By Elsa Johnson & Victor Lucas
When we told people we were going to see Mark Morris Dance Group we were surprised how many replied, “Who is Mark Morris?” Even some members of Cleveland’s dance audience were clueless.
That’s surprising, because Morris has had a lot of name recognition since 1990 when he and Mikhail Barishnikov founded the White Oak Dance Project together, with Barishnikov providing the star power and Morris providing the choreography. Mark Morris Dance Group has performed a number of times in Cleveland over the years. Easy to come by on DVD is Morris’ funny, subversive take on the Nutcracker, Hard Nut, and his gender-bending but moving choreography for Dido and Aeneas, Henry Purcell’s 1689 opera.
As a choreographer, Morris has a way with music, an engaging sense of humor, and a postmodernist propensity for mixing genres as well as bending gender assignments. All of Morris’ talents, quirks, and warts were on display at Playhouse Square.
In the first dance of the concert, Canonic ¾ Studies, Morris choreographed to an assortment of waltzes by various composers, all arranged for solo piano by Harriet Cavalli. The very beginning of the first of the studies set up a typically postmodern contrast between a formal, neoclassical pose and a decidedly casual walk, arms swinging and feet smacking the floor heel-toe. That contrast between formal and casual, neoclassical and pedestrian, continued throughout Canonic ¾ Studies, sometimes in successive movements and sometimes in the same movement, jumps and turns with knife-sharp balletic feet and legs but deliberately floppy arms and shoulders.
The shifts from formal to casual, literal music visualization, and repetition yielded a comic effect which the audience quickly picked up on.
The dancers, costumed in black tights and white t-shirts and dancing against a sky-blue cyclorama immediately reminded us of the men in Balanchine’s black and white ballets, but in Canonic ¾ Studies both men and women were dressed the same, typical Morris gender-bending.
If Canonic ¾ Studies was an appetizer, a little delight, a titillating teaser, the second piece on the program, Festival Dance, marked a change in tone, calmer though still upbeat. Set to a piano trio by Johann Nepomuk Hummel, this dance presented the dancers as – mostly – members of heterosexual couples with contemporary costumes, the women in skirts and blouses and the men in pants and shirts. No cross-dressing. Call it a court dance or a folk dance for Americans.
The third and final dance in the program, Socrates, was danced to 3 movements of Eric Satie’s Socrate. Our program notes provided excerpts from 3 Platonic dialogues (these also scrolled across a screen high on the back curtain – which could have been distracting but somehow wasn’t), the excerpts titled Portrait of Socrates, Banks of the Illissus, and Death of Socrates. Far from literal dramatizations of the libretto, Socrate used friezes and choral movement that made only the broadest allusions to the text. Potentially boring in lesser hands….but Boring it was not; Morris’ restraint allowed the grave emotion of the piece to come through without melodrama.
All the music in the concert was played live by 4 members of the MMDG Music Ensemble.
Toward the end of the company bows for Socrates, Morris himself came out and made a flamboyant bow. Then, a few moments later, he came out with a glass of wine in hand for Q&A, which followed a pattern: the initial response to most questions was pure “Bad Boy” Mark Morris (after all, he has a reputation to uphold). Funny! But also shockingly derisive. The following dialog does not begin to hint at the sense of unleashed denigration.
Question: What do you look for in a dancer?
Morris: What you just saw.
Question: How do you come up with the geometries in your dances?
Morris: I’m a choreographer.
Morris’ bordering- on- abusive come-backs (oh so funny, but oh so uncomfortable) invariably gave way each time to a generous, thoughtful, and sweet response that actually did answer the question. In a thoughtful answer to a young choreographer who was having difficulty understanding the music she had chosen, Morris (after he had gotten the snark out of the way) made a forthcoming response: “If you can’t figure out the music, if it’s over your head, pick something else.”
A few moments later, he generously dropped a hot tip for choreographers. “Scott Joplin played by James Levine; find the album.”
That’s Mark Morris.
Mark Morris Dance Group accompanied by MMDG Music Ensemble performed at Palace Theatre on March 2, 2013, co-presented by DanceCleveland, PlayhouseSquare, and Cleveland State University.
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.
Cleveland, OH 44115