Review: Paul Taylor Dance Company makes triumphant return to Kennedy Center

Taylor understood the cycles of humanity, the fixed return to battle, catastrophe and loss of life, but additionally emergence. The hope of his works is that we emerge modified, that maybe we study one thing. I see “Firm B” as leaving this query open-ended, whereas “Esplanade” feels extra solidly optimistic, regardless that its darkish facet (Taylor, the realist, all the time features a darkish facet) is emphatically disturbing. Sandwiched between views of nice pleasure — dancers leaping into each other’s arms and skidding to the stage like mud-surfing kids — there’s a fractured household that by no means touches, and its smallest member is shunned. There are such a lot of imaginative connections to be made right here, amongst them Taylor’s painful previous as a toddler of divorce.