American choreographer Paul Taylor has made important contributions to dance modernism and postmodernism. His early choreography aligned him ideologically with New York’s avant-garde, most particularly with visual artist Robert Rauschenberg who designed all but one of Taylor’s dances through the 1950s. The work was “objectivist” in that it privileged action over emotion and it presaged the more radical deconstructions of the Judson Church choreographers by almost a decade. Though some of his subsequent choreography used more traditional modes of representation, the majority of Taylor’s dance-making has been essentially non-narrative. He has created over 140 works across six decades, and his large active repertory is a rich source for rethinking definitions of dance “isms.”