FINDING A NICHE WITH PAUL TAYLOR

In the five years since she joined the Paul Taylor Dance Company, Kate Johnson has become one of its most prominent members. She has had featured roles made for her in many of Taylor’s recent works, and taken on a wide range of parts created before she began working with him.

When the Taylor company performs at Royce Hall, UCLA, Friday through Sunday, the petite blond dancer will appear in four of the six works on the two programs. These include three of the choreographer’s latest pieces--”A Musical Offering,” “Ab Ovo Usque ad Mala” and “Roses”--as well as “Esplanade,” his 1975 classic.

Johnson previously danced in the companies of Eliot Feld, Hannah Kahn, Rosalind Newman and others. But with Taylor she has found a niche where she believes she can thrive artistically and fully develop her talents. “As soon as I started working with him,” she said recently, “I felt I had found something that had a huge capacity for involvement.

“There is so much to delve into in his works. So many of the pieces have an emotional content that I feel has great depth. He is someone you can stay with for a long time, because there are so many layers in his work.

“Paul somehow creates an atmosphere where the individual is allowed to have some space to try things out. The more confident you are in taking that space, the more generous he is with it. You also have to be willing to take the risk of being responsible for yourself.”

Johnson said she especially values spontaneity in dance, and has found in Taylor someone who helps the dancers sustain the freshness of a work, even after years of performances.

“Paul is not afraid to change things. Recently he took a fresh look at one part of ‘Esplanade’ and gave everyone new directions as to what he wanted. He rearranged the emotional dynamics of the second section. He always thought of it as a family situation, but now he wanted more of a sense of resentment at being part of the family.”

Johnson spoke with enthusiasm about Taylor’s musicality: “He has his own way of hearing music. He knows a great deal about it, but not in a scholastic sense. He’s learned about it intuitively. When we learn a piece, we don’t always realize how well it goes with the music until after it’s done.”

“A Musical Offering,” a 40-minute work set to Johann Sebastian Bach’s score of the same title, represents one of Taylor’s most sophisticated musical challenges. The cast of 14 is one of the largest he has used.

“Paul had a very clear idea of what was going to happen in that piece,” Johnson said. “He had mapped it out, and knew that it was going to involve a constant adding and subtracting of people. The composition of it was very clear in his mind. I feel that music really dictated the steps to him in a way I hadn’t seen in any other piece.” Johnson opens the work with an extended solo that lays the groundwork for all that follows but, contrary to appearances, it was one of the last portions to be choreographed. “Most of the movement had already originated when he made it, but he knew that it would be the opening section,” she said. “What I do is a very pared-down version of what everyone else does.”

A book of New Guinea statues, which Taylor showed to the dancers, was one source for the work. “He always starts out with an idea, something that has inspired him,” Johnson said. “Often, he abandons it in the middle and yet retains some of what he started out with. He uses those ideas the same way he uses the music: He doesn’t research them or find out a great deal about them--he just lets them inspire his imagination.”

Taylor’s repertory has always been a study in contrasts, and this year’s other new work, “Ab Ovo Usque ad Mala” (“From Soup to Nuts”), could hardly be more different from “A Musical Offering.” In this case, the composer is P.D.Q. Bach, that highly suspect, justly forgotten son of Johann Sebastian.

Given the zany nature of this music, it was inevitable that Taylor would come up with one of his lighter pieces. The work is a gigantic in-joke, as Johnson cheerfully said: “It was stolen from all of his previous pieces. He intended to lampoon himself. It’s practically like vaudeville.”

Making a mockery--even at the choreographer’s request--of material she usually preforms in earnest proved trying to Johnson.

“It was a wrenching experience, even though in the end it was fun. Having to perform some of my steps from ‘Sunset’ like that just drove me crazy. I hated it, because they had a particular voice and tone, and to be doing them out of context like that was hard.

“Once we performed the piece, however, I found that I had a real appetite for comedy. I became like a maniac--anything to get a laugh! We all became that way. As the audience would respond, we would get more and more ridiculous and enjoy it.”

In addition to these newest works, Johnson will be seen in “Roses,” a highly romantic 1985 work set to Wagner, in which she and David Parsons perform the culminating duet. The four roles she is performing here represent just a sampling of her extensive Taylor repertory, which includes the heroine in “Le Sacre du Printemps,” important roles in “Equinox,” “Diggity” and others.

Clearly, the past five years have been a fertile period for both dancer and choreographer. “A lot of dancers never find that place where they feel their talent is being used in the way they want it to be, where they can feel proud and connected to what they are doing,” Johnson said. “I feel very lucky that I’ve had this opportunity.”