Last night I finally got a chance to see Mark Morris’s newest piece, Moon, which premiered at the Kennedy Center last spring and has just now reached Berkeley under the auspices of Cal Performances. The last time I watched a new Morris piece in the middle of political turmoil, it was the fall of 2001, and his brilliant V (set to Schumann’s Piano Quintet) roused me out of my post-9/11 sense of anomie. But Moon, which may be equally brilliant, had the opposite effect on me: it only deepened my despair about our current national situation. Perhaps that says more about the difference between 2001 and 2026 than it does about the respective dances. But precisely because it was so moving and evocative—of a lost time in history, and of our nearly lost feelings of innocence and wonder—Moon made me sad rather than joyful.
Take, for example, the effect of the work’s opening moments. After the lights came down in Zellerbach Hall, with the stage still dark, the two musicians who played all the live music in the show—Colin Fowler on keyboards and Michel Taddei on double bass—struck up the slow-paced notes of a weirdly inviting modernist piece of music. Then, as the backdrop came to life with the first of Wendall K. Harrington’s charming (and invariably appropriate) projections, we saw the words “President of the United States” arching over the presidential seal. The shocked silence in the Berkeley auditorium had the feel of a collective gasp—and then the seal dropped down to reveal a portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr. The audience silence turned into a relieved laugh, but for me the shock persisted, because the symbols brought me face-to-face with the changes that have occurred in our national self-image since Kennedy’s “Moon Shot” excitement of 1961 and 1962.
America’s exploration of outer space and in particular its astronauts’ moon landings form a big part of the one-hour dance, but so do many other associations with that planetary, mythological, romantic entity. The music alternates between live performances of Debussy (Clair de lune), Ligeti, and other classical moderns, and recorded melodies, mostly derived from the world of popular song. So we get “Roll Along, Prairie Moon” and “Blue Moon” by Al Bowlly, “Blue Moon of Kentucky” by Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys, “Dark Moon” by Bonnie Guitar, and “Honey-Colored Moon” by Henry Hall & the BBC Dance Orchestra—to each of which Morris, in his inimitable way, has composed a dance that both gestures toward couple dancing and also stresses the group patterns of modern dance. These “social dances” may well have been my favorite parts of the show, seconded by the initial Balanchine-style chorus line of rah-rah cheerleader/dancers celebrating the “Dawn of a New Day.”
I also deeply admired, and would love to watch again, the strange, wondrous interludes that took place behind a scrim. In each of these, performed to the music of the two-man live band, one to four dancers at a time would cross the slightly darkened stage on pivoting wheeled stools. Generally they lay face-down, with their stomachs on the stools; they alternated between extending their arms and legs outward and curling them up, thus spinning the stools faster or slower. It seemed to me that all this supported yet restricted propulsion evoked the condition of astronauts in a gravity-less environment, while at the same time reminding us of children on a playground wheel. Perhaps the best of these ghostly and alluring intervals was the one where the dancer Noah Vinson stood among a group of four spinners, holding their hands and twirling them in various directions as we tried to puzzle out which body connected with which and in what direction it was moving. That sequence was magical, and somehow incredibly moving.
Isaac Mizrahi’s costumes—identical for all the dancers, who included four women and five men—could not have been bettered. With their all-white fronts (resembling space suits) and all-black backs (like wetsuits), they managed subtle and humorously to evoke the pale moon and its eternally dark side. All nine dancers were top-notch, too, and though my eye was drawn as always to Dallas McMurray, Courtney Lopes, and Billy Smith, it really seems unfair to single out any one dancer, since their success lay in being wholly persuasive as a group. At the end I wanted nothing more than to applaud these dancers and their choreographer, and I did. Yet even as I clapped enthusiastically, I was weighed down by the residual sorrow they left me with. For the evening pointed out (as if it needed pointing) the vast distance between Cape Canaveral’s hopeful optimism of 1961 and the reprehensible tragedies unfolding in Minneapolis right now. America has come a long way in those sixty-five years, and at the moment none of it seems like progress.