
MEDIUM COOL
The curtain rose quickly to reveal a quiet stage dominated by a huge rectangular backdrop painted by Alex Katz with puffy clouds arrayed in pink-violet tones, though it was hard to say which colors were painted and which were conjured by Jennifer Tipton’s perfect lighting. On the bare stage were eight clumps: the dancers lying motionless, two of them covered by cheerfully patterned beach blankets. Everything in this dance—Paul Taylor’s Scudorama, 1963, staged this past November at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in an all-Katz evening of Taylor dances—already seemed funny but