Paul Taylor "Scudorama"

Music: 

 Clarence Jackson

Set and Costumes: 

 Alex Katz

Lighting: 

 Thomas Skelton

Date First Performed: 

 August 10, 1963

 The dance dates from 1963, when Americans were still in the grip of nuclear fear following the Cuban missile crisis.  Taylor was keenly attuned to the anxiety of the era and expressed these unresolved tensions in the dance, which carries a program note quoting Dante: “What souls are these who run through this Black haze… These are the nearly soulless whose lives concluded neither blame nor praise.”    The title combined the type of clouds that race across the sky before a storm with a 1960s term for “bigger and better” that to Taylor connoted “tacky.”

-AR