The footage you see here is of Beloved Renegade, as rehearsed by the Paul Taylor Dance Company at the 2009 American Dance Festival. Paul Taylor established his company in 1954 in Manhattan along with five other dancers. The dance company since then has performed in 520 cities and 62 countries. Among other accomplishments, Taylor has won an Emmy award for outstanding choreographer for 1992’s Paul Taylor’s Speaking in Tongues.
Beloved Renegade premiered in 2008 and is inspired by the works of the great American poet Walt Whitman, and set to Francis Poulenc’s Gloria. Reviewing the work in February, The New York Times‘ Alastair Macauley called the piece “one of the great achievements of Mr. Taylor’s long career and one of the most eloquently textured feats of his singular imagination.”
The company will also perform two pieces in addition to Renegade. Mercuric Tidings (1982) uses excerpts from Franz Schubert’s first and second symphonies while Scudorama, an ADF-commissioned-work created in 1963, is described by the festival as a “gem most Taylor devotees haven’t seen, complete with a jazzy-classical score by Clarence Jackson.”