Mercurial & Magical

Paul Taylor’s Parisa Khobdeh blends beauty, grace, and comic timing.

 

 

Paul Taylor’s
Also Playing. Costume by Santo Loquasto, photo by Matthew Karas.

 

After nearly 10 years as a member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, Parisa Khobdeh is being rewarded in the way every dancer loves most: showered with plum roles by a modern master. Still, one part in particular, the stoic, fearless female lead in Promethean Fire, fills her with awe. She first encountered that majestic dance in 2002; its tumultuous duet, performed by Lisa Viola and Patrick Corbin, blew her away.

 

“I saw Lisa run from Patrick to the edge of the stage and then she turned and threw herself at him,” says Khobdeh after a rehearsal at the company’s Lower East Side studios. “As he caught her, her face grazed the ground. I took the same gasp the audience took.”

 

The moment was life-changing. “At that point, I knew: I don’t want to be a great dancer—I want to be a great Taylor dancer.”

 

To accomplish that requires range, and in Khobdeh’s dancing—from her eloquent lyricism to her sly sense of humor—there is a rainbow of emotion and physicality. “I look at Paul’s dances, and it’s not light and dark,” she says. “It’s how many shades of gray. In one dance like Esplanade, you have tremendous pathos, you have romance, you have darkness, you have absolute abandon and letting go, and I feel like being a Taylor dancer is executing all of those things. That’s what I try to achieve. There’s beauty in the madness and the sanity, in the pure gorgeousness and exhaustion, and in the disparity and the dignity.”

 

In many ways, Khobdeh is impossible to typecast. She’s a beauty, with finely arched eyebrows that lend her dancing a sensuous air in works like Brandenburgs and Arden Court; they also seem to let you in on the joke in humorous pieces like Offenbach Overtures or Troilus and Cressida (Reduced). Despite her delicacy, she is tougher than she looks: Khobdeh is a Texan whose parents left Tehran a few years before the 1979 Islamic revolution. She grew up in Plano, a suburb north of Dallas.

 

Khobdeh began dancing for practical reasons: Her parents worked full-time and they needed a place for her to go after school. “Also, I think my mother always admired dancing when she was younger, so this was an opportunity for me to be exposed to the arts,” Khobdeh says. “She couldn’t dance. She wanted to as a youngster and her father didn’t approve.”

 

At the Chamberlain School of Performing Arts, under Kathy Chamberlain, she received rigorous training. The main focus was ballet, and Khobdeh had the chance to perform with high-level guest artists, including Carlos Acosta. “But it wasn’t until I saw modern dance that it spoke to me as an expressive medium,” she says. “I immediately fell in love with it. It blew my hair back.”

 

She entered Southern Methodist University as a pre-med major, but halfway through realized that she wanted to pursue dance instead. It was at SMU that Khobdeh feels she developed, not just as a dancer but also as a person. She recalls asking herself questions like, Who am I? Where am I going? “That’s where I discovered what I wanted.” Khobdeh set her sights on joining the Taylor company. “And then,” she continues, “it was like I’d walk through walls for it.”

 

She auditioned twice. The first time she was cut immediately, but the second audition, about a year later, occurred after she had completed a Taylor intensive. “The line was out the door at 7:00 in the morning, and I was a little cold, so I went to the third floor to the yoga studio that I had been training at.”

 

It wasn’t open, but a cleaning woman was working; Khobdeh asked her if she could use one of the smaller studios to warm up and meditate. “As I was leaving, I looked at her—there was a window behind her—and she was just glowing like there was a halo around her,” Khobdeh recalls. “She said, ‘I have a very good feeling about you today.’ ”

 

At the audition, Khobdeh says that she felt superhuman. “They were pounding out choreography,” she says, snapping her fingers. “When you’ve got so many eyes all over your body, it’s incredible. The next thing I knew, the dancing was done and I couldn’t believe that I had made it that far. Paul came up to us, and he was so generous. He said, ‘You guys are all beautiful’—and he kind of wrapped his arm around me and gave me a little squeeze—‘but I’ve made my choice.’ ”

 

Taylor hasn’t had reason to second-guess his decision. This fall, Khobdeh performed as the lead in his newest work, To Make Crops Grow, after this piece went to press. Taylor says that the role “is one of the most demanding I’ve ever made for her.”

 

“Parisa connects with you in the moment. You can tell when you look in her eyes that there is nowhere else she would rather be.” 
—Michael Trusnovec, her frequent partner.
Photos by Francisco Graciano, Courtesy PTDC. 

