A
Dark Look at a Dark World
Mark Morris Dance Group
All Fours (world premiere); Grand Duo, Serenade,
Going Away Party
Zellerbach Hall
September 12, 2003
reviewed
by Rachel Howard
Sometimes the fascination of even Mark Morris’ best
work cannot compete with the spectacle of the man himself.
After the first section of his latest world premiere
Friday came a long pause. Two dancers froze in darkness
on the Zellerbach Hall stage, waiting for their cue;
the audience coughed and shuffled nervously. Finally
a woman from the upper balcony yelled “Hell-o?,” like
a petulant teenager, and Morris came traipsing (he can
do nothing other than traipse, even in haste) down the
theater’s right aisle.
“Do you really think ‘hello’ with a question mark is
going to start us?” he chastised her, but not before
asking the quartet stage left if someone had broken
a string. Indeed someone had, and a new string was being,
well, strung, and in the meantime the once-impatient
audience was now happy to hear Morris grandstand wittily
until the music resumed.
For
the Cal Performances crowd, Morris’s impromptu intervention
could only be seen as a bonus to the silent but similarly
winking performance in his solo Serenade which
was to follow. The American dance-going public is on
a first-name basis with Morris now, particularly since
his landmark company building in Brooklyn has made his
Mark Morris Dance Group perhaps the country’s most prominent
modern dance institution. But the Bay Area is on especially
chummy terms due to Cal Performances’ long and extensive
relationship with Morris; last year those ties were
strengthened with the promise of one world premiere,
one residency, and one run of The Hard Nut
annually. Throw in San Francisco Ballet’s frequent commissioning
(a new Morris full-length Sylvia is set to
premiere next spring), and you create a viewing public
that says not “What is he doing?” but “There he goes
again” when Morris lets his outsized personality take
the stage.
And familiarity has its deeper benefits. Last week MMDG
brought L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, ed Il Moderato
back to UC Berkeley, despite those perennial rumors
that Morris intends to retire his best-loved work forever.
It’s been mounted at Cal Performances now three times
since 1994, but far from having exhausted its audience,
L’Allegro is one of those life-affirming works
that moves those who have experienced it to root out
every last person who hasn’t and urge them to. (How
interesting it would be if we could get everyone in
a city to see the same dance the way everyone in Chicago
was supposed to read To Kill a Mockingbird.)
It’s true it looked and felt different this year; my
colleague Paul Parish (I hope I’m representing his views
faithfully) thinks that’s because we’re in a new, post-911
era now and cannot embrace the old faith in humanity
as we once did. But if L’Allegro felt a bit
more distant I think it’s also simply because enough
time has lapsed to move it firmly into the category
of established masterpiece. Certainly the Zellerbach
audience responded in kind, with a full standing ovation
and a chorus of unorthodox bravos.
If the revival of L’Allegro lulled us with
known comforts, the world premiere one week later caught
us off-guard with its foreignness and risk, and broken
violin strings proved the least of its treacheries.
All Fours, set to Bartok’s disturbing fourth
string quartet, is very unusual for Morris. So much
of Morris’ work carries the pedigree of high modernism,
and yet this new piece seems to channel the early 1930’s
classic modernism of Graham and (as far as I can deduce
not from first-hand viewing but from photos, reading,
and videos) especially Humphrey. An eight-person chorus
in black buzzes anxiously about the stage, stalking
like birds of prey, raising hands in desperate prayer
above heads. They are not, as in so many Morris dances,
a group of individuals, but a mass, the faceless force
of society itself. Their echelons and their faintly
beatnik attire and especially the way they strike strident
poses on the music’s harsh chords—arms held with clenched
fists, one hand covering ear with the other held as
if to keep an evil force at bay—speak from a different
age.
The next three sections introduce our cast of players,
first in a flailing duet for Craig Biesecker and Bradon
McDonald, and then with each paired into a couple—Biesecker
with Julie Worden, McDonald with Marjorie Folkman. A
cryptic domestic drama ensues. Worden and Biesecker
do not trust each other, and Folkman and McDonald, less
dysfunctional, circle about, interlopers whose presence
hardens Worden and Biesecker’s mutual wariness. The
drama is personal, but it does not take place in a vacuum.
As the chorus grows more agitated in the allegro finale,
you’re left with no doubt this private face-off is shaped
by, perhaps even emblematic of, realities in the world
at large.
Berkeley audiences, accustomed to finding pages of Noam
Chomsky left in the restrooms of Telegraph Avenue eateries
for diversion, will have no problem formulating political
interpretations. Throughout All Fours, Nicole
Pearce’s lighting suddenly falls dark, or flashes intense
red. The blackness is unpredictable, swift as death.
The sensation of shock is one we all, right now, know
too well. The chorus is driven to a helpless fear. Your
faith in the human will to find strength and calm in
crisis is not strengthened.
According to interviews, Morris first created All
Fours as a duet back in Seattle, before he had
his own proper company, and premiered it as such during
the debut of his New York troupe in 1980. He felt compelled
to revisit it this year, adding the mob-like ensemble
sections. To be sure, the work feels timely. What its
atmosphere of terror says about our times remains to
be seen with further viewings.
Meanwhile another of Morris’ mysterious works, Grand
Duo, offered its own dark truths. When I first
saw this 1993 work five years ago, I did not like it
(a matter of thwarted expectation, since I had been
told all about the campy Mark Morris and had never seen
his work before—I came woefully late to the Morris party).
But Grand Duo has become a staple of the MMDG
rep, and it’s easy to see why, with its eerie disconnect
between the infectiousness of a tribal people’s circle
dance and the chilling primal impulses, and between
the gay melody of Lou Harrison’s concluding polka and
the thrashing piano chords.
Not everything was dark on this MMDG visit. Morris’s
recent solo to more music by Harrison, Serenade,
fused earnest spirituality and absurdity in a manner
only Morris can carry off. And the program led with
a piece of classic Morris camp, 1990’s Going Away
Party. When Bob Willis and His Texas Playboys sang
of “your lips on my lips” and the women jumped so that
their crotches landed in their partners’ faces, everyone
knew just which lips we were talking about and smiled
accordingly. The Texan tunes were recorded, of course;
all the other music was live, per Morris’ company policy,
and very well performed. And the dancers were superb
as usual, especially McDonald and Biesecker, urgent
and heartbreaking, in the Prestissimo quartet from All
Fours.
Copyright
2003 by Rachel Howard.
Photo:
Marc Royce.
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