last night was, in one word,  fantastic. Other reporters have previously referred to the piece as "one of American dance’s finest achievements" (Time Out Chicago), and "some of the most glorious dancing to be seen anywhere" (Newsweek). 
Every piece from "Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh!” to “Joseph! Joseph!” “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” and “Tico-Tico,” were danced superbly and cleanly by the ballerinas. 
Company B is set in the 1940's just as America emerges from the dark times of the Great Depression and into the age of prosperity ushered in by World War II. Taylor chose to set all of the pieces to pop hits by the group the Andrew's Sisters, an accurate portrait of the music of the era. Pieces like "Bei Mir Bist Du Schon" show couples in light colored clothes jitterbugging, lindy-hopping, and polka dancing the night away across a bright white stage "lit as if it were heaven," but as we all know, while the economy was looking up, America wasn't all smiles in that day and age: men and mere boys were going off to war, some of them not coming back home. As with most of Taylor's works, Company B has a dark side to it, but it is a very realistic one, one that existed in our country just beneath the surface of these sunny years with their exuberant music and dancing. We watch a jaunty solo magnificently danced by a male principal in "Bugle Boy" end with the title character getting shot. The beauty and happiness of the entire performance is overshadowed by the cloud of war hanging over the heads of these young people. Taylor has always had cutting edge work, so much so in the 1950's that audience members often walked out of his performances and leading Martha Graham to dub him the "naughty boy of dance, a nickname that has stuck with him through the next century. The "naughtiness" has been tamed to a place where he can keep behinds in seats at rapt attention, but it is still there, under the surface. The most pervasive and deceptive facet of the naughtiness is that a work like Company B  would be performed by some of the country's leading ballerinas and widely accepted as one of his most popular works because of it's pep and upbeat nature. When really, it is centered on a very grim topic. Paul Taylor, "Naughty Boy," has done it again.


Here is a video clip of the highlights of SF Ballet's performance of Company B:
Company B