 

Khobdeh, who wears heels in the dance, laughs. “He’s warned me that it doesn’t end very well for me,” she says. “I don’t have a very good relationship with my husband. I’m kind of fancy and I’m married to an older gentleman. We have one child together, and he doesn’t do it for me. Paul says I’m very flirtatious. I think it’s because I’m unhappy.”

 

Actually, offstage, Khobdeh, who is single, is as sunny as they come. Michael Trusnovec, her frequent partner, says, “She’s one of those people that whenever we go somewhere on the road and get into a taxi, not two minutes into the ride, she knows everything about the driver.” That curiosity, in part, is what keeps her challenged by Taylor’s prodigious imagination. There’s no way to know what’s around the corner, and that’s how she likes it.

 

“Maybe that’s why we’re so fiercely loyal and devoted to Paul,” she says. “In doing parts like Piazzolla Caldera, Promethean Fire and Company B, I feel like Paul has a lot of trust in me. That he feels I’m capable of doing them justice. Being in the studio and making something is a very special process. When we find out who’s going to be in the new dance, it feels like Christmas morning. It is the best part of my job. It’s such a beautiful thing, especially to see him move. I admire the man so much. And I love trying to read his mind.”

 

Khobdeh, 32, lives on New York’s Lower East Side and rides her bicycle everywhere. She also attends as many theater, dance, and music performances—from the Philharmonic to a three-person band in a Brooklyn basement—as she can afford. But Khobdeh doesn’t limit herself to simply sitting in the audience: She’s also part of a comedy-improv troupe called the Sea Monsters.

 

“The reason I got into it was because Paul was challenging me with more comedy roles,” Khobdeh says. “It’s like the yoga, the biking, and the weight training that I do. It’s cross-training for my mind. It helps me understand comedy, timing and, more specifically, Paul’s timing. And that’s really what I’m striving for.”

 

Clockwise from top left: 
Offenbach Overtures with Michelle Fleet. Photo by Paul B. Goode, Courtesy PTDC; In costume for Piazzolla Caldera. Photo by Matthew Karas; Esplanade, from backstage. Photo by Francisco Graciano, Courtesy PTDC. 

 

 

So far, her comedy-improv life is something of a secret. “Sometimes it’s really nice to walk into a random third-floor theater somewhere on MacDougal Street and perform and nobody knows who you are,” she says. “Nobody knows what you do. You’re just another player and I love that. I love completely being anonymous and turning into something else.”

 

In her dancing, she manages to do that all the time, performing such disparate roles as the forlorn young woman in Company B (her solo to “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” is heartbreaking) and as the lusty, space-devouring sexpot in Piazzolla. This March at Lincoln Center, Khobdeh dances with Trusnovec in three Taylor classics: Esplanade; Eventide, a delicately rendered look at love told through the simplest of means—walking; and Promethean Fire.

 

Photo by Matthew Karas.

 

 

Trusnovec finds something in Khobdeh’s essence similar to that of the recently retired Taylor dancer Annmaria Mazzini, who danced each performance as if it might be her last. “Parisa is one of those dancers who connects with you in that moment,” he says. “You can tell when you look in her eyes that there is nowhere else she would rather be, that there is no one else even onstage when you’re dancing with her. I feel like the world disappears. It’s very pure and beautiful.”

 

Khobdeh relishes dancing with Trusnovec; in Promethean Fire, which hints at the events of 9/11, she calls him her rock. “I do that blind leap,” she says. “I jump into the void. And I know he’s going to catch me. I trust him with my life.”

 

Photo by Matthew Karas.

 

At one point in Promethean Fire, the dancers collapse on top of each other only to rise up again. It’s a triumphant look at the human spirit, which is why Khobdeh loves it so much. “Being human is going through obstacles and overcoming adversity,” she says. “We’re all faced with tragedy at some point or another, and if you are afraid of it, it might overtake you. So you look beyond the obstacle.”

 

Before last season’s Lincoln Center engagement, the company performed a run-through of Promethean Fire for Taylor. “After we bowed, he gestured to me and I went up to his chair,” she says. “I bent down to hear him because he was sitting. He looked at me and he kissed me on the cheek and said, ‘That’s it.’ It was so tender. My heart felt huge. It was a beautiful moment that I’ll cherish forever.”

 

Gia Kourlas is the dance editor of
Time Out New York and writes about dance for The New York Times.