The Brooklyn Rail

There is a remarkable photograph from 1963 of modern-dance titan Paul Taylor and his greatest acolyte, Bettie de Jong. Taylor is mid-leap, limbs splayed. His unitard has no shading or texture, so he looks flat and almost fictitious, a cartoon cat who can float indefinitely as long as he doesn’t glance down. De Jong is beneath him, her body flush with a hardwood floor. You can see every contour of her clothing; she looks real, gravity-bound, made of flesh. They are an incongruous pair: like two action figures manufactured at such different tiers of verisimilitude that it would be unseemly to play with them at the same time.

When the photo appeared on the cover of Taylor’s autobiography, Private Domain, de Jong was cropped out, but she appears in the book’s pages as an inspired comic caricature, whose role in the troupe, according to Taylor, lies “somewhere between auntie and virgin queen.” His “Bet” kvetches endlessly about her sinuses, knits dance tights on public transit, and grumbles about the tweaks Taylor makes to his old dances. “Mostly I love her, but sometimes I don’t,” Taylor writes, before conceding, “Probably, no one has ever had a muse like dear Bet.”

Born in Indonesia in 1933 to Dutch parents, de Jong spent the Second World War in a Japanese-run internment camp, where she and the other children staged “little performances” for the adults. In the late 1950s, she came to New York, where she trained with Martha Graham and killed time in automats. In 1962, she bumped into Taylor in Graham’s kitchen. He invited her to tour Europe with his company, and she never left his side after that.

These days her “muse” era is long past; de Jong retired from dancing in 1985, and, at this point, she has spent the majority of her professional life in the position of rehearsal director for the Taylor company, a gig she self-deprecatingly likens to being a “traffic cop.” For Michael Novak, who danced in the company for eight years before becoming its artistic director, her impact runs much deeper. “Paul hired us, but Bettie made us dancers,” he says. “Bettie was in the studio; she was on the road. She would see you try and falter and grow. Paul gave you these springboards of casting, from role to role, but Bettie did the work to get you there.”

For decades, the repertory was de Jong’s domain. During his lifetime, Taylor was disinterested in the process of reconstructing his early dances—de Jong liked to call him “Mr. Forgot”—so she relied on a blend of archival footage, Taylor’s notes and stick-figure drawings, and her own muscle memory to breathe the choreography into new bodies. Today, Novak and rehearsal director Cathy McCann handle the bulk of the restoration work, but de Jong still provides a final gloss. “When you have a repertory as old as ours,” says Novak, “you might lose some of the marrow of the work. That’s where Bettie is pivotal: in making sure that the driving spirit remains intact. Everyone huddles around her and she’ll preach.”

Hoping that I might catch the spirit myself, I spoke with de Jong at her home on the Lower East Side a week after her ninety-second birthday. Her apartment is a stone’s throw from the Taylor studios and boasts an incomparable view of the Williamsburg Bridge. The windowsill is lined with photos and a single Paul Taylor original: a monarch butterfly pressed between panes of glass. De Jong’s gifts to Taylor were more pragmatic. “I gave him once a whole box of socks, and he just loved it,” she said in a 2019 oral history.¹ “He liked things that he could use.”

For reasons I can’t easily explain, I’ve interviewed a lot of ninety-year-old artists, and de Jong has something you rarely find in that demographic: a mind unclouded by ego or vanity or nostalgia. She is, in the words of Taylor dancer Alex Clayton, a “talking mirror.”² During our conversation, she brought her signature blunt forcefulness to bear on a number of topics, from the importance of packing liquor before tours to the Taylor company’s upcoming season at the Joyce. The programs there will feature three major works from the 1970s alongside two reconstructions of rarities—Tablet (1960) and Churchyard (1969)—that have gone unseen for nearly fifty years.

Afterward, riding the train home from de Jong’s apartment, I found myself staring at the 1963 photo of her and Taylor, which I had printed out along with my questions. The image’s prophecy felt weirdly complete. Seven years after his death, Paul Taylor is in the air, unattainable, pure evanescent myth, and Bettie de Jong is still on the ground, doing the work, listening.

