On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA
On Dance MARK MORRIS AS DIDO AND THE SORCERESS BY LAURA JACOBS "Greta Garbo and Sarah Bernhardt are rolling in their graves," said a friend who had just sun Mark Morris in Henry Pureell's...
...a wide fling of the arm on "away," This adolescent literalness seems to be his nod to the opera's unlikely history: Purceil originally composed it in 1689 as an and of semester recital for a girl's school in Chelsea...
...There is a felicitous correspondence between the simplicity of Nahum Tate's libretto and Morris' movement vocabulary, which is, as usual, weighty, folky, but very deliberately shaped, The fit is made even closer by the naïve sign language Morris employs to accompany words in the libretto, e.g...
...Indeed, it is surprising that she never did Dido...
...none so gifted and free of gimmieks...
...Given her wrought-up generosity, though, one can imagine a Graham Dido as a roar of nerves capped by self-conscious sacrifice...
...Here and there, however, Morris sneaks in a gesture that harks to darker intonations in Pureell's score...
...Or herself, He's net afraid to be larger than life...
...none whose work has such deep roots in dance history yet possesses the freshness of a natural phenomenon...
...A Suzanne Farrell Dido is the stuff of dreams...
...To be sure, he is capable of a bit of postmodern queasiness like Lovey, where the subject is incest and the music is supplied by the Violent Femmes, But his real nature is more abiding, Standing column straight, his arms outstretched and his head drooped sideways, tresses falling, he conjures up nothing so much as Isadora in silhouette, alone and barefoot on a European stage...
...The kind of dance is life commitment Morris brings to his work is in a tradition that can be traced through the great matriarchal line of modern dance: Isadora Duncan, Ruth St...
...Morris' Dido is stately, sloe-eyed and as girlishly elegant as a pasty, pudgy, pony-tailed master choreographer can be, Playing the Sorceress, Morris gives a saucy, raucous performance: He rings down his hair, lets his dimples come out and scratches his behind, That Morris chose to do both roles makes dance sense, The self-destroying duality of Odette/ Odile from Swm Lake Is discernible in his melaneholy Dido and grand guignol Sorceress (she's part Odile, part Rothbart), Indeed, Odette and Dido are both undone by their impossible demands en leve...
...Morris' Dido, by contrast, dies quietly and classically, arranging herself over a stone bench...
...But could Baryshnikov leve Dido as Morris does...
...On Dance MARK MORRIS AS DIDO AND THE SORCERESS BY LAURA JACOBS "Greta Garbo and Sarah Bernhardt are rolling in their graves," said a friend who had just sun Mark Morris in Henry Pureell's Dido and Aeneass, The comment suggests the adoraties and cultshness that surround Merris, thi outspoken 14-year-old American dancer and choreographir who has been artistic director of the Monnale Dance Company in Brussels for the past two years, In June he brought his troupe te the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Majestic Theater, where he performed the dual female roles of Dido and the Soreeress, This was the big event of a bland spring season, lut it would have been an event in any season, Morris has been a media darling since he was first "dissevered" in the early '80s, And justifiably so, Although his dances pontificate sometimes–he can be too rhythmically and thematical· ly dogged–there is no other under-50 choreographer as musically engaged as he is...
...For example, as Dido presses her fingers into her sternum on the words "sorely pressed"– expressing her fear of and desire for Aeneas–her knees also Slide open slightly, a sign of the sensuality that undermines her...
...Few daneers today could manage this double role as Morris dees, rearing like a white wave and sending ripples throughout the dance world, Baryshnlkov might be something to watch in the same situation: That brooding self-interest of his leads him to seek the difficult, the odd, the definitive (Morris has used him in two ballets...
...In Dido Morris doubles up and sings a song of himself...
...a Farrell Soreeress is more diffieult to picture...
...Denis, Doris Humphrey, Oraham...
...the sections, all lock together in friezes, pediments, cuneiform panels of activity, The feeling of airlessness conveys Fate's inexorability, Dido's outcome is, after all, deelded from the beginning=you can hear it in the overture's stricken first chord...
...In this Dido and Aeneas Morris put the singers in the pit and let the dancers have the stage...
...Strueturally, Morris' choreography is tightly pegged and dovetailed...
...The production is highly stylized, a ritual meditation on the Queen of Carthage (Dido) and the Sorceress who does her in with a trlek (she senvinces Aeneas, Dido's new lover, that he must leave Dido and go to war...
...The young Martha Graham in both roles is an intriguing thought...
...She is the eternal feminine melting into history...
Vol. 73 • August 1990 • No. 10
