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(Dance Review) Mark Morris
7.28.05
JACOB'S PILLOW DANCE
MARK MORRIS DANCE GROUP
Ted Shawn Theatre
July 26-31, 2005
It's almost a cliche at this point that Mark Morris is the most musical of choreographers. His company often performs with live musicians, as they do this week at Jacob's Pillow with fellows from the Tanglewood Music Center, and he is alleged to sometimes choreograph dancers with a score in hand. And there's no doubt that many of Morris's dances pay literal tribute to the music, sometimes even acting it out, as if the dancers were notes on a staff, directly responding to the live or recorded sounds.
But Morris is more than just the literal interpreter of music. His dances are also some of the most narrative works of contemporary choreographers, certainly as seen in the program running this week at the Pillow. Not narrative necessarily in the sense of telling a linear story, but certainly more narrative, or more concrete, than the usual abstractions parlayed by many modern dance companies. Morris's dances themselves seem as rooted in the reality of people's lives (people portrayed by dancers, in itself not something to necessarily take for granted in modern dance, especially in a season in which we've seen a lot of animal-like dancing) as much as they are rooted to the ground, with Morris's trademark, heavy footed dances, based seemingly on the way Morris himself trods the world.
In any case, all this and more was on display at the Pillow last night in one of his most enjoyable programs at the Pillow in several years, sort of a sampler of his work ranging from his most irreverent, as in THE 'TAMIL FILM SONGS IN STEREO' PAS DE DEUX from 1983, to ROCK OF AGES, which only just premiered in October 2004.
Morris can't help but be folksy and funny. Duets and quartets were made to look balletic in scenarios in which the dancers were quite actorly -- another trademark that sets Morris's work apart from others -- as well as very still, favoring tableaux and slow gestures (a style we've been seeing a lot of this summer at the Pillow, thankfully). There wasn't a lot of running, leaping, and jumping, but rather, very concerted, concrete movements, sturdy with lots of beats held in place, as a trio of musicians played Franz Schubert's "Piano Trio in E Flat, Adagio." Some of the movements were quite literal responses to the music, to the point that by the end it seemed a literal dance rendition of a string quartet (which happened to be played by a piano trio -- leave it to Morris).
ALL FOURS, danced to Bela Bartok's "String Quartet No. 4," one of the composers more dissonant works, furthest from the folk-derived forms one might think Morris, with his foundation in Balkan folk music, might favor, began with a striking tableau of eight black clad dancers in front of a richly lit red backdrop. The dancers alternated ensemble steps with flights of individuality. They were a diverse but mostly young corps seemingly caught in some vortex of stops and starts, perhaps tied to the everyday realities of the work world -- they very much could have been a group of cool Brooklynites, which they probably are in real life. Some of the recurring gestures included holding their hands up their ears -- cellphones?? - and hiding their heads behind their arms. Gradually, the piece opened up to be about a nuclear family, with a mother and father figuring out how much (or how little) space to give their children, one boy, one girl, how much free reign or independence.
The second half opened with TAMIL SONGS, a short, witty, comic piece that explains why at one time this most mainstream of modern dancers was once tagged as "the bad boy" of modern dance. As much a Marx Brothers-inspired comic sketch as a dance, it straddled closely the line between dance and performance art, blatantly subversive in its mockery of balletic convention, and making ingenious use of an odd bit of found music on cassette.
Th evening culminated with GRAND DUO, performed to four parts of surprisingly conventional music by the otherwise idiosyncratic composer Lou Harrison. This was the most "dancerly" of the evening's works, the dancers less people than doll-like marionettes. The best scenes featured a large corps of 14 dancers in deconstructed versions of folk dancing, explosive colors and gestures echoing some of Harrison's more chaotic passages. The piece concluded with a highly stylized folk dance, or game, to a Kurt Weill-like polka, everyone dancing like a bunch of Mark Morrises. Morris Dancing, anyone?
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