Matt Weinstock (Rail): Of the eighteen dancers who are now in the company, fourteen of them never worked directly with Paul Taylor. Is it harder for them to get his language into their bodies? What sorts of questions do they ask you?

Bettie de Jong: Nothing. [Laughs] I tell them.

Rail: What do you tell them?

de Jong: What Paul hates. There are so many things that he hates.

Rail: You’ve often described the Taylor style in negative terms: that he hated certain things, and that the Taylor style emerges from a dancer once all of those things have been eliminated. What were some of the things he hated to see?

de Jong: A girl sitting with her legs open. Forget it. Or crawling with your behind facing the audience. In Esplanade (1975), all the turns are absolutely right-angle. And diagonals are diagonals. No wishy-washy with Paul. Absolutely no wishy-washy.

Rail: You once called Paul Taylor “a hunter,” and said that “he was always stealing movement ideas from the dancers.”

de Jong: He called it “borrowing,” which I think is a very nice word. Otherwise it sounds so rotten.

Rail: What were your favorite works of his to dance?

de Jong: Esplanade. Post Meridian (1965). One that I really loved was 3 Epitaphs (1956). 3 Epitaphs was my goodie. I did it with Paul. He was tall and I was tall, and it felt so good to be behind him. I did 3 Epitaphs until I stopped dancing. When the company was in Paris in 1962, a photographer from the Paris Opera asked Paul if he could take some photographs of us. Paul told the dancers, “Take your most favorite costume.” Everybody else chose things that were colorful, beautiful, waify. And I took my costume for 3 Epitaphs, which is totally black: black shoes, black leotards, black face covering. The only things not black are the mirrors in the hood and the eyes, so you could see. A mouth too, but it wasn’t too visible. They laughed at me, that I had chosen that costume! But that photo of me ended up everywhere we went on tour for years. It was such a catchy photograph.

Rail: I have a question about touring. I rewatched the documentary Dancemaker (1998) recently, and there’s an amazing montage where all the Taylor dancers are preparing to go on tour. They’re packing things like NyQuil, melatonin, throat lozenges. Then the camera cuts to you, and the only thing you’re packing is an enormous flask. What was in it?

de Jong: Liquor, of course. [Laughs] Because it’s very hard to get at times in other countries.

Rail: How does it feel seeing Tablet come back into the company’s repertory?

de Jong: Tablet was not made for the company. Tablet was really made for Pina Bausch. I saw her do it out front—just one time. She was a statue, and Dan Wagoner manipulated the statue. She didn’t do anything; she was still. She had a white painted face. Why a white face? I don’t know. Paul was into odd things. He was into that kind of thing till the end—always laughing about something.

Rail: What quality did Pina Bausch bring to the role?

de Jong: She was a ballet dancer, number one. She was not a modern dancer. Very soft, and so skinny—scary skinny. But very beautiful. Dead, now. She really danced herself dead. That was, I think, her métier, through the end.

Rail: Taylor later reset Tablet on Akiko Kanda, a dancer who was your first roommate in New York.

de Jong: Akiko was always in the pretty dances, and I was always in the dirty ones. I didn’t mind at all. And she couldn’t speak a word of English. Japanese only.

Rail: So Taylor taught her dances without being able to speak to her?

de Jong: Pretty much. She just did what he did. And when it didn’t come out so well, he would mumble and she would mumble back—and usually she improved. [Laughs] You don’t really have to talk in modern dance. In ballet, there’s a lot more talking to communicate how the steps are done.

Rail: Agnes de Mille, who started out in ballet, always used metaphors with her dancers. She’d say things like “Do it again, but you’re a diseased Christmas ornament.” Did Paul Taylor give you metaphors?

de Jong: In Esplanade, I’m only in one section—the second section—and Paul called it a “haunted house.” That’s all you got, you know. A haunted house with an absent mother. That’s what Paul meant, at least to me. I played the mother figure, but she still was absent.

