Sylvia,
choreographed by Mark Morris.
San Francisco Ballet,
April 30-May 9, 2004.
All Fours,
choreographed by Mark Morris.
Mark Morris Dance Group,
Brooklyn Academy of Music,
June 8-12, 2004.
Rock of Ages,
choreographed by Mark Morris.
Mark Morris Dance Group,
Cal Performances, Berkeley,
October 28-30, 2004.
I’ve liked all the dances Mark Morris has choreographed for the San Francisco Ballet over the past eight or nine years. It’s a good company, and he knows how to play to the dancers’ classical strengths without giving up on his own unconventional vision. But even the ballets I liked best—Sandpaper Ballet, A Garden, and now Sylvia—didn’t move me the way Morris’s best works for his own company do. Why is this? It’s possible that I’m just more of a modern-dance fan than a ballet fan, but that explanation doesn’t explain anything; it just moves the question back one level. And in any case I don’t think the distinction between modern and ballet means much in Morris’s work. He uses both idioms fluently and mixes them together all the time, so that the dancers in his own company have to master ballet technique to perform their roles, while the ballet dancers for whom he guest-choreographs have to draw on the kinds of expressive, dramatic qualities usually demanded only of modern dancers. The Hard Nut includes dancers on pointe, and Sylvia has at least one barefoot sequence; both feature a number of zany characters, profuse references to pop culture, and lush scores by famous nineteenth-century composers. So why should one be classified as a modern dance and the other a ballet?
Well, one reason is that The Hard Nut is danced only by Morris’s own dancers—as are Dido and Aeneas and L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, the other evening-length works Morris has made for his company. More specifically, these dances were created with particular dancers in mind for each role. As the company has aged and altered, with old dancers retiring and new ones coming aboard, the people in the roles have changed, but as a result the roles themselves have had to change, and so have the dances as a whole. In The Hard Nut, for instance, David Leventhal and Lauren Grant bring to the characters of the young lovers a tone of exuberant intimacy that was not there when William Wagner and Marianne Moore played these roles; Julie Worden’s bitchy teenage sister is more of a glamourpuss and less of a comic sourpuss than Tina Fehlandt’s was; and John Heginbotham’s portrayal of the mother is more girlish and movingly delicate, less campy and hilarious, than Peter Wing Healy’s version of the same part. This is not to say that one embodiment is better or worse—they might both be great, in different ways—but when a Mark Morris dancer takes over a role, she makes it her own, and the rest of the dancers in the piece need to respond to what it has become. This is not a matter of interchangeability but its opposite, real change.
A ballet, on the other hand, must be designed to allow for multiple casts, since there are always additional performers waiting in the wings and competing for stage time. Dancers in a ballet do not marry their roles for life, as dancers in the Mark Morris Dance Group do. In the San Francisco Ballet, even the most admired performers will flirt with the main parts on one night and find themselves relegated to the sidelines on the next. So, although the roles that Morris has created in Sylvia have character (he cannot avoid expressing character, which is one of the things I love about his work), it is not a character that is tied to the body, face, temperament, and gestural range of a single dancer, as it would be in his own company. And with the loss of this kind of specificity comes a certain reduction in emotional intensity. Sandpaper Ballet is charming, A Garden is beautiful, and Sylvia is a chocolate box filled with delicious treats, but the pleasures of all three are relatively abstract compared to the humane delights and deep feelings evoked by Dido or L’Allegro.
Still, one takes one’s pleasures where one can, and Sylvia has plenty of them. Even if you do not start out as a fan of Delibes’s 1876 score (and I wonder how many people really agree with Tchaikovsky, who thought it was better than his own Swan Lake), Morris will make you feel that it is the only possible music for this story-ballet. Not only does he suit each leap, twirl, or arm flourish to its musical phrase; he also tailors the atmosphere of every scene to its musical accompaniment, so that you almost begin to imagine that the choreographer, the set designer, the costume designer, and the composer all got together to agree on how each piece of the dance would look. As with most of Morris’s dances, the best bits are both funny and touching: I particularly loved the piratical goons who guarded the kidnapped Sylvia in Orion’s cave, but I also adored Eros—a plum of a role that was played with nearly manic brilliance by Jaime Garcia Castillo on opening night.
