You will never meet a complacent modern dance choreographer. Descended from the art’s socially conscious founders, theirs is a righteous movement. Its cost is, oftentimes, obscurity. One choreographer I know was asked by her mentor if she was prepared to make work for “eight people in a Soho loft.” The modern, or downtown, scene can easily become an endless peer review process. I’m willing to bet those proverbial eight people are now choreographers themselves. Hidden in this advice is the idea that, if you’re popular, you must be doing something wrong. Like all art, it’s a calling, not a business model.
This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The worst modern dance concert I ever saw took place a number of years ago at a certain studio on Bethune Street in New York. Two women dressed in Saran Wrap and accompanied by earsplitting electronic music flung themselves around a six-foot-long fluorescent light aimed directly at the audience. Migraine-inducing is the only way to describe it. I learned that the show’s stage manager had tried to dissuade the strident young dancemaker, but she would not be deterred from her course of self-expression. Perhaps migraines were the message. Those in the audience who didn’t walk out immediately were rewarded with the knowledge that plastic wrap doesn’t cling consistently to the human form. It was a memorable evening, but hardly an artistic success.
The spectacular career of Mark Morris turns on his 1984 show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Prior to that he was just another talented Young Turk (“a would-be enfant terrible,” as one writer put it) making dances downtown. This was a strange time in dance history, between the twilight of Judson Church and the emergence of AIDS. New York and dance needed something new. Morris gave it Gloria in 1981, and it was hungry for more.
Morris had come to New York in 1976. He grew up in the suburbs of Seattle, the only son in a close family of five. He learned to play piano and to read music and spent hours making songs, dances, and films with his family and neighborhood friends. At the age of eight he decided he wanted to become a flamenco dancer. He began training locally, and later included ballet and other techniques. In his teens he fell in with a communal folk dance group called the Koleda Folk Ensemble.
In the concert dance world, this is a most unusual pedigree and, perhaps, explains why ballet dancers consider his choreography easy, and some dance fans view him skeptically. What often goes unremarked is that Morris has been working as a dancer, dance teacher, and choreographer since he was 15 years old. By the time he came to New York to dance professionally, he brought a finely developed artistic sensibility and a thorough knowledge of music and rhythm. You may not like it, but Mark Morris knows his stuff.
The people I know who saw Morris and his fledgling Mark Morris Dance Group could sense his potential; “edgy” and “entertaining” were the words they used. But it was the BAM show, in its skill and broad range, that confirmed to a wider audience that he was to be the new “it” choreographer.
His star rose quickly. There was more touring, national press, and a Guggenheim fellowship in 1986. Recommended by Peter Sellars to Gerard Mortier, in 1988 he replaced Maurice Béjart as director of dance at the Théatre de la Monnaie in Brussels. It’s good for us that Morris was never liked in Brussels: The Monnaie Dance Group/Mark Morris, as it had become known, did not extend his three-year contract. But the years there were fruitful and saw the creation of L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed Il Moderato, Dido and Aeneas, and The Hard Nut among others. He teamed up with Mikhail Baryshnikov to start a little venture called the White Oak Dance Project. And he learned to control his outrageous mouth.
At his first press conference in Brussels, Morris was asked to define his philosophy of dance. Perplexed, he replied, “I make it up, and you watch it. End of philosophy.” This was one of his least explicit statements during the Brussels years, but surely the most revolutionary. Years from now we might point to this as the moment when modern dance stopped masquerading as religion, and grew up; but it is also fair to say that many audiences and critics still want an underlying philosophy from choreographers. Good that Morris has thick skin; the criticism of his work often feels personal.
His latest large-scale project, Romeo and Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare (R&J), has been almost universally panned. I saw the production at the MMDG’s West Coast home, Zellerbach Hall at the University of California at Berkeley. This is the Christian Science, happy-ending Romeo, based on the recently recovered Prokofiev score. For those accustomed to Shakespeare and the iconic Kenneth MacMillan ballet, R&J can be a shock: all those consciously clumsy modern dancers, running through low arabesques and pas de Basques, the lovers’ starry apotheosis.
Yet even if you hate the movement or the gimmick, there are moments when the score and the staging come together beautifully, such as the scenes in the friar’s cell, Romeo’s introduction to Juliet, and Juliet’s dance with Lord Capulet. Principal dancers Rita Donahue, Maile Okamura, Noah Vinson, and David Leventhal have transformed themselves from great dancers into great actors. None compares with Amber Darragh, whose performance as Mercutio justifies the entire enterprise.
Nothing is what you think it should be in a Morris show. Women are played by men, love turns to rutting, and politics is replaced with poetry. Indeed, Morris can frustrate with his insistence on having things both ways: funny and sad, classical and modern, vulgar and divine. If you still believe in the separation of modern and ballet, uptown and downtown, the Mark Morris Dance Group is not for you. But that gray area he has created is a rich space. R&J harks back to a time before ballet dancers become so technically accomplished, and proves there can be more pleasure in witnessing effort than exactness.
Morris must be doing something right. The scale of his dance projects is unprecedented; he has become the go-to guy for big ticket productions, including music festivals and operas. He receives commissions from major ballet companies, including San Francisco Ballet and American Ballet Theatre. The MMDG owns its new building in Brooklyn. Hundreds of people reserve spots in its annual audition. Former dancers staff the best dance conservatories in the nation. L’Allegro is the only dance I know that has its own coffee table book.
The Mark Morris Dance Group is touring throughout 2009. R&J (2008) will be performed in Norfolk, Virginia, Urbana, Illinois, and New York City. Audiences in Boston will see Bedtime (1992), a dance that contains Morris’s treatment of the Schubert lieder, including Der Erlkönig. Washington and Seattle will get Mozart Dances (2006) in its entirety; Princeton, only its stronger second half, Double. Morris and Mozart, whose intricacies call for pointe shoes, are not the best combination, but at Double‘s heart is the most beautiful circle dance I have ever seen. Princeton, Louisville, and Boston will get V (2001), another example of architectural genius, set to Schumann. L’Allegro (1988) returns to Zellerbach Hall in May. Two new works will premiere at Tanglewood.
The Mark Morris Dance Group has made a lot of work in the past 29 years. And Morris has proven that audiences, if you give them a chance, really like dance. You have to love him for that.
Natalie Bostick is a writer in New York.
