On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA
On Dance MARK MORRIS IN SEARCH OF A VOICE BY LAURA JACOBS ROMANTIC love has flourished at the ballet more happily and to greater effect than in any other imaginative realm. Even Giselle, a...
...He never had to start over from scratch and eke meaning out of small steps...
...His 1982 New Love Song Waltzes, a hormonal rushof 19th-century romanticism and hang-out sexual liberation, paired men with men and women with women...
...Classical ballet hoped to square sexual passion with social convention...
...Graham's postmodern daughters, choreographers like Tricia Brown, Laura Dean and Lucinda Childs, took a more conceptual route...
...in a vampire's bite, was a metaphor that quivered with erotic ambiguity...
...The overlit Crayola colors of the costumes join with the winking innocence of the Morris approach to make it an odd Utopia, a summer camp where men and women go their separate ways— equals, yes, but certainly not partners...
...In Dido and Aeneas he danced the good/evil dual role of Dido and the Sorceress and wore them like Disney's Snow White and Wicked Witch...
...At almost two hours, L'Allegro is Morris' longest choreographic statement to date, as well as his most pretentious...
...His spinning-mirror performance revealed the depths of the power struggle between tragedy and comedy, self-love and selfhate...
...Through Handel's score for Milton's poems and frequent allusions to the drawings of Blake, the dance attempts to embrace two extremes of human experience...
...My, what derivative letters he's been sending...
...Elaborate cadenzas sounded the heights and depths, aided by a great deal of Luciferian pyrotechnics...
...In L'Allegro the execution is trite, too...
...That's not a bad place to hide in a world where young people die daily for love...
...Morris' second fall program was a disaster: two dull premieres and a tired revival...
...Morris' strategy, though, has failed to challenge him in a deep or formative way...
...They eschewed grand hymns of worship or sentiment...
...Even today, there is little for men to do in the works of Graham, whose earthly vocabulary was born of a woman's full thigh...
...Morris places himself in the company of visionaries, yet he proceeds literally...
...In his brilliant ballet Drinkto MeOnly with Thine Eyes, Morris had to function within the rigid constraints of classical technique...
...Often his erudite sources, references and music choices read like compensation for an absence of choreographic depth...
...Mark Morris rose to importance during that decade, partly because he was so different...
...it wanted to see men and women find their one and only...
...The early pioneers—Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey— performed alone or in companies of women...
...That his dances would include all forms of libidinal expression seemed a logical point for Morris to make...
...It goes hand in hand with his "cathedral" works—Gloria, Marble Halls and Stabat Mater—older dances that flicker with dogma, raise anonymity to ritual and enable him to lose himself among the candles and crucifixes...
...The idea was trite...
...As the piece wears on we feel it stretch increasingly thin, a sophomoric dichotomy with a few ripe moments...
...Take his recent creations for Mikhail Baryshnikov...
...Morris did not, however, accept heterosexuality as a paradigm...
...They're too busy studying their own images in the water...
...Critics looking for old wine in old bottles apparently will settle for Beaujolais Nouveau (the fuss over L?llegro was a veritable bacchanal...
...In Pas de Poisson and Wonderland he overlooks Baryshnikov's legendary aerial abilities—the very talents that inspired Twyla Tharp, Karole Armitage and David Gordon to create spikey, over-thetop dances for him—and focuses on the way the two resemble each other...
...The clinical qualities of contemporary dance were flattened under his loud, bare feet...
...Thedarker lighting of the "Melancholy" segments cannot hide a lack of compelling imagery...
...In its high drama and fullbodied nature, his work harked back to Isadora, though his troupe exhibited more balance between its male and female roles...
...Man might be the maypole around which her women dance, all aflutter, but he is also unknowable, uncommunicative, perhaps a stand-in for God...
...Morris' musical taste, ranging from a penchant for Baroque to early 20th-century orchestral pieces, was diverse enough to please both balletomanes and new-wavers...
