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Micaela Taylor/Mats Ek/Crystal Pite
Vibrations

by Thomas Hahn

The connection between the Paris Opéra and Los Angeles endures. Benjamin Millepied—a short-lived Directeur de la Danse—once arrived from there, and the current director, José Martínez, has discovered a young choreographer in the US: Micaela Taylor. Her background lies in urban dance, yet she has forged a distinctive style—fluid yet physically demanding in its athleticism, theatrical yet intuitive—that has already been tested with Nederlands Dans Theater 2 and the English National Ballet. Nevertheless, she is unknown in Paris, and the Opéra audience is far from accustomed to experiments.

It was therefore lured in with a myth and an enduring favorite. For Vibrations, Mats Ek handed over his Solo for Two— which is currently celebrating its twentieth anniversary on stage—to distinguished ensemble members (at the premiere, these were Amandine Albisson and Pablo Legasa). Ek even took a brief bow from the stage after the premiere. The third part of the evening marked a ten-year anniversary: ​​Crystal Pite’s The Seasons’ Canon, created in 2016.

What was there to discover? Micaela Taylor’s Dreams This Way is dance theater that plunges into a dream world yet never entirely loses its connection to reality. There is less of the everyday here than in Mats Ek’s work, and a tendency towards American minimalism beneath a starry night sky.

Taylor views her scenes from the realm of dreams as an encounter between realism and surrealism.We begin in a sort of waiting room; a brief scuffle breaks out, an elevator spews out a host of dancers, and the mantra "I see you in my dream" pounds from offstage like a metronome. Then, a multitude of nymphs appear, skillfully blending Balanchine’s legacy with urban dance. And just like that, the vision vanishes. Yet the journey into the no-man’s-land between sensuality and abstraction continues, leading—after a brief intermission—straight into the surreal relationship imagined by Ek, which likewise straddles the line between dream and nightmare.

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