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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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page last updated: October 8, 2003