Rail: Did you crave more from him in terms of language and meaning?

de Jong: No, I just did what I did, and if he didn’t like it, he would scream. [Laughs] I’d say, “Oh, okay! Next time!”

Rail: You danced in the premiere of Churchyard at New York City Center in 1969. Tell me about the making of that dance.

de Jong: Churchyard. Oh, god. At the time I had an apartment uptown, and Paul would always call at nine o’clock on Sunday morning and say [meek, sweet voice], “Bet, could you come? I have such nice music.” He wanted to try things out, and I was always the proofreader. He had nothing else to do on Sundays. He said, “Take a taxi.” I was—pardon my bad word—pissed that he called on Sundays, when I just wanted to rest. Working for Paul Taylor, grappling on the floor, was hard work. But once you started working, there was no way you could keep being obstreperous with him. At least I couldn’t.

Rail: What is Churchyard about?

de Jong: Churchyard is a dirty dance. I started out a very clean, queenly dancer—and then I was turned into a very dirty dancer. Hair, face, makeup: everything was dirty. I had a lot of hair sticking out. We stuffed pillows into our costumes. A friend of mine who was very up on looking beautiful said, “How did you dare come onstage with those lumps in your costume?” I said, “Paul asked me to.” Nobody ever said no to Paul about things like that.

Rail: What do the lumps represent? The piece has medieval elements; are the dancers catching the plague?

de Jong: I would think they’re cancerous. Through the dance, I was disintegrating into a nothing. At the end, I was sort of part of the floor.

Rail: When you had a role like that, did you think of yourself as an actor playing a character who was undergoing all these changes, or were you just thinking about the gestures and the steps?

de Jong: It’s the gestures and the steps. No acting. No acting.

Rail: How did you make the decision to stop dancing?

de Jong: It was on stage in the middle of Esplanade. I’d done a million performances of it by then. We were on our knees, going around and around, and I said to myself, “I think this is the last one I’m going to do.” I happened to be very close to Ken Tosti and he said, “Is that really true?” It was funny that he heard me. After we took our bow, I went to Paul’s dressing room and said, “Can this be the last performance that I do?” He said, “Whatever you want, Bet.”

Rail: You didn’t want a farewell performance?

de Jong: Paul said, “Do you want a big one?” Meaning flowers and stuff like that. I said, “Me? Flowers? Forget it. Don’t do that to me.” It’s scary, you know, to be on stage all by yourself and get all that stuff thrown at you. Not me. My last performance was out of town, if I remember correctly.

Rail: I’ve read that Paul Taylor liked to make art out of things like driftwood, butterflies, rusty nails, and petrified mice. He gave them as gifts.

de Jong: Oh, he did that forever. Ugh. He loved butterflies. But butterflies, you know, they’re very fragile. John [Tomlinson, the company’s longtime executive director] has a whole wall of Paul’s butterflies in his office, but I wasn’t so happy to have them on the wall because they get discolored and ugly. Art should be sustainable. It should be able to last. Otherwise…

Rail: [Incredulous] It goes in the trash?

de Jong: Yeah.

Rail: It’s funny hearing you say that, because of course dance is unsustainable too. You’ve spent so much of your life working to preserve this fundamentally ephemeral thing.

de Jong: I know. But what he gave me is so precious to me that I want other people to have it too.

Rail: What has it been like watching the current dancers rehearse old works?

de Jong: They think that they know everything. You could just [mimes wringing necks]. Usually they make it pretty. And Paul loved ugly, he really did. The uglier the better.

Rail: Is that something you tell them? “Make it uglier”?

de Jong: Oh, yeah.

Rail: How did Paul Taylor feel about looking back at his early dances?

de Jong: Probably shitty. He was always in for the new. Doing the same dances for a long time was boring to him. Me, I could do 3 Epitaphs all my life.

Rail: What do you think it is about you that you never get tired of these dances?

de Jong: That’s just me. [Laughs] I don’t change what I eat, either.