Work Reconstructed by Founder and Artistic Director Kim Jones to be Performed at MoMA

The Paul Taylor 2 Dance Company will perform Tracer, a 1962 work by Paul Taylor that was reconstructed by Associate Professor of Dance Kim Jones, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City on Wednesday, September 6. Tracer is one of three works to be performed in the program “Dance Among Friends: Robert Rauschenberg’s collaborations with Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, and Paul Taylor,” organized in connection the current MoMA exhibition Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends.

One of 13 dances that Taylor created with Rauschenberg, Tracer is one of seven works by Taylor for which no complete record of the choreography exists. During an extensive research process that culminated in a residency at UNC Charlotte, Jones worked with dancers of the Taylor 2 Dance Company to reconstruct the work, which premiered in Robinson Hall on September 30, 2016. Charlotte artist Jeff Crawford created a kinetic wheel sculpture inspired by Rauschenberg’s original Tracer sculpture. 

The Taylor 2 Dance Company performed Tracer in New York City at the 92nd Street Y on December 16 and 17, 2016. A review in The New York Times praised Jones’s reconstruction work for its “instinct and imagination as well as research.”