Mark Morris

The Boston Phoenix
November 26 - December 4, 1997

[Dance Reviews]

Contra man

Mark Morris still works against the grain

by Marcia B. Siegel
Toward the end of Mark Morris's celebrated early choreography of Vivaldi's Gloria, the dancers run on urgently, one at a time, then for no apparent reason skid into a full about-face with a gesture of struggle and run out the way they came. The sequence defeats our expectations; having done that, it institutionalizes the contradiction. Where we would look for exaltation, we get an endless series of starts and cutoffs. God is not eternal reward but eternal striving.
Morris's Gloria seems to be almost pessimistic about religious faith. The men and women are in states of resistance, conflict, and impasse most of the time. At the beginning of the piece ("Et in terra pax hominibus"), a woman makes her way forward, one heavy step at a time, and a man, prone on the floor, pulls himself along with his hands. The dancers never escape this earthbound condition. The closest they get to overcoming their inertia is, in the closing moments, to take running bellyflops that allow them to slide along faster while pushing with their hands.
Morris, whose company played a sold-out weekend at the Shubert, has made a career out of being bad. His musical contrariness is the inverse side of a musical intelligence that can be literal or even pedantic. In the middle of the vaudevillean Lucky Charms (1994), Jacques Ibert's Divertissement momentarily pauses. The lights go dim and in the silence a woman enters, stepping backward toward three inert bodies on the floor. Naturally, she trips on one of them. Just as she hits the floor the orchestra plays a spooky chord.
Last week's concerts were the first of two Mark Morris appearances Dance Umbrella is sponsoring here this season, and it's a sign of his standing with the Boston audience that the program offered only one piece new to the city, I Don't Want To Love, set to Monteverdi madrigals. In this essay on the many ways people fail to connect, the movement seems more fluid, less clunky than the effortful Gloria, but Morris exposes the dark side of love rather than indulging in its painful consequences, as Monteverdi does. The madrigals are full of sunshine and flowers, kisses remembered and tears enjoyed, but the dancers seem to have no regrets. They may even prefer being alone. They run endlessly from each other, at different speeds, so there's no possibility of being caught. They break away from those who try to console them.
Love, in Mark Morris's work, is at best a passing pleasure. Partners come and go. Romance is lust disguised. The Shubert programs included One Charming Night (1985), a profound duet that's often written off as a campy joke. Morris plays a suave suitor who turns out to be a vampire and carries off the no-longer-innocent Marianne Moore to who know what awful delights.
Again Morris subverts the musical text, this time songs by Henry Purcell. "Be welcome then, great sir," sings the soprano as Moore expectantly skips and bounces like a little girl waiting for the ice-cream man. Enter the villain in a suit and slicked-back ponytail, with soft beguiling jumps. He could be her father or a kind teacher, so by the time he falls on her neck she's more than ready to learn his lessons. When he's had his fill of her blood, he offers her his wrist and she eagerly chomps on it. The more horrible this seduction gets, the funnier it gets. "Lord, what is man, lost man?" asks the soprano, telling of the fall of Adam. But neither of these lovers has any shame. When the vampire lifts her onto his shoulders to leave, they seem exalted, eager to explore the next chapters in sin.
Even as he's subverting music, Mark Morris honors it with live performances. The Purcell was beautifully performed by Eileen Clark Reisner with Michael Curry and Gwendolyn Toth on continuo. The Artek Singers and 458 Strings did the Monteverdi, unwisely miked, I thought. The theater was small enough that we didn't need amplification, and the sound was so artificial they might as well have used tape. Craig Smith conducted the Orchestra and Chorus of Emmanuel Music in the Gloria, and Linda Dowdell led the Jacques Ibert.