I first saw the Paul Taylor Dance Company perform in 1970. I was immediately impressed, even though it’s a modern dance company and at the time I tended to prefer ballet. But Paul Taylor’s work had a unique set of characteristics that wowed me: wonderful music, powerful dancers, incredibly inventive choreography, contrasts of lightest light and darkest dark, an emphasis on the interrelationships between people, and even that rarest of commodities in dance—humor.

Taylor himself was a revelation. Dancers tend to be short and to look taller onstage. But he really was tall, and muscular like an athlete. When he wanted to (and every now and then he did want to, if it suited his dramatic purposes), he could walk onto the stage and not even look like the trained dancer he was—but like a regular Joe instead.

Taylor is still churning out dance works a few months shy of his eightieth birthday. His choreography doesn’t sound as though it would be extraordinary, and yet it is. Solid technique is present, to be sure. But mere steps and flash are never the point: movement is, and what movement expresses. If I write that in one of my favorite works of his—“Esplanade”—he eschews conventional dance steps and uses movements that derive almost entirely from natural everyday motions such as walking, running, and falling, it sounds boring. But Taylor transforms these steps into one of the most exhilarating and joyous dances ever created, one that at times exhibits an almost sublime tenderness, and at other times makes the audience gasp with its bold daring, lightning speed, and the dancers’ sheer physical power as they hurl themselves with reckless abandon into each others’ arms and then down to the floor and up again.

I’m visiting New York right now, and last night we went to see Paul Taylor 2 (Taylor’s chamber company) at the Joyce Theater. To my delight, “Esplanade” was on the program, and once again I thrilled to its timeless choreography, every bit as fresh now as it was the day it was created in 1975.

I always feel like apologizing when I post dance videos here. I’m glad to have them, of course. But they can only give the barest idea of the power of the thing itself in its live, three-dimensional, living and breathing onstage manifestation. The following You Tube clip shows rare documentary footage of Taylor himself dancing the work “Aureole” (see 2:32-2:39), and contains an excerpt from the exuberant aforementioned finale of “Esplanade” (minus Taylor; he retired from active performing in 1974, before the work was created), which starts at minute 3:49 and lasts until the video’s end:

This is pretty wonderful, too. It’s another video showing nearly the same excerpt from “Esplanade,” only this time much of it is filmed from the wings, offering a very different perspective:There was a question-and-answer session after the performance last night, and one of dancers described the way Taylor conducts auditions for his company. Taylor always first has the dancers walk across the floor, one by one, and then each must run. He is looking at their quality of natural movement; if that isn’t up to his standards, he’s not interested. After the walk/run he lets many of them go, and then works with the ones who are left, winnowing them down until the lucky dancer or dancers remain who will get the chance to dance his choreography onstage as members of his company.

I once took a master class from a group of Paul Taylor’s dancers back in 1970. As is often the case with such lessons, they taught us some excerpts from his works. I well remember how wonderful those little snippets felt to actually perform. There was a freedom and a sweep to them, a musicality and a sense that we were almost flying across the floor, dancing in a way that expressed the joy that can sometimes be found in dance—and in life.