The Lost Dances of Paul Taylor

If a dance isn’t performed for a long time, it starts to disappear. People’s memories of it fade, and videos can be confusing—choreographers’ notes, even more so. In short, reconstructing old dances isn’t easy. On the other hand, that process of rebuilding is inherently interesting. This is what the Paul Taylor Dance Company has been up to for the past few months, as it revives two Taylor pieces from the nineteen-sixties, “Tablet” (1960) and “Churchyard” (1969), for its weeklong run at the Joyce (June 17-22). “It took us two hours of research for every minute of dance,” Michael Novak, the company’s first leader since Taylor’s death in 2018, said recently. “But, eventually, we figured it out.”

For the company, it’s an opportunity as well. The current dancers work with those from a previous era; they get to perform Taylor works that, though old, feel new, and the audience get to see a work that they haven’t already seen many times before. It’s a clean slate. Plus, these particular dances are full of curiosities. “Tablet” is a duet with a commedia-dell’arte feel. The dancers wear face paint and color-block unitards, designed by Ellsworth Kelly. They bend and twist, creating geometries with their bodies. Sometimes, as they touch dispassionately, they look like a Cubist Adam and Eve.

“Churchyard,” a more complex piece, is one of Taylor’s explorations of false piety and the violence and grotesquerie that lie beneath. The setting is medieval—Taylor loved a period piece. It, too, contains a beautiful pas de deux. A man and a woman touch tenderly, creating an image of innocent love; then, suddenly, she kicks him. This juxtaposition of man’s contrasting natures is an important through line in Taylor’s work. “Churchyard” will be echoed at the Joyce by a more familiar work, “Cloven Kingdom,” from 1976, in which apparently polite men and women in formal attire devolve into strange, threatening behaviors. Then, there is “Esplanade,” set to Bach. Turning fifty this year, it’s perhaps Taylor’s sunniest, most welcoming dance and certainly one of his most beloved. These days, it looks almost classical. What is new? What is old? “I’m obsessed with the notion of what’s timeless and timely,” says Novak. “When I go back into the vault of Paul Taylor’s repertoire, I’m amazed at how avant-garde some of the work is.”—Marina Harss

About Town

Off Broadway

Aishah Rahman’s colorism dream-play “Chiaroscuro,” directed for the National Black Theatre by abigail jean-baptiste, drifts between states: reality and surreality, droll satire and sincere despair. Passengers board the mysterious S.S. Chiaroscuro for a “Chocolate Singles” cruise, only to find the sole crew member—the trickster Paul Paul Legba (Paige Gilbert)—more interested in divesting the Black couples of their obsession with light skin than in returning them to port. In the second hour, the show loses its sense of direction, but several strong performances still anchor the production: Gayle Samuels and Lance Coadie Williams bicker as exes who miss their second chance, and the forceful (and then heartbreaking) Ebony Marshall-Oliver plays a woman so tired of whitening her skin that she peels it right off.—Helen Shaw (National Black Theatre at the Flea; through June 22.)

TV

In the Prime series “Overcompensating,” Benny—played by Benito Skinner, the show’s creator—checks a near-comical number of boxes: valedictorian, football player, homecoming king. He is also a closeted gay guy who craves the acceptance of straight dudes, and the show is about the immense temptation to keep up such an act, even as the lack of authenticity becomes corrosive. Skinner is a particularly sharp satirist of the relentless policing of masculinity by other men. The pressure to conform to traditional masculinity isn’t new terrain—but the canon of queer television is still slim enough that “Overcompensating” feels fresh. Though Benny and his crush, Miles (Rish Shah), make eyes at each other, Benny’s friendship with his ostensible love interest, Carmen (Wally Baram), emerges as the real love story.—Inkoo Kang

Off Broadway

Jennifer Smith as Stage Manager.Photograph by Hollis King

“Prosperous Fools,” adapted by the protean queer theatre-maker Taylor Mac from Molière’s “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” turns the tension between making art and making money into an occasion for lampooning all involved, from artists and arts organizations to their mega-wealthy funders. A ballet choreographer who worries he’s a sellout (Mac, in a semi-autobiographical role) is presenting his work at a gala honoring a rich scumbag (Jason O’Connell) and a bleeding-heart philanthropist (Sierra Boggess, who somehow charms you with her character’s insufferableness). The show’s direction, by Darko Tresnjak, matches the zaniness of the script; what keeps the wild ride from going off the rails is the earnestness underlying Mac’s satire, which turns a shrewd eye on the corrupting potential of money in the arts, as anywhere else.—Dan Stahl (Polonsky Shakespeare Center; through June 29.)

For more: From 2019, a report on Mac’s sequel to Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus,” a play that reminded Mac of “Trump’s crudely menacing and unwittingly self-lampooning use of comedy, which, Mac added, ‘isn’t that funny.’ ”

Art

In the art collective Open Group’s video installation “Repeat After Me II” (2022, 2024), refugees from the war in Ukraine imitate the sounds of Russian weapons that haunt them—a striking woman with red lipstick and deep bags under her eyes vocalizes the “ssssssssssssss tuhfff tuhfff tuhfff”s of aerial bombs that nearly killed her family. The project represented Poland at last year’s Venice Biennale, and there, as here, the videos play in a military bunker-cum-karaoke bar with red lighting, crates of bottled water, and microphones. Each speaker ends by saying “Repeat after me”—a phrase that’s equal parts education and exhortation to stand at a mike and make the noises yourself. You may feel awkward, but that’s the point: doing so turns the witnessing of trauma into something inescapably visceral.—Jillian Steinhauer (601Artspace; through June 22.)

Folk Rock

Photograph by Jake Edwards

In the sixty years since he débuted with Art Garfunkel, the singer-songwriter Paul Simon has shaped an undeniable career around an ambivalent perspective. As half of Simon & Garfunkel and as a soloist, he has contributed significantly to American music. From “The Sounds of Silence” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” to “Graceland” and “You’re the One,” his storytelling is nuanced, moving through an uncertain world with ease. Simon’s most recent album, “Seven Psalms,” from 2023, an acoustic song cycle, feels purposefully built for his “Quiet Celebration” tour, intimate live shows in venues selected for their sound properties. But even amid the quiet he will always find space for the classics.—Sheldon Pearce (Beacon Theatre; select dates June 16-23.)