Phantasmagoria, City Center, New York

Dancers in ‘Phantasmagoria’

Several Paul Taylor dances from the past decade could be called “phantasmagoria” – the name of the second premiere of the New York season, which continues until Sunday. Increasingly, the acclaimed American choreographer has set on stage a tumbled dream of theatre – or its kin, ritual. Some of these dances, such as 2010’s Also Playing (reprised this year), are comic and rooted in vaudeville; others, such as the pair of Buñuelian Dream pieces from 2007, are infused with an eerie surreality. But both types – in fact, most of Taylor’s vast repertory – feature shifting points of view. Taylor is a master of sleight-of-hand, with tricks in the service of truth.

Phantasmagoria (pictured left) is one of the revue-inspired pieces, though it begins soberly enough. Brueghel peasants, sunk in longtime Taylor collaborator Jennifer Tipton’s inky shadows, pound their fists on the ground in protest at a grievously hard life. Soon, though, they have cast off their woes and grown frolicsome. To a score of anonymous Renaissance tootlers that carries on throughout the dance, the lassies squat simian style on their lads’ thighs and press cheek to cheek.

Like a zealous and drunk short-order cook reduced to scraps, Taylor serves up a whole hodgepodge menu of stock characters – first as separate dishes, then as stew. Gauzy and flower-bestrewn Isadorables, a strictly up-and-down Irish step dancer (a deadpan and broom-stiff Michelle Fleet), an imperious spying nun with massive wimple (Laura Halzack, whose comic impulses turn out to rival her celebrated lyricism) and, as pièce de resistance, an “East Indian Adam and Eve”, as the programme puts it.

This is Indian by way of burlesque. Funny like Lucille Ball, Parisa Khobdeh’s Eve twirls the two ends of her fat green toy snake as if they are ta-ta tassels and she is Gypsy Rose. Dressed in hoochie-coochie harem wear, Khobdeh and game helpmate Sean Mahoney solder the exotic to the ticky-tacky, bawdy, cartoonish and adorable.

As with the opening night’s ragtime Oh, You Kid, which deploys Ku Klux Klan chorines to return the shock to blackface, Taylor plays fast and loose with political sensitivities but only to lay out the ingredients of bigotry. You laugh because the mix is so unlikely – and so true.

City Center, New York