The Corporate Exec in Our Dreams: Paul Taylor's Exotic Imagery

"Doc, I've been having this dream. I'm in Mexico, and there are all these crazy primitive archetypes running around -- you know, very Day of the Dead. There's a gullible flower girl, and a half-naked guy with deer antlers, and this beautiful glittery woman with a halo. She was nice. And then there was Death, dressed in a suit. He wasn't nice, but he smiled a lot. And everyone's carrying skulls. Pink ones."

"Ach, nudity, horns, froufrou: It sounds like Martha Graham meets José Limón by way of John Waters, nein? Und zis Death, was he wearing pinstripes?"

"Yes, yes he was! And carrying a machete."

"Aha! A long one?"

"Yup, and he was waving it around at everyone. He was real proud of that big machete."

So, clearly, is Paul Taylor. His arming of a maliciously grinning businessman (an investment banker, perhaps?) with a brutal phallic symbol was one of the funniest and smartest elements of his luxuriously phantasmagoric "De Suenos" ("Of Dreams"). Carl Jung would have to agree: The corporate executive is now fixed in our collective unconscious as a figure of suspect power.

That Taylor was clued in to this notion in 2007, when he created "De Suenos" and its companion piece, "De Suenos Que Se Repiten" ("Of Recurring Dreams") -- which the Paul Taylor Dance Company performed Friday and Saturday at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater -- is part of why we love him. Few artists can create pointed, succinct portrayals of humanity's failings as well as its gifts as the veteran modern-dance choreographer, whose past works include a spot-on skewering of President Bush.

So it's not surprising that while the rest of society -- politicians, pop culture and, yes, assorted news media -- was pushing foreign terrorists as our greatest threat, Taylor was among the few Cassandras warning of the dangers lurking in the corporate world's inner rot. And with Hillary Clinton's recent trip to Mexico and that nation's headline-grabbing drug violence, Taylor has hit the jackpot of topicality.

But though "De Suenos" and "De Suenos Que Se Repiten" contain interesting notions, and the production values (Santo Loquasto's cheeky sets and costumes, full of rough glamour, and Jennifer Tipton's magical lighting) are first-rate, neither rises to the level of Taylor's best work. There's a curious lack of momentum throughout. With such characters as a sneering, macho drag queen, the nearly nude Yaqui deer dancer, a leering Death and the mysterious gold-sheathed Virgin of Guadalupe -- with her towering halo headdress, she looks like part goddess, part Ziegfeld girl -- you'd think Taylor could have conjured more emotional and erotic tension than he does.

Taylor is playing with the differentiation of masculine and feminine -- the virgin (the luminous and imperturbable Laura Halzack) stood in for the standard female attributes of warmth, tenderness and beauty, while Death (Orion Duckstein) was the aggressive self-directed male. Other characters, such as Robert Kleinendorst's pleather-clad cross-dresser and Michael Trusnovec's deer dancer, had elements of both. There were also references to cultural blending, with Halzack as a bridge between Catholic imagery and indigenous icons. Similarly, in Trusnovec's high-bounding animalistic solo, it's not a coyote -- the traditional enemy of the deer dancer -- that brings him down; it's gunfire.

But a large problem with both works was the music, a Kronos Quartet recording of Mexican songs and street sounds. The sound quality, as is so often the case in the Eisenhower, was poor and the music was overamplified. But technical aspects aside, the music itself did Taylor few favors. The recording was a stop-start amalgam of pauses and jarring interludes that dictated the stage action with a heavy hand. In some of the more rambling scenes, one sensed that Taylor was having to kill time.

"De Suenos Que Se Repiten" was darker than the first "De Suenos" -- more nightmarish, with most of the dancers wearing black (which looked a bit like bondage outfits, to my admittedly inexpert eye). There's a scene of ritual sacrifice (the innocent -- read, uninformed -- flower girl, whom I think Taylor means to be us). It ends with a vision of mass extinction, followed by mass resurrection via the virgin, though this part is overlaid with a tart sense of irony. To believe we can be so easily saved, Taylor seems to be saying, is to be fooling ourselves.

"Beloved Renegade," which Taylor created last year, closed the program on a different but related note. Death and salvation were at issue here, too, though this piece, accompanied by Francis Poulenc's "Gloria," sprang from Walt Whitman's poetry and was more cerebral and majestic in tone. Trusnovec led the cast as a Whitmanesque Everyman, witnessing (or reminiscing about) young lovers and children at play. Taylor's choreographic gifts were in full view here, the way he can swirl dancers into garlands and spirals and endlessly dissolving lines to reveal new formations.

The exceptional Halzack was again a kind of angelic creature, distant (she never met Trusnovec's eye) yet soothing. She seemed to be his muse, his artistic ideal, and the poignancy and joy when he finally embraced her was that of the artist finally achieving perfection.

Was it really Whitman or himself on Taylor's mind? The fact that, in a final solo, Trusnovec briefly shows us flashes from other Taylor works -- how Halzack takes up his dance and expands it, enlarging it into a soaring bequest to the heavens, the fact that he then lies down at Halzack's feet as if on his deathbed, as she spins on, slowly, her dance continuing without him -- these images brought Taylor, who is 78, to mind as an artist coming to terms with his own mortality. How beautiful it all might have been -- had the music not been so stridently blasted over that Eisenhower sound system, which can kill even the most deathless notes.