Sylvia had four casts in all, and I saw two of them, with the title part danced first by the company’s precision-machine ballerina, Yuan Yuan Tan, and then by a vigorous, expressive, spunky little person named Megan Low, who had literally been plucked from the corps. I liked Low’s rendering better (though I could see the skill in Tan’s performance), but my problem was more with the fact that the role had multiple inhabitants than with any individual performer’s flaws. I couldn’t get a fix, finally, on who Sylvia herself was really supposed to be. I didn’t know what I was meant to feel about her, or how seriously she’d been altered by her experiences; I couldn’t even decide whether I would have preferred her to end up with the villainously attractive Orion or the lovesick Aminta. These are questions you don’t necessarily expect to get an answer to in classical ballets, but Mark Morris has such an appetite for plot and character (not to mention gossip and fable and history and just plain overabundant life) that he feeds your desire to know those creatures onstage. And in his works for his own company, you do know them. You know them through the ways their bodies move, and how they respond to the music, or to each other, or to gravity. This is not personal acquaintance as we normally think of it, but it is very intimate nonetheless, and very satisfying. It is what I miss when I watch Morris’s dances performed by other companies, and it is what always sends me eagerly back to his own incomparable dancers.
I was out of town when All Fours premiered at Berkeley’s Cal Perfor-mances in September of 2003, so it wasn’t until last June that I finally caught up with it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was well worth the wait. This is one of Morris’s instant classics—as good as V, I think, and just as complicated. Even now that they’ve settled into their roles, so that they’re reaching toward perfection in each performance, the dancers are still energized by the complexity and the pace of the work: you can’t exactly feel them struggling, but you can sense that every successfully completed sequence is a triumph of training, will, intelligence, and musicality over almost insuperable odds. Like the Bartók string quartet to which it is set, All Fours is a fiendishly difficult piece to perform well, and part of its amazing pleasure is that it comes across as so much fun.
The dance’s title is a mathematical rather than an anatomical one. That is, we are not watching dancers crawl around on hands and knees; instead, we being treated to a musical and choreographic pattern in which everything is a multiple or a factor of four. The music is Bartók’s fourth string quartet. There are twelve dancers in the piece, who divide into a corps of eight (four men, four women) and a quartet of principals. The quartet then subdivides into a pair of men and a pair of women, so that in the three central movements of the piece, we get a wildly appealing dance by the two men, followed by a slower but equally enchanting sequence by all four, and then another wonderfully speedy duet by the women. These three centerpieces are bracketed on either end by refrains involving the eight other dancers. That the Bartók quartet has five movements rather than four is the only exception to the title’s rule, but it is an exception that serves Morris well, for it allows him to indulge his passion for symmetry, with equally weighted segments raying out from a center.
If the patterning sounds coldly calculated, that is only because you are not sitting there in the audience at this very minute. Nothing could be hotter or more vibrant than the way these particular dancers (and these particular musicians, credited as the MMDG Music Ensemble) bring the Bartók music to life: they show us its melody, its wit, and its complicated richness. In many places Morris uses the individual dancers to define individual melodic lines, allowing us to see and hear what is happening on the cello, say, in contrast to the first violin. But elsewhere he has the dancers move in unison or near-unison to the whole sound, so that we can feel the strings blending together into one voice. The collaboration between music and gesture is especially noticeable in the fourth movement, the Allegro pizzicato, where the two women do something with their feet—an amalgamation of tap-dancing, toe-wriggling, and Balkan-dance shuffling—that exactly mimics the pizzicato sound of the strings. That the two women are Marjorie Folkman and Julie Worden, two of Morris’s most gorgeously eloquent dancers, doesn’t hurt.
