On Lisa Viola: a personal view

Dance Magazine, March, 2005 by Allan Ulrich

As expected, the 50th anniversary season of the Paul Taylor Dance Company has restored to public scrutiny the inimitable dances and lasting memories of an American cultural institution. Unfortunately, the occasion has also revived some of the enduring myths about the troupe and its founder. Foremost among those legends is the belief that performing Taylor is a man's game.

Do not believe it. Anyone captivated by, or smitten with, the dancing of Lisa Viola brushed off that rumor years ago. Taylor's great woman dancers--and Viola is the latest in that long, glorious lineage--have become an archetype of American modern dance. They furnish the key to what this veteran choreographer is all about--balance, equanimity, harmony, finding a path through life that ends neither in dread nor absurdity, tempering dread with hope, slipping into swamps of despair in an untroubled landscape.

Viola joined the Taylor company in 1992 after mo years as a scholarship student at the Taylor School. I fell hard for her on my initial exposure to The Word (1998). This was an insidious allegory which, to judge from the men cavorting in unison in preppy ties and gray flannels, happens in one of those uptight English boarding schools, ready to crack at the seams. The fly in the ointment, or, more specifically, the worm in this Edenic apple-tree grove, was Viola, a wriggling serpent in chartreuse, determined to wreak havoc on this crew's cloistered morality for the sport of it. Viola was a small, sinewy, speedy hurricane, spewing surprises with every contraction. It occurred lo me that, as muchas the company's tall, muscled men and the leggy, imperious Bettie de Jong superwomen (who also include Susan McGuire and Karla Wolfangle), Viola was also a "Taylor type," formed by nature and temperament in the mold of predecessors Carolyn Adams, Kate Johnson, Lila York, Raegan Wood, and Mary Cochran. No matter when, during the past five decades, you fell under Taylor's spell, there was always a Lisa Viola in the ranks.

The current and rightful bearer of that name displays an uncanny ability to melt into assignments to the point where you cannot distinguish dancer from dance. In Antique Valentine, an underrated mechanical music jest that was made on Viola, she proved a capital farceur in a robotic duet with her equally creaky and ardent swain, Patrick Corbin. In another Viola creation, Le Grand Puppetier, she offered a perfect portrait of the autocrat's daughter, a subservient acolyte of Napoleon, unredeemed malice in an Empire dress.

Of all the qualities that draw your attention to Viola, her capacity for ironic inflection ranks high. Wearing an off-kilter smile, she guides us through Taylor-made terrains, where nothing is quite as simple as it seems. In its opening moments Black Tuesday, an insidious suite arranged to songs from the Great Depression, suggests we're in for a wallow in nostalgic kitsch. Then, to a recording of "I Went Hunting and the Big Bad Wolf Was Dead," Viola, a lethal urchin in cap and floppy trousers, points and crooks her trigger finger at the audience. You understand that voracious capitalism is her prey and, even though the finger is pointed in your direction, you're much too mesmerized to duck.

I have consistently relished Viola's attack, which is swift and merciless. How many times have I watched that backward run and leap into Michael Trusnovec's arms in the duet from Promethean Fire? And how many times have I been caught up short? Viola can also radiate tenderness; see her as one of the redeeming angels in the heartbreaking Sunset, transporting the dead soldiers to a place beyond worldly care.

Viola, reportedly, had her heart set on dancing for Taylor for several years before the company finally admitted her. I am not surprised. Watch her in a solo, pick her out of an ensemble and you come to the same conclusion. Dancing here and now in these Taylor marvels is more than Viola's profession or her craft. It is her destiny.

Allan Ulrich is Senior Editor at DANCE MAGAZINE.