A couple of weeks ago, I was able to get another glimpse of Mark Morris’s delightful tribute to Burt Bacharach songs, The Look of Love, which was playing for four days at BAM. This was actually my third encounter with the piece, since I managed to see it twice last February when it appeared at Cal Performances in Berkeley. I wrote about this hour-long dance in some detail then, so this time I am going to focus on what struck me belatedly—always a useful exercise with Morris’s work, which, as I have learned, stands up to numerous revisits over the years.
When I rewatch something as lengthy and complicated as, say, The Hard Nut—Morris’s brilliant and beautiful take on The Nutcracker—I am not surprised to notice new things, because one’s focus cannot be everywhere onstage at once, and something unusual is often going on in the corners. Still, I always find myself asking the choreographer afterward, “Didn’t you change bits of that? For instance, was there always a woman bursting into tears at the party scene?” And he always says to me (and I do mean always), “I haven’t changed a thing.” So I have learned to take him at his word.
With a shorter, simpler piece like The Look of Love, you would think it would be easier to notice everything the first time. But no: there are still odd corners where someone is doing something different from everyone else, small and nearly hidden gestures that can have large effects. And there are complexities even within the seeming simplicity. The dance to “Walk On By,” for instance, struck me now as one of Morris’s best. Last time, by comparing it in my mind to his truly masterful walking dance in L’Allegro, I failed to give it the full credit it deserved on its own. This time I saw that the subtle numerical deployment of the ten dancers—the way the successive waves of walkers met in fives and then fours and finally threes—gave the work a deeper, more subconsciously satisfying layer; and the interruption of the walking patterns with occasional flights of leaping dance (how had I failed to notice that?) was also an intense pleasure. I still love the segment set to “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” the best, I think—nothing can match those syncopated rhythms and semi-comical, semi-earnest gestures—but “Walk On By” has now risen to near the top of my favorites list.
I noticed the music more this time—Ethan Iverson’s elegant piano, Marcy Harriell’s terrific voice—but perhaps that is to be expected, since I was relatively ignorant about Bacharach’s oeuvre before Morris decided to focus on it. And I noticed how beautifully the dancers all performed this time. Some of them are new to the company since I last saw it, and yet they all had the Mark Morris style down, to the point where they actually seemed to be dancing with enjoyment (something you never see in ballet, and rarely enough in modern dance). But maybe what I noticed most is that, very much like the songs it is based on, this is a successful work of art built around the idea of love. That is a harder thing to do than you might think. Every day during submissions season at The Threepenny Review, I go through dozens and dozens of horrible poems and stories about love; it has gotten to the point where, if I see the word love in the title or the first line, I cringe. Very few people can make anything new and surprising out of this hackneyed, repetitive, universal experience. But Mark Morris and Burt Bacharach, especially when combined, can.