Of the men in All Fours, the stand-out in a very fine crew is Bradon McDonald. The first time I saw McDonald onstage, Morris had thrown him into The Office as a last-minute substitute for himself (an injury had prevented Morris from going on), and even in these trying circumstances, McDonald shone. Now, a few years later, he has grown into the kind of superlative dancer you can’t take your eyes off: in effect, a Mark Morris-caliber dancer. Though it’s painful to contemplate signature Morris roles like Dido and the Sorceress being passed along to any other dancer, Bradon McDonald almost makes even that kind of change seem imaginable.
Recent triumphs like V and All Fours represent a new direction for Mark Morris even as they are continuous with everything that has gone before. They are recognizably his choreography and couldn’t be anyone else’s; they share in (and sometimes even exceed) the musicality of his earlier work. But they are the creations, I can’t help feeling, of a man who is noticeably older than most of the dancers performing the works. This is something new for Morris, who began as virtually the youngest member of his own company and who was for many years its chief dancer. Now, however, there has been a generation change—several generation changes, if you consider the recent retirement of still-youngish dancers like Shawn Gannon and Mireille Radwan-Dana. The dancers who populate the Mark Morris Dance Group now are young and energetic and immensely skilled; even the somewhat older ones dance as if they are still, or again, young and energetic. And the choreography that Morris is producing for this company reflects that fact. There is a separation, in works like All Fours and V, between the self that thinks up the dances and the selves that enact them. The choreographer takes a kind of delight in physical exuberance that, for lack of a better word, I would call self-conscious—a delight that is infused with an awareness of mortality.
The turning point in Morris’s style came, I think, with the 1999 piece Dixit Dominus, set to Handel’s eponymous music. I thought of that as Morris’s “mortification of the flesh” dance, his raging at the inevitable decline of the human body, and I found the piece disturbing and unpleasant to watch. It was technically difficult, but with no rewards to compensate for the difficulties: the dancers just seemed to be drowning in the difficulty, isolated in it, mortified by it. Yet now those very same dancers are performing far harder works with pleasure and satisfaction. This is not chance, but choice—or rather, it is the kind of choice that gets made by a creative artist who works with his whole body and his whole mind, his conscious and his unconscious, his eyes and ears and hands and feet and phenomenal sense memory and extremely logical brain. He could not have reached this point without going through Dixit Dominus; but now, having moved beyond that moment of anger, or despair, or whatever it was, he can take a somber delight in the ever-renewable mortality that is represented by the bodies of his dancers.
Perhaps some of this knowledge has come to him through his work in ballet. Certainly the technical virtuosities of dances like V and All Fours are in-formed by ballet and require ballet training on the part of the dancers who perform them. But I mean something more than that. I mean that working with the interchangeable (or at least changeable) casts of ballet companies has given Mark Morris some distance on the connection between the dancer and the dance. Not too much distance: that would be to give up everything I have been praising in the particularity of his work for his own company. But just enough distance for him to realize that change can entail excitement as well as sadness, renewal on top of loss.
As if to demonstrate the very points I’ve been making while at the same time slyly contradicting me, Mark Morris has just created an austerely brilliant new dance that has multiple casts drawn from his own company. Rock of Ages, which had its world premiere in Berkeley in October, is set to Schubert’s Adagio in E flat, a trio for violin, cello, and piano. The music, shaped around the slow, emphatic plangency of its strings and the varying speed of its piano arpeggios and trills, is both immensely sad and strangely hopeful—and the dance echoes these feelings exactly.
The four dancers in the piece begin by walking toward the center from the four corners of the stage. (There is a lot of walking in this dance, and I take that to signal some connection with life’s ordinariness; but there is also a lot of leaping and turning, which is something we don’t generally see offstage, so it seems to invoke the very opposite of ordinary life— which is what? dance? a dream? the surprisingness of life?). This initial criss-cross pattern runs through the dance, at times resulting in a near-miss as the dancers pass each other by, but elsewhere causing them to meld together or lift one another up.
