About Paul Taylor Dance Company

Newsweek's Laura Shapiro once offered a succinct history of American modern dance: "In the beginning there was Martha Graham, who changed the face of an art form and discovered a new world. Then there was Merce Cunningham, who stripped away the externals and showed us the heart of movement. And then there was Paul Taylor, who let the sun shine in." The last living member of this homegrown pantheon, Taylor has not finished innovating yet, adding new pieces each year to a prolific catalog of 140 dances. Romantic, iconoclastic, dauntingly athletic, and sometimes hilarious, his works heft weighty topics such as war, spirituality, sexuality, and mortality onto their shoulders, then alchemize them into weighty dances that seem to exist for the sheer pleasure of their beauty.

Among his countless accolades, the champion choreographer has received a Kennedy Center Honor, the National Medal of Arts, and the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship “genius award.” Such a rich and prolific body of work makes it easy for the Paul Taylor Dance Company to harvest a unique program for each performance, which they have done in 520 cities throughout 62 countries.