Spring's Slow Start
JACOBS, LAURA
On Dance SPRING'S SLOW START BY LAURA JACOBS Mark Morris' mane of raven hair has long had telling associations for me. It used to evoke the deeply wrought waves that frame faces by Edward...
...That seems to grant a big benefit of the doubt, for Behemoth gives anemia new meaning...
...Indeed, Morris was once an adept study, and worthy of the praise he received...
...The New York City Ballet similarly began its season with an inauspicious opener, Peter Martins' 1991 version of The Sleeping Beauty...
...Watching the latest production, I realized that Martins' work has not settled —if anything, it is even more breathless...
...Heavy, loose, busy, and boring—Mark Morris nevertheless enjoys a prince's welcome...
...A great many of his pieces (in this engagement, Going Away Party and Lovey) are set to music with words —choral works or popular songs—and a favorite Morris method is to dance out the text in large-size Broadway type...
...Lately Morris has not bothered to come up with motifs that focus his themes and return throughout a dance, bringing news of their development...
...His tenure there was not without controversy...
...One recurring movement is a leg lifted to just below the hip, loose at the knee, and carried around to the side...
...Or that his dancers never reach the high level of stage communication demonstrated by the Cunningham troupe...
...Unfortunately, the best dance they saw, Gloria, dates back to 1981—practically juvenilia for Morris...
...ABT's fine dancers are unnecessary here...
...Of the other premieres, Beautiful Day was a blandly cliched "love" duet that could have come from any one of 10 contemporary choreographers...
...When there are no words, Morris falls back on formal constructions that obsessively mirror the musical ones...
...It is at once ugly and completely clear, capturing the terrifying beauty, the broken-glass glitter of spirituality...
...Nor has the dance taken shape...
...a lesser troupe could amply fill roles that require little technique...
...Artists who cannot let a work evolve on its own are often frustrating, but oh how I wish Martins would do some tinkering with this rushed, fractured and fatiguing fairytale...
...Visions of transcendence and degradation dissolve into one another...
...In the case of Behemoth, a New York premiere with no music whatsoever, Morris imitates the work of Merce Cunningham, whose commissioned scores frequently approach silence...
...Peter and the Wolf, moreover, will hardly brighten the company's lackluster spring season, featuring a slew of Romeo and Juliets, Giselles and Don Quixotes that have carried the same list of performers for the last five years...
...The design for Peter and the Wolf is certainly acceptable...
...An off-axis spin, for example, combines religious possession with self-abandonment...
...It is disheartening to see that where Mikhail Baryshnikov brought serious experimental work to ABT, current artistic director Jane Herman is commissioning slop...
...While all of Morris' work looks loveless, in Gloria that absence is successfully transformed into a cosmic question of and quest for faith...
...The big event on the bill is a brand new Peter and the Wolf, a bid for the whole-family crowd...
...Bejart could be equally campy, his music was no less classical, and in many ways his dances were more brazenly homo-erotic than those of the outspokenly gay Morris...
...Beauty desperately needs another intermission, and more blossom time for the lovely Awakening scene that begins the second half...
...Morris remained a success with American critics, and even developed a cult following here that made frequent pilgrimages to his premieres in Brussels...
...Choreographed by Michael Smuin, former director of the San Francisco Ballet and a man not known for making works that endure, the 20-minute affair is good-natured, upbeat and tries hard to be loads of fun...
...Morris spent the past three years in Brussels, where he replaced Maurice Bejart as artistic director of the national dance company at the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie...
...To see his latest programs, fans had only to travel to the midtown Manhattan Center, one of New York's less fashionable venues, ride an elevator to the seventh floor, enter a mud-orange ballroom sporting heraldic shields and frescoes of Russian village life, and grab a seat in the bleachers...
...Pared down for mad hatters in the audience, it is about one hour and two intermissions shorter than most productions...
...The choreography actually loses concentration about midway through, but its exceptional opening images compensate for the lack of duration...
...Smuin's broad, jokey choreography flattens out whatever delicacy is left...
...No matter...
...It only feels very long...
...The Belgians never warmed to his doughy choreography, or to his penchant for throwing high camp and low humor onstage, usually to revered pieces of classical music...
...I remember it as gray on gray...
...Behemoth is so blocky and cumbrous it suggests a Soviet sort of abstraction...
...A Lake, presented in shades of blue and green with costumes resembling the garb of 18th-century servants, was hardly better, if more brightly lit...
...He is blowsier than ever—tiptoeing through the tulips, composing in falsetto...
...At its premiere last year, Martins' Beauty was performed too quickly, but with all the ad vance press on how trim the classic would be, the audience was well braced...
...I couldn't wait for the closing curtain...
...Today Morris' curls call Tiny Tim to mind...
...Nothing is articulated in terms of classical dance...
...We see it enough that it must signify something...
...and it is endless...
...Setting the sights that low is a waste of company time and energy...
...My impression then was that if Martins was going to cut so liberally, he should have eliminated more scenes entirely and given the remaining ones their due space and duration...
...Vivaldi's choral work is a tightrope walk over the abyss...
...Morris first used the space in 1987 to present his Mythologies, a triptych of dances based on essays by French semiotician Roland Barthes...
...Using creative math, some have calculated that the dance's flat-footed elements add up to the expression of a new kind of 1990s fear and loathing...
...Tony Walton's set looks like a Russian village dangerously atilt, as if painted by Marc Chagall in deep charcoals, cobalt blues and ember reds...
...But can so limp a gesture really qualify as a leitmotif...
...Any competent choreographer of musical theater can do as much...
...Like houses, ballets have a tendency to settle, to find a natural alignment and tempo...
...a narrator (Dudley Moore on opening night) simply tells the audience what is happening...
...Not with a bang but a simper, he and his troupe took the stage in April for the first performances since their permanent return to the United States...
...The return to the site this spring, he told the New York Times, was an attempt to bypass the "official dancedom" represented by safer, cleaner, more convenient theaters such as the Joyce and City Center...
...Official dancedom, though, has been good to him, as was obvious from the enthusiastic crowds that packed the ballroom...
...In Gloria he twisted the elder choreographer's idiom into his own...
...It used to evoke the deeply wrought waves that frame faces by Edward Burne-Jones, or the rebellious tresses of Ros-setti heroines...
...A American Ballet Theater (ABT) opened its two-month engagement at the Metropolitan Opera House the week after Morris closed...
...And in a perfect motif, the dancers clasp their hands down between their knees, then pull the knot of fingers upward as if to split their bodies in two...
...The Lilac Fairy's magic boat is clearly oversized for the stage, and despite the ballet's overall brevity, Act I—which encompasses what is traditionally a Prologue, Act I and Act II—is a marathon most difficult to sit through...
...On Dance SPRING'S SLOW START BY LAURA JACOBS Mark Morris' mane of raven hair has long had telling associations for me...
...This would have forced him to frame what was left by inventing new transitions and turns of phrase...
...It begins with a man and woman coming forward out of darkness, pulling themselves up and out of the primordial ooze...
...Too bad that neither Morris' eye nor his ear is as keen as Cun-ningham's...
...The effect is often witty, but soon interest fades...
...Gloria bears the unmistakable influence of Paul Taylor...
...Instead, he illustrates...
...But Bejart was theatrical on a grand scale—in the European manner?and he knew what to do with the women in the company...
...The result is Taylor's Esplanade without the tenderness, a community bound not by mutual joy but by a common emotional void...
...Willa Kim's fancy but unimaginative animal costumes, however, tire quickly, and the narrative, updated and streamlined by playwright Larry Gelbart, is short on dramatic impact...
Vol. 75 • May 1992 • No. 6