Rock of Ages contains some delicately tender gestures that are new to Mark Morris’s work—in particular, a nestling motion wherein a dancer slowly raises his arms and the person standing next to him lowers her face so as to rest her right cheek briefly on his left arm, even as she is simultaneously raising her own arms. The gesture reappears in the course of the dance, so that we see it in pairs and also in lines of four, and each time it is touching in both a literal and a figurative sense. Another frequently repeated motif is a Degas-like pose that has the dancers facing away from us—their hands clasped behind them, their arms extended downward, their backs slightly arched, their heads turned aside—in a manner that could signify either sorrowful renunciation or proud self-containment.
The dance as a whole depends to an unusual extent on poses, or pauses, that correspond to the measured stateliness of the music’s pace. Often a physical movement—a head turn, say, combined with a leg thrust and an arm motion—takes place in several stages, each separated by a beat of stillness, so that we can see and feel the inviduality of the component parts. At other times the four dancers—who sometimes appear in pairs, sometimes in a trio opposed to one, and sometimes all together—move so quickly and variously that we can’t keep track of the pattern. (This too, of course, has its analogue in the music, in the trilling rivulets of piano notes.) There are moments of purposeful awkwardness—a sudden fall, the twist of a foot—and moments of expressive grace. There are even a few technically demanding solos. (A huge solo, in Morris’s company, is one that takes up five to ten seconds.) But though the piece requires tremendous control on the part of the dancers, the overall effect is not one of overt display, but rather a sense of suppressed feeling. And perhaps the most unusual thing about Rock of Ages is the way this emotional texture can be shifted—not changed utterly, but modulated and ramified—by the substitution of one dancer for another.
Morris has trained eight dancers to do the four parts: four men and four women. At the Berkeley premiere, he showed us the dance with an all-male cast, an all-female cast, and a mixed cast, but it can actually be performed in twenty-four different ways, in a series of combinations that mathematicians describe with the notation 4!—that is, 4x3x2x1. The fact that this factorial expression corresponds to the very numbers we find in the dance and the music (Schubert’s single-movement trio is in three-beat and four-beat measures) may be a coincidence, but it seems to me more likely to be the result of the intuitive links between music and math that Morris so clearly apprehends. In any case, the point I am trying to make is not a mathematical but a human one: the dance feels very different depending on whether it is performed by four men or four women or two mixed pairs (not to mention three of one sex and one of the other, a combination that I’m sure lends a whole new tone to the piece, though I haven’t yet seen it done that way). In fact, the subtle variations are such as to make you long to see every one of the twenty-four possible performances. And yet the dance can also satisfy on a single viewing: it is complete in itself, even if it also contains multiple other potential forms.
The reason the total variations are only twenty-four, rather than a much more massive number, is that each dancer has been trained to do only one part. In this sense, the dancer continues to be attached to her role, just as she always has in the Mark Morris company; it’s just that there is also one other dancer of the opposite sex who is also attached to that role. He and she are the only two people among the eight who will never dance together, and each of them brings to the part a particular character, a particular style of dancing, that affects the way the other three dancers will perform their roles. Because Mark Morris’s dancers know each other so well and rehearse together so closely, each combination is in some ways a rethinking of the piece, and this goes beyond the question of how many men or women are in it. Sex (in the sense of gender, but also in its other sense) is important to Morris, but it is never the whole story.
Rock of Ages is only a little over ten minutes long, but it has about it a quality of endlessness. I don’t mean boring interminableness or even passive open-endedness, but a deep, intense wish not to come to an end, a wish so strong it transmits itself to us as a conviction. Several times before the dance is over, the dancers come to the center from their four corners and then go out again, as they did at the very beginning, and because of the way the dance is structured, we can’t actually predict whether they will finally end up together or apart. When the music comes softly to its unemphatic end, they are moving ever more slowly away from each other, almost as if they could come back together again, but not this time. That is where the hope comes in, and also the sadness —for to resist the sense of ending is also to acknowledge how powerful and finally unavoidable a sense it is.
Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review. She has written six books of nonfiction, as well as one novel, The Pagoda in the Garden, which is due out next October.
