A Taylor Dancer for the Ages, ‘Unmannered and Wondrous’

Paul Taylor loved his dancers, but Carolyn Adams must have been in another league. In his autobiography, Taylor recalled his reaction to her audition for his company: She was “a sure bet, a gold mine.”

Adams went to that audition with no intention of getting the job. A senior studying dance at Sarah Lawrence College, she had offered to drive some of her friends to the audition. It was a Friday in January 1965. She had her father’s De Soto.

“It’s almost embarrassing to tell this story,” Adams said. “I kept waiting to get eliminated.” There were 200 people at the audition. “But I have to say that there was a certain point when we were moving across the floor — I thought, Oh, this dress fits kind of nice.”

Taylor’s movement, in other words, suited her physicality. But before she could join the company, she had to finish school. Taylor made an agreement with Bessie Schönberg, the director of Sarah Lawrence‘s dance program, that Adams would be released during certain hours so she could learn repertory. “That didn’t happen back then,” Adams said. “You didn’t walk in and out of school.”

Adams danced with the Taylor company until 1982 and is now its director of education. On Wednesday, she will be honored at the company’s gala program at Lincoln Center with a new work by Robert Battle: “Dedicated to You,” a solo (to be danced by Jada Pearman) set to Bach and Sarah Vaughan. Battle, the former artistic director at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, was Adams’s student at Juilliard and considers her an important mentor.