Plain folks' tales

Mark Morris still does it his way

by Marcia B. Siegel

After all this time, Mark Morris still seems to be choreographing anti-ballets. His first adventures in the big time, around 1980, shocked and thrilled people because they had the ambition and theatrical skill of the high-art stage but not the elitist pretensions. Thoroughly musical and meticulously designed, these works nevertheless denied all expectations of approved virtuosity, beauty, and sex. Morris is adored by people who never go to ballet or any other dance performance, and by some of the most discriminating ballet critics. Notwithstanding the success that's allowed him to build a company of 18 dancers and perform with live music to sellout audiences, he subverts the tradition every chance he gets. In his four performances last weekend for the BankBoston Celebrity Series, his oppositional tactics were on display, and the audience at the Wang Center hardly noticed them.

Resisting the understandable tendency to harden one's experiments into a style or technique, Morris uses movement from a Fibber McGee closet filled with the world's dance. Instead of an invented vocabulary of steps, what his dancers share is an idea abut dancing: a naturalistic way of carrying themselves through whatever steps they're performing. The first thing you might notice is that the legs aren't usually turned out like a ballet dancer's but work in parallel like a skier's or an ordinary person's. Their feet are often flexed, seldom deliberately stretched to a refined point, and they don't try to gain a regal, classical look by elongating and opening their bodies.

With this more or less pedestrian baseline, they can look clunky rather than graceful when they do balletic leaps and turns. We identify with their efforts to overcome inertia, to surpass the limitations of gravity. I don't think they really work any harder than ballet dancers, but they don't have that readiness to start up in their stance. The thing that makes them subversive is that they mean to look casual, even indolent. They want us to think this could be just as good a state to dance in as any.

The matter-of-fact approach governs much of Morris's creative decision making. He picks music for variety and danceability, not for its familiarity to Western ears. He lists dancers alphabetically in the dance credits, even when one of them is the superstar Mikhail Baryshnikov. For the Boston performances, renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma performed in his 1997 collaboration with Morris, Falling Down Stairs, a part of Ma's "Inspired by Bach" film project, but he also played for the other two Morris works on the program. The participants in any Mark Morris enterprise seem to be comrades, like those guys who sit in front of the firehouse and tell stories they all know, or remark about the weather, trade gossip, help one another solve their problems.

I was thinking about this analogy as a way to explain why, even though each dance is extremely formal and seemingly without expressive coding, somewhere in the middle I often get ideas about narrative. Not a specific story with two or three main characters and their relatives and rejected boyfriends. Nothing about enlisting in the army or getting caught in a storm or celebrating a successful harvest. There aren't even expectant beginnings or neat resolutions. But notions about what these folks are doing together seem to float up in the course of the choreographic conversation and then break off.

In Falling Down Stairs, Yo-Yo Ma sits at the side of the stage playing Bach's third Suite for Unaccompanied Cello, and in a flash at the beginning we see a group of dancers on a set of stairs. Almost immediately they cascade down the stairs and fall, all spread out along the floor, except for one person who stays at the top of the stairs. During the rest of the dance the group now and then rush the stairs and fall back, leaving someone on top. It's like a game of King of the Hill that keeps being interrupted and resumed, with the rules changing slightly each time.

One woman, having almost attained the summit, swan-dives off the side into the arms of two waiting rivals. Competition for control of the stairs isn't what the dance is about, it's just an anecdote. They drop this idea and use the stairs as a grandstand; nine people climb up and go through a sequence of rhythmic but cryptic gestures together while the other six people sit on the floor below them. Trading roles, the ones on the stairs sit and the other group play a game for them. They trade again, only this time the group on the stairs, instead of standing in a diamond shape, make three straight rows. Their gesture pattern is the same but it looks different in this formation.

In The Argument, which was having its world premiere in Boston, three couples danced to Robert Schumann's Fünf Stücke im Volkston. From Schumann's descriptive subtitles for his not-exactly-authentic folk dances, the composer must have been working in a parodistic mode, or at least a playful one. You could see Morris going for the same thing when Baryshnikov and Marjorie Folkman grabbed and glared at each other, Morris and Tina Fehlandt slowly suppressed the music's sentimentality, and Shawn Gannon and Ruth Davidson mooched up close together but threw slashing punches in opposite directions -- all, of course, matched to Schumann's romantic rhythms. But it was in Morris's flamboyant pseudo-mazurka that the joke played best, because it was so fully danced. What's a mazurka, the portly and scraggly Morris seemed to be saying, if you don't throw yourself into it?

Yo-Yo Ma, with Ethan Iverson at the piano, leaned into the dance as if nothing but the cello prevented him from leaping to his feet. Gannon and the women heated up after Morris's outburst of bravura, but Baryshnikov seemed withdrawn and tight, a black-clad apache dancer caught in the wrong century or the wrong nightclub. The whole piece was crammed with detail, and I couldn't see all of it, or hear all the stories, at one view. Perhaps the dancers were testing out the gradations among light comedy, mockery, and burlesque.

The Argument represented the furthest I've seen Morris go in fragmenting his choreographic material. He seemed determined not to let the dance get so deep into any phrase material that it became predictable. Even the costumes -- the women's black velvet cocktail dresses, the shirts and pants for Morris and Gannon, and Baryshnikov's turtleneck -- clashed stylistically with one another while undercutting the Mittel Europa rrrrump-pa-pa feeling of the music.

Rhymes with Silver also tumbled together styles and references, but it made a more consistent blend of them. This piece, to a long, lush score for piano, percussion, and strings that Morris commissioned from the West Coast master experimentalist Lou Harrison, depends on exotica but plays it down. The 16 dancers, identically dressed in black silky pants and dark green jerseys, walked sideways on their heels like Cambodian dancers, with bent knees and wide, scooping gestures. They slid back and forth in a grapevine step, in groups of three with pinkies linked. They did a kind of quadrille, where four new people replaced the original group without stopping the dance. To a cakewalk rhythm in two or three different keys, they paired up in a sort of maxixe, one partner behind the other, both of them sliding their legs forward and leaning their torsos back. They line-danced off in a lurching side-step. They pitched themselves into flat, Egyptian zigzag shapes. Guillermo Resto dithered nonstop around a stationary Kraig Patterson for a long time, then finally sank to his knees and crawled off. At one point, a woman and a man posed like Hindu deities in a cosmic Oriental dance by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn.

The dance seemed as if it would never run out of motifs and new ways to design them, but finally the groups and duets dissipated in a mass crossing of the stage. Instead of linking with any others, the dancers now spun and gestured in their own ecstatic orbits, perhaps fighting off and falling into trancelike states.

The apparent randomness of this, the abandonment of visual coherence, is rare in Mark Morris's work. I can't think of anything that rhymes with silver. Maybe rhyming or dancing with others is unimportant in the momentary attainment of individual bliss.