WHAT a difference your own com pany makes! When San Francisco Bal let last year pre miered Paul Taylor’s “Changes” – set to pop songs by the Mamas & the Papas – it looked like a minor league effort from a major league artist.
Taylor’s always been an ace at taking popular songs and crafting them into a statement on their eras, yet despite San Francisco’s talented dancers, “Changes” didn’t seem inspired. That certainly wasn’t the case Tuesday night, when Taylor’s own troupe performed it.
Taylor’s dancers know him and how to move the way he wants, and they delivered.
Concert life and strife, hippies, bad trips, fathers and sons, it’s all in there – set to six songs, ending (of course) with “California Dreamin’ ” and the dancers clad in psychedelicious costumes by Santo Loquasto.
Even in San Francisco, the best part of the ballet was the sheer energy of the dancers doing the pony or Watusi, but Taylor’s dancers also gave the work acidity. In their hands, cliché became trenchant observation, and treacle became poignant.
Also on the first-class bill were Taylor’s imaginative versions of “The Rite of Spring” and “Private Domain.” For the former, he used a piano reduction of Stravinsky and turned “Rite” into a two-
dimensional cartoon detective story in which Grecian urns meet the funny papers.
“Private Domain” takes place behind two wide columns onstage, so we can’t see all the action. The dancers, in bathing suits, have intimate encounters to Iannis Xenakis’ atonal growls and burbles, and we’re voyeurs.
The current crop of dancers is fearless and ferocious. They were all brilliant, especially Rob Kleinendorst and Annmaria Mazzini, who danced the closing solo of “Rite.” She threw herself into it so feverishly that, even at the back of the house, you could hear her gasping for breath. For a moment, you held your breath for her.
PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY New York City Center, 130 W. 56th St.; 212-581-1212. Through Sunday.