King Arthur,
a “dramatick opera” by Henry Purcell
with text by John Dryden,
directed by Mark Morris.
Cal Performances, Berkeley,
October 2006.
There are certain emotions that only good dance can provide. Joy of a particularly physical sort is one of them; sitting there in your seat, you can feel the echoes of the patterns and gestures resonating in your own body, even if you are not a trained dancer. Pleasure in the meshing of music and movement is another, for good choreography can alert you to rhythms and melodic structures that might otherwise have escaped your notice. And because performed dance is also spectacle, there are visual delights as well: imaginatively designed sets enhanced by evocative lighting, amusing or luscious or just plain flattering costumes, astutely chosen props that draw on a range of conscious and unconscious meanings, and color itself, in everything from the backdrop to the curtain to the dancers’ bodies. But to list these pleasures individually implies that they are perceived separately, whereas the really thrilling thing about good dance is that it all floods in at once, almost as a single sensation, and then darts away again, already on to the next movement before you have fully taken in the last. That too is one of the feelings evoked by good dance—the sense that you can’t hold onto it.
Mark Morris’s staging of Purcell’s King Arthur is many other things besides good dance, but its brilliance lies in the way it has converted all those other elements to the needs and possibilities of dance. This is not to say that the music is subservient to the movement, nor that the singers are any less important than the dancers. The singers are dancers, in this production, and the movement is the music. But the synaesthesia Morris has achieved here would not be possible if he had started with the biases inherent in opera—in favor of coherent story lines, say, or recognizable characters.
In a Director’s Note at the front of the program, Morris announces that “King Arthur is here presented as a pageant—a sort of vaudeville—a sequence of production numbers… I chose to discard the spoken text (which I don’t like) and keep all of the music (which I do).” As both guide and confession this is true enough, and the cutting has inevitably resulted in some loss of narrative continuity. Perhaps this explains why the serious opera fans who flocked to the opera’s premiere at the London Coliseum were occasionally confused and disturbed, whereas the serious Mark Morris fans who came to the show in Berkeley were just delighted. If you don’t ask yourself what’s going on in the plot, if you simply lend yourself to the sequence of pleasures offered to your eyes and ears, confusion ceases to be an issue and becomes part of the fun. This is opera in the sense of the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera (as certain slapstick moments in the performance make clear) as well as “dramatick opera” in Purcell’s and Dryden’s terms.
By jettisoning the plot of this semi-opera—and believe me, it was not much of a plot to begin with—Morris has freed up the wonderful Purcell score to become something richer and stranger than anyone reading the libretto could have imagined. You can sit through the whole evening’s performance without having a clue where you are, and without catching a single glimpse of King Arthur, whose only visible remnant is a stagy-looking oversized crown that appears intermittently amidst the props. Certain elements in the piece—an emphatically sung line about “Old England,” a bizarrely proud reference to the production of wool, a finale that features the colors of the Union Jack, and some excessive concern with the weather—may suggest to you that you are in some highly attenuated and symbolic version of Britain. But the point is that none of this matters. You are here, now, in the theater with these performers, and you are caught up in the beauty and silliness and overwhelming richness of what they are offering you, moment by moment, with voices and gestures, costumes and sets. None of it is trivial or unnecessary, but all of it is very lightly offered, as if to say: Let’s put on a show, and let’s make it a really good show, so everyone will go home happy.
To achieve this effect of lightness and charm is extremely difficult. Take, for instance, what is possibly my favorite passage in the entire production, the maypole dance that leads directly into the Act Five finale. We have just finished watching a small, engaging episode on the left-hand side of the stage, in which a soprano and a baritone sing about love while two dancers, also male and female, join them in forming every possible permutation of a couple arrangement. Now the props and sets all disappear, and we are left with only the enormous red-brick backdrop that has been there all along, suggesting throughout the show that we are either outside Arthur’s castle or else in an old brick-walled theater space. Showcased against this bare brick, the red, white, and blue maypole streamers descend in the center, glowing in the newly golden stage lighting. All the dancers are now onstage, all the singers are off, and the music that begins to play is a ravishingly lovely instrumental piece. (In my recording of King Arthur, this is the Chaconne that ends the whole opera, but Morris has chosen to move it up one space, so that it precedes rather than follows the choral finale.)
Each dancer picks up the end of a streamer, and then, to exactly the pace and mood suggested by the music, the sixteen figures begin to weave their maypole patterns, moving in and out among each other in complicated formations, reversing direction in opposing halves, circling around one another in pairs. If you watch the top of the maypole, you will see the streamers braiding into complex and ever-changing patterns. If you watch the dancers’ feet, you will see that they are always moving to a beat of three—but a different beat of three depending on whether they are at that moment following the bass line of the music, its original melody, or a new melodic strain. In its subtle complexity and graceful ease, the choreography reminds me of nothing so much as the line dance in Morris’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato. I think it is probably the most purely beautiful scene in King Arthur.
