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[DANCE REVIEW] Mark Morris at Tanglewood
6.27.08
TANGLEWOOD
Ozawa Hall
MARK MORRIS DANCE GROUP with
FELLOWS OF THE TANGLEWOOD MUSIC CENTER
Program includes New Long Song Waltzes with music by Brahms, Bedtime with music by Schubert, and the world premiere of Excursions with piano music by Samuel Barber
By Seth Rogovoy
(Lenox, Mass., June 27, 2008) – In what has fast become an annual ritual, the Mark Morris Dance Group joined forces with students at the Tanglewood Music Center last night (in a program repeated tonight) at Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood.
Instead of a full-length work, this year’s program consisted of four pieces, including one world premiere, Excursions, set to Samuel Barber’s Excursions for the Piano. As the titles of the other pieces indicate, the theme of the evening was, for the most part, romance, and the challenge—or opportunity—this time around wasn’t only to dance to live instrumental music, but to vocal music, as all of these numbers save the Barber were settings for German poetry. Or, in other words, love songs.
This, of course, makes total sense—dancing to love songs, it’s what everyone does! And Morris, of course, is uniquely qualified to pull off such a task, as a musician himself, and as a choreographer who focuses intently on having his dancers become the music itself.
As such, the program was very much signature or essential Morris, with his large corps of dancers using the familiar Morris vocabulary of folk-influenced lines, circles, and coordinated angles of movement, blended with mock-ballet (sometimes even mocking ballet), to express the music in gesture.
Morris’s choreography seemed to pay more attention to the music than to the lyrics, sung wonderfully by the handful of vocal fellows drafted for the occasion. Texts were provided, but of course one didn’t want to read along for fear of missing the dance. But a quick scan of the text before each dance gave a basic context for the aching, pining, and celebratory love poetry of G.F. Daumer, Grillparzer, Goethe, and others, so that one could just sit back and marvel at the talent of the dancers and Morris’s mastery of choreographing masses of bodies with the precision of a music conductor leading an orchestra through a symphony.
The Barber world premiere was the standout of the night and the most unique work. Where the others were more meditative and lyrical, this was bright and jazzy, very much in keeping with Barber’s surprisingly jazzy Excursion. The number opened with almost Fosse-like brightness, with a half-circle of Xmas lights strung along the back wall only emphasizing the Broadway-like nature of the dance.
Of course, Morris isn’t going to choreograph an entire dance in Fosse’s style, and the piece quickly became an excursion or riff on Fosse’s “jazz hands!” approach. The choreographer Morris-ized the piece with some of his own signatures, turning it into a horsey romp at one point, following Barber’s urban origins into the music’s more rural meanderings.
The piece was short—almost too short, which is a complaint you will rarely hear from me. But it delighted, as did the rest of the evening, making this a wonderful way to begin the summer, with a fusion of performing arts at Tanglewood.
Seth Rogovoy is editor-in-chief and critic-at-large of Berkshire Living magazine.
6/28/2008
thank you for languaging what I experienced as well at Ozawa Hall, since the concert left me speechless ---
which is an unuusual occurence.
human bodies and sounds in their most supreme form....
pure beauty all around.
From IP address: 69.204.157.36
6/28/2008
p.s. loved the "jazz hands" reference....
From IP address: 69.204.157.36
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