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Paradise, and Paradise Lost

"Four Saints in Three Acts" and "Dido and Aeneas"
The Mark Morris Dance Group
Howard Gilman Opera House
Brooklyn Academy of Music
New York City
March 15, 2006

by Nancy Dalva
copyright 2006 by Nancy Dalva

"...two may and inclined."
             Gertrude Stein, "Four Saints" libretto
 
In "Four Saints in Three Acts," Mark Morris follows the Virgil Thompson (1934) score with the Gertrude Stein libretto. Maira Kalman has provided cheerful après Matisse sets—imagine Matisse designing  fabrics for a lady's dressing room, all Schiaparelli pinks, and hothouse plush. Elizabeth Kurtzman's costumes for all but the principals suggest a different Matisse—the artist who painted "Spanish Woman with a Tambourine." To enhance this environment—suggested within the closed box set of the stage—Michael Chybowski has been convinced, by someone, to throw off his cloak of darkness and flood the stage with sunshine, and more sunshine. This notion of someplace south, of Iberia, persists throughout. My guess is that this is something along the lines of what Mark Morris thought of at the time as heaven: a southern climate, with gypsies, and castanets, and flamenco dancers, and skies endlessly blue.
 
Because that's where this dance takes place: Heaven. The key to this work, it now seems to me, is one suggested to me by a New Yorker article Joan Acocella (who, by perfect coincidence, is the choreographer's biographer) wrote about Joan of Arc—Joan, "bonny and blithe." Until, of course, the moment when the flames started licking at her feet. But that idea of the happy saint–without-pain of the flames is what suffuses this dance. It is about sainthood as pure love, pure goodness. This, it turns out, is a very simple notion: Sainthood without the tortures, with their ever-icky overtones of sado-masochism, of strange pain as the price of admission to paradise. Mark Morris's saints, in this piece, are all blithe. The two principals are extroverts—St. Teresa, danced by Michelle Yard, and John Heginbotham, dancing St. Ignatius—and they are also lovers. (Or so it seems to me. They each wear a half of a pair of pajamas, she the top, he the bottoms, which would seem to be a giant clue.) They usher in the company to their kingdom, which is the kingdom of happy, pure and simple. This isn't such an easy thing to choreograph, but Morris rises to the rare occasion with a simplicity of address, with open movement, and with courtly dancing replete with Iberian motifs, or so they seem. Since the last time I saw this dance there seems to be to be an increase in projection. Had I to venture a guess at why the work seems to be coming towards me, rather then drawing me in like a scene inside a sugar crystal Easter Egg, it would be a rare separation of the company from a community into a hierarchy. Yard and Heginbotham are so at ease in this work now, so radiant, that Heaven comes and gets you. At the end, just in case we've missed the summons, it's made emblematic, by means of a simple wooden swing. (Pendant from a framework which, in less happy circumstances, would dangle a noose.) She takes her seat, and he pushes her, higher and higher, as her smile increases. Then he climbs up on the seat behind her and standing tall, uses his weight to sail them high. All to that happy music by Virgil Thomson, and those loopy lyrics by Gertrude Stein.

                           *****************************
 
"Poor sister, and if things stand thus, would could I do to help do or undo?"
                                           Ismene to Antigone, "Antigone", Sophocles
 
Mark Morris originally planned to dance not only Dido and the Sorceress but also Aeneas in his wonderful, wonderful 1989 version of the Purcell opera of 1689, to the Nahum Tate libretto. This last follows Virgil at a considerable distance, but it is important, I think, to remember that to an audience at that time—even one watching a performance at a girls' school, where this work was first performed, by a cast of young ladies—there were certain givens. Everyone knew who Dido was, and particularly in such an environment, where Book IV of the "Aeneid" is the romantic reward for all those years of reading about Caesar and the Gallic Wars, and about the sacking of Troy. Finally, a tragic heroine! And everyone knew who Aeneas was: his lineage (son of Venus); whence he came (hero of the Trojan War); and where he was going (to found Rome). Morris manages to get all this into his dance, through archaic postures, through significant gestures of subservience, and through the inspired choice of the artist Robert Bordo to create a set that is a portal to the Aegean. The simple sarong costumes by Christine Van Loon impart a gender neutrality (when the characters are anything but) and the lighting by James F. Ingalls—more than any lighting I think I've ever seen—suggests that somewhere off stage there is a ship waiting.
 
As things turned out, Morris took on only two roles in his work: Dido, the Sovereign Queen of Carthage, and the debauched one-woman orgy of a Sorceress who seals her doom (which is of course already sealed, but she has an awful lot of nasty fun winding up the curse and spasmodically releasing it. This includes a scene where gods are worshiped not with raised arms, but by splayed and raised legs, and that's far from the most louche thing that happens.) Aeneas was ceded to Guiellermo Resto, who forever to me holds the standard for the part. As the epitome of the masculine, he was a sovereign, too. In other words, the dance is a work about the conflagration that occurs when the Queen of Carthage meets the King of Testosterone. (This is always a problem for female rulers—the right consort. Of course Aeneas is not that. He's got bigger fish to fry than following several steps behind.)
 
With these two gone from their roles, "Dido and Aeneas" emerges as a different work, one with a strong structure previously concealed. With Morris doing his star turns—first his White Swan, Dido; then his Black Swan, the Sorceress—one tended to see that duo as paired opposites. Aeneas was suitor to one, and the other was an unholy singularity. Now, we can see that the Sorceress is actually the opposite of the character Belinda, the sister and soul mate to Dido, who comforts her at the beginning of the work, and weeps over her at the end. In Greek tragedy, there is perhaps no more significant role than that of sibling—closer than parent, and incapable of duplication. One can have other spouses, other children, but one cannot generate new siblings. Belinda, it happens, is the one role in the Morris work not subject to gender crossings. She is always played by a woman, and a lovely one at that. First Penny Hutchinson, then Ruth Davidson, now Marjorie Folkman. All three are angels, sisters of mercy. Here, Folkman is opposed by Bradon McDonald as a Sorceress so lubricious the Morris original is met, and more.
 
So that's one couple. The other is of course Dido, the magnificent, Athena-in-love Amber Darragh, and her sailor love. Here, when the golden surfer boy Aeneas of James Maddalena leaves her, all you can think is "Poor Dido." Seduced by those muscles—in case you wonder what the attraction is about, Morris starts off by having Aeneas showcase his manly back, and later, he faces upstage and shows the court (he parts his sarong) his manly front. Dido seems not so much ravished, in this version, as brought down by a passion not met. Aeneas looks like a boy toy, but it's Dido who's been toyed with. Nothing sovereign and royal about that, really. Just a variation upon a theme. And utterly fabulous, at that.

Photo credit: Stephanie Berger.

Volume 4, No. 11
March 20, 2006
copyright ©2006 Nancy Dalva
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last updated on March 20, 2006