But even to single out the maypole dance in this way feels like a betrayal of the other stunning moments in the show. There is the Passacaglia in Act Four, for instance, which manages to be simultaneously moving and funny. This dance leads us from an unusual “shower” scene—in which the legs of two female dancers protrude from a circular waterfall of shimmering plastic strips, while two scantily clad sopranos sing above them—to a full group song-and-dance about “the pleasures of love.” All seven singers, male and female, are dressed in some form of underwear and exaggeratedly Dryden-esque wigs. Ignoring their own ridiculous appearance, they cluster together on a platform in the middle of the stage, performing as if they were normal opera singers. Meanwhile, the sixteen dancers, clothed with elegant simplicity in leotards and tights, move in a stately, dignified, minuet-like dance around them. The comedy and mockery are all centered on the singers, who carry it off like Mark Morris pros, while the dancers seem visitors from another era, striking poses and twirling kerchiefs in a manner that feels distinctly chivalric. The two levels of performance are not at odds, though; in fact, the combination is so remarkably attuned to the multiple levels of the musical number that it is only by taking in both of them at once—the comic and the dignified, the near-naked and the formally kerchiefed —that you can begin to get the full measure of Purcell’s sensibility.
Mark Morris has picked his singers well in this production, not only for their voices, which are excellent, but for their willingness to engage in the physical demands of their roles. They are not all shaped like dancers (though one of the sopranos, Gillian Keith, manages to look quite fetching in a thigh-high clingy black dress) but, through a combination of astute costuming and clever choreography, they are successfully disguised as dancers at many moments in the show. At one point in the fifth act, for instance, some festively clad dancers enter in front of the rich red curtain that has defined the breaks between scenes. They form themselves into two groups of eight and, as one of the soloists alternates with the chorus in singing about “our harvest home,” the two sets of dancers perform various square-dance figures to a lively hornpipe-ish tune. But as the dancers melt away and new voices start to sing, we suddenly notice that three male singers have been hidden in the righthand cluster of eight. It is not that they were shielded from our view by the dancers’ bodies; they have been able to disguise themselves among the dancers because they too were square-dancing.
Naturally this is not true of all the choreography in King Arthur—most of it is far too complicated and technically demanding for amateurs to grasp. But in those crucial places where he needs to merge the dancers and singers, Morris has used his backyard-performance aesthetic to great effect, creating moves that are simultaneously easy for beginners to master and visually appealing to an audience. (And this goes the other way too: at times he has some of his dancers join in the singing, and though this strategy is wisely used sparingly, it too is effective and delightful.)
The seven King Arthur soloists—three sopranos, two baritones, a tenor, and a countertenor—are a game bunch, and in the first two acts they prove themselves willing to tumble through doors after the dancers or emulate the choreography’s elaborate arm gestures. Yet it is only in the third act, in a scene where the bass-baritone is traditionally used to embody the idea of frost or winter, that Morris really begins to exploit the singers’ physical talents. This particular bass-baritone, Andrew Foster-Williams, is a lively, personable young singer, and his strong, clear voice is the first one heard onstage at the beginning of the opera. But neither the man nor the voice is easily recognizable when he returns as “Cold Genius” in Act Three. At first we don’t see him at all—we only see a refrigerator, the kind of squarish freezer-and-fridge unit that furnished a lot of American kitchens in the Fifties and Sixties. High above the refrigerator is a manually operated snow-machine, whose governing cord is yanked (to the exact rhythm of the Purcell music) by a blanket-shrouded dancer, so that a constant snowfall drifts down on the fridge and its immediate surroundings. Into this strange, semi-comic, semi-dramatic environment strides a powerful soprano, Mhairi Lawson, wearing a pink blouse with a blue bow and a Dutch-Cleanser-Boy blonde wig. (She happens to be playing Cupid, but you don’t have to know this to enjoy the scene.) As she sings, searching for “the genius of this isle” under the “hills of snow,” she repeatedly opens the doors of the refrigerator, revealing first a gray frozen head in the freezer and then a gray frozen body in the food compartment. So it should come as no surprise—though we are amazed, nonetheless—when this gray figure comes to life and begins to sing from within the refrigerator itself. Foster-Williams emits each syllable in a slow, croaky, frozen manner that is at once hilarious and entirely audible. When he at last emerges from his prison, it is by sliding out of the lower compartment onto his knees. He then creaks to his feet and supports himself on a furled gray umbrella, singing all the while as he holds out one crooked, frozen, white-gloved hand. It is this hand, with its distinctive shape and gesture, its contorted embodiment of his whole condition, that really makes the sequence into dance.