...Modern dance saw things differently...
...The world their dance reflected was, in short, the one arrived at in the '80s...
...Mark Morris' unwillingness to dig down into himself may well be his true subject...
...It was as if he had suddenly been handed a diamond drill...
...And in spite of his rampant experimenting as a young artist feeling for the boundaries of his talent, his spiritual interest and inclination to narrative revealed an esthetic that was positively Biblical...
...Paul Taylor's major work of last year, Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun, was also simplistically divided—between good and bad...
...Their angle was less heart of heart than heart of darkness...
...They walked on walls, spun toward Nirvana, repeated step phrases with computer-like speed...
...The result was something remarkably faceted: a work suggesting that ballet's perfect geometries are a form of eternal adolescence...
...The Handel of L'Allegro is far too sophisticated for his crude method, except on an ironic level...
...In fact, only when Morris is actually illustrating Milton's words does the stage turn into a tableau vivant (he depicts a hunt scene—its foliage, hounds, equestrians, and panting fox—with childlike invention and delight...
...By dangling his eclecticism like a billfold of family pictures, Morris managed to slide past the little rooms of the postmodernists...
...Indeed, his strongest pieces are the ones that engage the very issues inherent in his style: dances that confront the threats and attractions of duality, investigate aspects of narcissism, or question the self-immolation of love...
...the horror of the human body was as much a subject as its heavenly aptitudes...
...Even Giselle, a work that boasts the Wilis—girl ghosts who dance men to death—lets love triumph in a final pas de deux that is peerless in its murmuring intimacy, formal complexity and exquisite duration...
...Instead, he discovered the media mileage to be gained from adding loud sexual statements to otherwise conventional dance-making...
...Since Morris went off to Brussels three years ago, every new work of his seen here has been greeted as a letter home from a prodigal son...
...He could be anyone...
...Adam and Eve are not talking in this Eden...
...Nor is there a dance in which Morris forgets himself and concentrates on whatisuniquein others...
...If they chose to show us heaven, it was a place of mathematical precision and hair-trigger technical elation...
...The "Mirth" sections gambol and warble in exaggerated jocundity—Paul Taylor without the frightening excesses of happiness...
...But it is hardly the place for a choreographer still in search of an individual voice...
...One Charming Night, aduet setto Purcell that begins as a shy Victorian romance and climaxes (with the lyric "Lord, What is Man...
...It is startling to think, for instance, that none of his dances for two —of either gender—is a sustained, firsthand communication done without tongue in cheek...
...Exploring a dancer's character is a complex task Morris evades...
...But over the years what may have initially appealed to the humanist in us has become glib...
...These women went into rooms of their own—little rooms —where for the last three decades they narrowed their themes and concentrated their efforts on the pursuit of essences...
...On the basis of two programs Morris' company brought to the Brooklyn Academy of Music this fall, his sexual identification appears less a source of inspiration than a quick fix of sensationalism...
...and the dutifully abstract Love Song Waltzes formed a depleted sequel to New Lo ve Song Waltzes, so fresh in its beginning yet less interesting with every viewing...
...The long-awaited L'Allegro, il Penseroso edil Moderalo, heraldedasa masterpiece by those who traveled to Brussels to see its premiere in 1989, was a big disappointment...
...Present as well on the surface of his work were obvious similarities to male masters: the doom-tinctured romance of George Balanchine and the protean playfulness of Paul Taylor...
...Wonderland, a desperately clever murder mystery à la Rashomon, was again ersatz Taylor...
...And regardless of fans' claims for them, I find Morris' dancers dourly anonymous...
...From the start he was outspoken about his homosexuality...
...the execution was nevertheless silky and glorious...
...moreover, his earlier precocity and variety have slipped into formula...
...rather, love was to be glimpsed in the details...
...Thus we get dances where Baryshnikov's fine line is lost in shadow...
Vol. 74 • January 1991 • No. 1
