I tend to avoid the hot, muggy months in New York, so I have missed most of the Mark Morris company’s recent summer performances at the Joyce Theater. But this year I had to be in New York anyway in July, and a huge added benefit was getting to see the delicious Program B. This program invitingly contained three older gems—“Ten Suggestions” from 1981, “Going Away Party” from 1990, and “The Argument” from 1999—along with the world premiere of a new dance set to John Luther Adams’s music.
A built-in disadvantage to watching new dancers in old roles is that one might make invidious comparisons, but the current crop of Mark Morris dancers is so good that I almost, though never quite, forgot about the earlier shadows who filled those parts. Since these shadows included Mikhail Baryshnikov and Mark Morris (who were alternating in the “Ten Suggestions” solo when I first saw it in about 1990), this was inevitably a difficult task for any replacement dancer. But the marvelous Dallas McMurray, who has similarly taken on nearly impossible Mark Morris roles in the past, carried out his own version of “Ten Suggestions” with grace, aplomb, and his special brand of endearing humor. There is something eternally fascinating about watching this Pierrot-like figure in white pajamas perform a series of experimental, sometimes tentative, sometimes playful moves to Tcherepnin’s piano Bagatelles, Opus 5; the music itself ranges from bright and cheerful to thoughtful and melancholy, and so did McMurray’s gestures, which involved props such as a hula hoop, a chair and a long white ribbon.
I realized while watching “The Argument” that although I had chased this dance from coast to coast when it first came out (it always seemed to be in New York when I was in Berkeley, and vice versa), I had never actually seen it before. So this piece, which had also included Morris and Baryshnikov as two of the original three men, was a complete revelation to me, despite all that I’d heard about it. In its present incarnation, Courtney Lopes and Brandon Randolph were particularly compelling as one of the three argumentative-and-then-making-up couples, but everyone in the dance—including Sarah Hillmon with Dallas McMurray and Billy Smith with Joslin Vezeau—did a fine job executing the exacting, complex, yet seemingly natural roles. The music is by Robert Schumann, who always seems to bring out the best in Mark Morris (I am thinking now of Morris’s 2001 V, set to Schumann’s Piano Quintet, a dance which roused me from my post 9-11 stupor and made me feel alive again). And in this case Morris brought out the best in Schumann as well, assigning beautifully sharp and evocative dance gestures to each phrase of the cello-and-piano Fünf Stücke im Volkston.
The new piece, “Northwest,” arrived in a strange location on the program, just after the opening work and before the intermission, as if shyly hiding itself among the others. But that turned out to be a canny choice, because it showed us—coming immediately after the spectacularly airy leaps and lifts of “The Argument”—that the earthbound, monochromally clad dancers, each armed with multiple yellow paper fans, were purposefully toning down their sparkling technique in the service of something else. Clearly modeled on indigenous dance modes (which, at least in the North American continent, tend to involve relatively simple footwork that can be executed by participants of any age), the moves in “Northwest” relied heavily on the upper bodies, arms, and hands of the dancers. And unlike “The Argument” (or for that matter the final piece on the program, “Going Away Party”), this new work made no attempt to differentiate between male and female dancers: the three men and seven women were all dressed in the same loose shirts and shorts, and their movement styles were uniformly ungendered. Normally Mark Morris focuses closely on numbers in his work, and this piece was no exception, except that the numbers proved extremely hard to count: what began as a dance for nine people intermittently lost or gained one or more dancers onstage, until eventually we saw all ten cast members at once—and even then they were divided into a group of six and a group of four, as if to thwart any wish for symmetry. When we finally got two circles of five, I thought, “Aha, now I know where I am!” But that was a temporary feeling. Like Adam’s spare harp-and-percussion music, to which it remained wholly true, “Northwest” consistently refused to let us settle in place.
I had misremembered “Going Away Party,” the last piece on the program, as Mark Morris’s “goodbye and fuck you” to Brussels, where he had a highly productive three years in the late 1980s and early 1990s—years that were marked by occasional audience incomprehension and critical abuse in response to some of his most stunning works. But I was wrong, it turns out: Morris just made this good-ol’-boys dance (performed to a recording of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys) because he wanted to, midway through his Brussels stay. I saw it long ago, and though I loved it then, I would not have guessed it would age well. But all the humor and pathos, now detached from any particular historical moment or location, are left to stand on their own, and the piece remains a total delight. The semi-square-dance arrangements are performed by three couples, as in “The Argument,” but here a seventh figure has been added to the mix—originally performed by Morris himself, now delicately rendered by Billy Smith. And the occasional presence of that extra figure—the one we seem to be saying goodbye to, especially in the titular “Going Away Party” and the final “When You Leave Amarillo, Turn Out the Lights”—lends a huge depth of feeling to what might otherwise seem a lighthearted send-up of Texas country music. It is not Brussels we seem to be bidding adieu to here, not a temporary foreign posting or even an important career era, but life itself.