When I asked Foster-Williams who thought up the hand gesture, he said, “I did. And the reason it looks the way it does is because I’m double-jointed.” As he spoke, he held up his bare hand in the gesture he had used onstage, so that I could see the weirdness of the frozen-seeming joints. That some aspect of this contortedness had been visible to me even at a distance was due, at least in part, to the white gloves he wore in that role—another crucial contribution to the dance, this one provided by costume designer Isaac Mizrahi. Mizrahi was an important collaborator on King Arthur (“Isaac wanted animals” is how one of the Mark Morris dancers explained the presence of a prancing bird, a bear, a duck, and a giraffe in one musical interlude), and so were Adrienne Lobel, the set designer, and Jane Glover, the orchestra conductor. Clearly this opera would not have looked and sounded exactly the way it did if Mark Morris had thought up every element himself: it has the definite feel of a group effort. Yet instead of making the piece feel higgledy-piggledy and chaotic, the external contributions all add to the overall impression of rich expansiveness and abundant variety.
It’s true that a certain degree of higgledy-piggledy chaos constantly nibbles at the edges of the production, as Morris himself hints in his program note about “a sort of vaudeville.” But that directorial disclaimer actually overstates the case. Because Morris’s allegiance is always primarily to the music, which has its own built-in structures—and because, despite his jettisoning of the spoken interludes, he has paid close attention to the words in Dryden’s songs—King Arthur is finally much more coherent than the analogy to vaudeville might suggest. The show is, above all, about love: nature’s or Cupid’s love, which awakens the world and its people from the cold frost of winter; the differing yet complementary views of love held by men and women, whether they be shepherds and shepherdesses or knights and ladies; and even the patently barbaric love for military honors or the rather silly love embodied in patriotism (for, as always with Morris’s irony, there is a kind of longing for those naïve feelings lying side-by-side with the criticism and mockery). All these kinds of love get mingled together in the performance, just as the singers and dancers do.
Yet there is demarcation as well—into the original five acts of the opera, for one thing, and into briefer scenes within the acts, marked by the dropping of the red curtain. You can feel a progression in the piece, a movement toward greater intensity of feeling and greater extravagance of spectacle, even the first time you see it. And if you sit through it more than once, you can begin to note the details that create this sense of structure and progression: the costume colors that evolve from drab through green to red-white-and-blue; the increasing use of singers in the dancing, and the increasing reliance on full-group performances; and, perhaps most importantly, the constant evocation of the circle, that unifying shape which lends community to the dances and majesty to the sets. A circle doesn’t, of course, get anywhere—its appeal lies in its perfect self-containment, its sense of eternal return—and the same might be said for this King Arthur. Not getting anywhere is one of the great things dance can do. What it can’t do, though, is go on forever, the way a circle can, and one’s slight feeling of sadness at this otherwise jolly show may have something to do with that fact.
Long ago, in 1989, Morris showed himself adept at transforming Purcell’s music into dance when he created his beautiful Dido and Aeneas. But King Arthur is a very different piece of music, and the dance he has made from it is far less tragic and stately than the one he made from Dido. Morris’s Dido, which draws on a rigorously constructed relationship between symmetry and asymmetry, could never be danced by singers: its vocal soloists stand chastely off to the side while the company dancers perform the steps. And though we no longer, alas, get Morris himself in the roles of Dido and the Sorceress, there’s no denying that as a piece of pure choreography, Dido and Aeneas is extremely well suited to the current Mark Morris Dance Group, which exhibits classical strengths that even his terrific 1989 company didn’t possess.
Still, those of us who have been watching Mark Morris for a long time occasionally miss that earlier, slightly roughshod, definitely let’s-put-on-a-show group of dancers. And for audience members who feel this way, King Arthur represents a marvelous return to form. Apparently the task of choreographing for amateurs as well as professionals has renewed something in Morris himself, which in turn has allowed him to give us an altogether fresh version of the opera. By offering us dance that bridges the moment between folk celebration and audience-based spectacle, Morris captures a special quality in Purcell’s music, which stems from exactly that same historical meeting-point. And by taking us back to a more youthful Morris mode—a looser, less perfect, but irresistibly pleasurable kind of dancing—King Arthur assures us that the past can indeed be recaptured and made present to us once again.
Wendy Lesser is the editor of The Threepenny Review and the author of eight books, most recently a novel, The Pagoda in the Garden, and a memoir, Room for Doubt.
