As I sit here trying to cudgel some thoughts together in response to the Mark Morris Dance Group performance at the Paramount last night (also tonight 8 p.m., Sunday 2 p.m.), what’s running through my mind is Sly and the Family Stone’s “Dance To The Music.“
MMDG “Jesu, Meine Freude” (Photo: Nan Melville)
And what I mean by “to,” if I can drop a little Bill Clinton on you, is not “in accordance with the notes,” but more like “facing the music”–which, literally, is what Morris was doing as he conducted “Gloria” last night, but is what he seems always to be doing, metaphorically. I suppose it’s similar to looking hard at a painting for hours; yes, you’ll become familiar with brush strokes, but you will also step into the whole (or not).
Let us turn now to a chapter of Genesis (Mark Morris, by Acocella): “He is listening to the music very hard, analytically–phrase lengths, key changes–but as he does so, an emotion is being born in his mind, an emotion that gradually eats the music, makes it his.”
There. That’s got it.
The Tudor Choir
“A Lake” (1991) finds Morris in an uncharacteristically unsaucy mood, his dancers taking springy steps and having a bit of a party that’s interrupted by a mournful middle movement that bends them low.
If there’s a lake involved, it’s off a ways–this reminded me of Virginia Woolf visiting her family’s lakeside cabin (though those shortish skirts wouldn’t have cut it) and watching the sun and clouds play over the afternoon. How much work it is to have fun, sometimes.
Next, Jesus is not just all right, or even a friend, but joy itself. “Jesu, meine Freude” (1993) opens with some stark iconography, with two duos stationed one dancer behind another, suggesting a cross with their torsos and arms, but also, flipping wrists up and down alternately, infusing an impression of an Eastern mandala.
I’m struck by the way Morris divorces imitatio from object, and returns the focus to the person. Jesus is nowhere to be found here, except through the dancers giving themselves over to love, elevation, ecstasy.
MMDG “Jesu, Meine Freude” (Photo: Nan Melville)
With the Bach propagating glorious order and the Tudor Choir intoning, “My heart has long been troubled and desirous of thee,” the men press their hands together, push forward, and open at the wrists releasing a prayer. They also delineate the heart with their hand placement on either side of their chests, and then, already bare-chested, open their arms in a way that–if you’re following along at home–forces the hinge of the breastbone out like a bird. You can’t do it without feeling intensely vulnerable.
It would be too much to compare the ensemble’s work here to Sufi, except in embodying a generally joyful spirit constrained by a movemental orthodoxy. Still, Morris gives each of the dancers a little frenzy of step-kicks that depending on the dancers can be expressed as a kind of possession or the outburst of a spring lamb. And, as you see above, they take also take flight.
Lauren Grant and MMDG company in “Gloria” (Photo: Stephanie Berge)
“Gloria” (1981) opens with a woman taking hampered, spraddle-legged steps slowly forward while a man inches forward on his belly, using only his arms to crawl forward, reaching forward in unison, pulling back. When they reach the front of the stage, they leave, and things go dark for a few minutes.
The scraping advance returns in a whole staggered line, like swimmers in a pool emptied of water, still trying to do laps. In sequence a dancer will rise to his or her feet, and reach upward.
Small groups of aged, infirm, or disabled, arms around each others’ waists, support each other as they jerk and twist and trip–but again, every so often, one will move ahead, gracefully. A pair of dancers share moves, but miss each other and they zig-zag across the stage. Arms are held loosely–as dance it’s pointing you toward daily sights and sentiments.
It’s rarer when you’re young–in my experience–to pop out of the bubble of ego and see how little life depends on you: all these people, all these lives, all the scraping to get by, all the slings and arrows. All this impersonal beauty being danced out around you.
Jim Kent and Ellie Sandstrom in “HOME” (Photo: Peter Mumford)
In stark contrast to Mark Morris’s Paramount-filling appeal, I am making my peace with the fact that I may appreciate the hermetic work of Scott/Powell more than I instinctively like it. The world premiere of “HOME” left me curiously unmoved at its end, though I was rapt throughout. The dancers–Beth Graczyk, Jim Kent, Jess Klein, Michael Rioux, Sean Ryan, Ellie Sandstrom, Belle Wolf–are compelling even when you don’t have the slightest idea what they’re doing. I just enjoyed watching the one thing after another.
The rarefied language framing the piece has been picked over elsewhere. My response to the “conceptual and tactical questions” that the word “home” evinces was largely to forget that “home” was involved at all until a small chandelier descended in one segment, and the green plastic sheet in another reminded me strongly of a shower curtain.
It begins with warm atmospheric, electronic washes from Jarrad Powell, interspersed with immense echoic boomings (there’s also a string piece later on); eight or nine large panel form a backdrop, they look like gold undercoatings for a series of Klimt paintings; and a pair of dancers in black have a pas de deux that’s unusually muscular. There are no swooning embraces here–in fact, the dancers’ arms are more often braced like barriers or used simply as levers.
Belle Wolf in “HOME” (Photo: Peter Mumford)
The disparate episodes that follow–a couple, their arms in front, as if holding reins, move slowly across the floor with a dip step that approximates a horse’s gait; a unison ensemble that may or may not suggest flocking behavior, its shifts and dartings; a solo on a packing crate (Ten Tiny Dances-style); a solo that looked like a wading bird in a river–sometimes share gestures between them, but I couldn’t discern why.
The have-to-see-to-believe costumes vary widely: see-though black dresses, white ruffles, a gold carapace, orange and pinks, a front-only floor-length dress, but for all the personality they displayed, the dancers themselves remained remote blanks. A duet between a male dancer and female dancer, stalking about, clutching a handful of bunched green plastic to their chests, seemed to illustrate a creeping Psycho-ish paranoia–or it may not have.
Only one interaction, Sandstrom wrapping around Rioux like a human starfish, seemed to come from a world I had experience with, which felt almost perverse, given the usual associations of the word “home.” I can, as I say, appreciate the multifarious expression that I was presented with in “HOME,” but I simply could not find the shared, central unity that home would normally imply.
