Company B

• Choreographer: Paul Taylor
• Music: Various 1940s-era songs sung by the Andrews Sisters
• Costumes: Santo Loquasto
• Lighting: Jennifer Tipton
• World Premiere: Paul Taylor Dance Company, June 20, 1991
• PBT Performance Date: February 12-14. 2010;

Program Notes

Excerpted from PBT playbill, 2010. Notes provided by the Paul Taylor Dance Company.

Just as America began to emerge from the Depression at the dawn of the 1940s, the country was drawn into the Second World War. In a seminal piece of Americana, Paul Taylor recalls that turbulent era through the hit songs of the Andrews Sisters. Although the songs depict a nation surging with high spirits, millions of men were bidding farewell to wives or girlfriends and many would never return from battle. The dance focuses on such poignant dualities. Young lovers lindy, jitterbug and polka in a near manic graps for happiness while in the background shadowy figures – soldiers – fall dead. Among the sections of the dance, the one choreographed to “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (of Company B)” is carefree until the moment the bugler is shot; the one set ot “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” tells of a young lady’s affections for a soldier an ocean away who, for his part, reaches out to a comrade in arms. The dance ends just as it began, with “Bei Mir Bist du Schon” – but the world has clearly changed.