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Mark Morris says goodbye to Dido

by Lloyd Schwartz

In 1989, three months after its world premiere in Brussels, Mark Morris floored Boston with his production of Purcell's 300-year-old short opera, Dido and Aeneas. In the orchestra pit of the Emerson Majestic Theatre, Lorraine Hunt sang Dido, the Queen of Carthage; James Maddalena sang Aeneas, the sole royal survivor of the Trojan War, who falls in love with her; radiant, loving Jayne West sang Dido's companion, Belinda; and tenor Frank Kelley sang the malevolent Sorceress, who succeeds in separating them, which results in Dido's suicide. Meanwhile on stage, Mark Morris danced the roles of both Dido and the Sorceress. His deconstruction of gender stereotypes has been a major thread throughout his work, and nowhere is it more central than in Dido.

Now Morris wants to retire the work and cut his long dark locks. "It's my life!" he says. "I've got to move on." So last week I went down to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to see his last Dido. Craig Smith, who led the Emmanuel Orchestra so movingly in Boston, was conducting the early-instrument New York Collegium Orchestra (excellent, with Stanley Ritchie as concertmaster) and Chorus (superb). Maddalena, in splendiferous voice, was back as Aeneas, once again making librettist Nahum Tate's cardboard lover into a vital and conflicted tragic hero. And in a brilliant stroke, the exciting young mezzo Stephanie Novacek mirrored Morris by singing both Dido and the Sorceress, in a voice with bronzelike (but not brassy) gleam. She doesn't yet have Hunt's heartbreaking profundity in Dido's great final aria, "When I am laid in earth," or the vocal security to make Dido's final high-lying request/bequest, "Remember me," not sound like "Rumumba muh," but she's a real find. Morris's Belinda has a central role, but the eloquent Ruth Davidson made much more of her than did her vocal counterpart, Christine Brandes (who, untender and brittle, was far more successful -- and livelier -- as a witch).

Morris's Dido is a pivotal and astonishing work. Robert Bordo's pared-down set consists mainly of a small bench that mimics an upstage balustrade that runs across the entire length of the stage, and Morris uses these "props" with great expressive power. Like Nijinsky in L'après-midi d'un faune, he creates a choreography of profiles. The main characters are like Minoan friezes, using an evocative body language of gestures. Dido sits on the bench and leans to the side, her hand flat on the bench (she's in love and worried). Dido and Aeneas (the magnificent, dreadlocked Guillermo Resto, wearing a skirt longer than Dido's) express their love by sitting next to one another on the bench, the knees and toes of one leg touching, the other leg stretched out behind, one palm raised and touching the other's palm, one arm crossing in front of the other's body and resting on the other's thigh. At the end, suicidal Dido is draped over the balustrade, her arms spread out with her palms flat on the floor. This stasis and "friezing" is beautifully balanced by all the kinetic, three-dimensional activity going on around it, like Kraig Patterson's intricately buoyant version of a hornpipe (Purcell's score is loaded with all sorts of dance music).

As Dido, Morris unites the tragic nobility of, say, a Vanessa Redgrave, with the let-it-all-hang-out animality of, say, Anna Magnani, then plays the Sorceress with the hilarious but dangerous hissy-fit bitchiness of Joan Crawford -- the serious and comedic sides of his performance brilliantly and accurately reflecting the combination of silliness ("Away, away!" "No, no, I'll stay!") and grandeur ("Remember me, but Oh, forget my fate") in the opera.

The "curtain raiser" for Dido was the New York premiere of Medium, Morris's setting of John Harbison's piano quartet November 19, 1828, his haunting evocation of Schubert in the afterlife (the title is Schubert's death date). It looked even better at BAM than at Boston's Emerson Majestic. Our discovery that the opening silhouette -- of Schubert? -- turns out to be three aligned women (while three men lie flat on one side of the stage and begin to raise their arms like giant wings) was more chilling in BAM's greater spaciousness. At the opening of the Rondo, in which Harbison quotes an enchanting fragment by Schubert himself, the enchanting June Omura outdid herself in a lambent, flickering performance.

One further word on the gender issue. Medium has a wonderful series of lifts. First a man and a woman (the marvelous, expansive Tina Fehlandt) emerge from the wings and the man swings the woman around by the arms. Then two men repeat the same step. Later, when the first couple return, it's the woman who swings the man around. This pattern of physical and emotional equality is persistent throughout Morris's choreography (in The Hard Nut, for instance, both men and women, in tutus, dance the snowflakes). Dido's ritualistic gesture of passion, her hands pushing down from her breast to the pit of her stomach, is later inverted by the Sorceress, her hands thrusting up from the stomach to the chest in a malicious parody of hara-kiri. Morris's dual role turns out to be less about gender itself than about the way we all have within ourselves the impulse to destroy our own happiness. It's this ability to see beyond the neat formulas that makes Mark Morris one of our most crucial and compelling contemporary artists.