danceview
a quarterly review of dance

Reviews

Mark Morris
The Company's 20th Anniversary Season at BAM

by Carol Pardol
copyright © 2001 by Carol Pardo
Spring 2001

The twentieth anniversary season of the Mark Morris Dance Group which took place at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in March was more than just an opportunity to see the company dance a generous sample of its repertory in an opera house setting. It was the public confirmation that Morris and his company have joined the dance establishment. All the accoutrements of the establishment were present: Morris himself was the subject of a major study before the age of forty. L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, generally considered to be a masterpiece,is now the subject of a monograph of its own. The company has a new home in Brooklyn, built to its specifications. The program even came stuffed with book ads or audience surveys.

The engagements opened with Sang-froid, a recent work to Chopin. From the first moment it was clear that the choreographer was fully in command. The choreography seemed inevitable. Many of the hallmarks of Morris’ vocabulary were present: the focus on the group rather than the individual, quick entrances and exits, the exploration of the space at the sides of the stage. In addition, although the score is comprised of piano pieces that everyone can hum and that have been used as dance music before (most familiarly by Jerome Robbins in Dances at a Gathering and The Concert), the music didn’t seem tired due in part to the reserved tone of the piece. The costumes were black pants and shirts; the performers focused inwardly on themselves and the group rather than on the audience avoiding the trap of being either overly sentimental or ingratiating—a masterful demonstration of the confidence born of decades of making dances.

The Office set to Dvorák does not display its formal mastery as overtly. A dance for six people and one implacable presence, it begins with the cast dressed like unassuming—even frumpy—civilians rather than as sleek, body-proud dancers (June Omura wears a loose dress, low heels and ankle socks)  who express their community in steps, groupings and rhythms based in folk dancing. The presence, personified by Tina Fehlandt in a severe suit and hairstyle, forces one member of the group to leave with her. Those who remain repair to the back of the stage and take their seats, one chair remaining vacant. This decimation of the community continues, individual by individual with varying responses by those who remain, from elegiac sadness to determined and desperate high spirits until only one person returns to a chair upstage. The pain one feels as Marjorie Folkman curls into herself overcome by the weight of her grief in piercing and resonant.

Like The Office, Bedtime has its quotient of fear and grief, here leavened by the sense of reassurance and protection which permeate its first section, set to Schubert’s Wiegenlied. Three figures seen sleeping near the edge of the stage each gain a guardian angel who materializes from the the darkness at the back through the intervention of Mireille Radwan-Dana as a combination Sandman, Chief Angel and Good Fairy. Morris provides, in dance terms, the security all of us have ever sought when awakened by a bad dream in the middle of the night. The choreographer was extremely fortunate in his collaborators. From the pit, Mary Westbrook-Geha’s rendition of the Schubert song was overwhelmingly beautiful, and Mireille Radwan-Dana, usually cast in roles that make the most of her power and size, took every advantage of the opportunity to show what she can do with a softer attack and legato line. Bedtime ends with Morris’ setting of Erlkönig. Although the dance is a retelling of the text, one can watch the performance without knowing the words and be fully cognizant of the narrative onstage; the fearful horrifying side of sleep and unconsciousness.

Having brought up the relationship between word (text) and choreography in Morris’ work, I suppose this is the moment to admit that I am one of the two people in New York who remains untouched and unmoved by L’Allegro. I have never gotten over the sense that in this work, unlike Bedtime, one had to know the text to fully appreciate the dancing, that the dance serves as an illustration of, and is subservient to, the text. It is a risk one takes in using vocal music, which Morris loves, as dance music. Sometimes he skirts it; sometimes, and this is just the most notable example, not.

There were smaller scale pleasures to be had as well. The choreographer himself performed a solo to pieces written for children by Erik Satie. Although the work started out with a too cute moment, Ethan Iver-son seated uncomfortably on the stage before a toy piano, Morris’ character, a mechanical soldier, possibly, intent on investigating space and motion but always recalled to his limits, was precisely calibrated to avoid that pitfall. It was rewarding to see the company’s vocabulary without the questions that translation to and by another body can raise: a useful point of reference in watching the rest of the repertory.

From a solo to a group dance: with its formal basis in the division of a circle into two half-circles and the interactions between the two as they move further into space, informally cut costumes in shades of blue, green and purple, Polka originally presented as an independent work, but now the final movement of Grand Duo seems to offer a privileged look at a very orderly colony if curious opalescent bugs. Of the pieces used as closers: Gloria, Falling Down Stairs and this, only the last built to a real finale. The others begin and end without a sense of cumulative dynmanic conclusion. Perhaps this is an unfair expectation based on the hierarchy of ballet which Morris eschews, but I don’t think so. Dancing Honeymoon, light, bright, periodically too cute and too literal hommage to Jack Buchanan and Gertrude Lawrence is riddled with climaxes, including folding chairs sailing across the stage.

These various disappointments are all the more surprising because Morris, lionized young, would seem to have worked out tone, text and cumulative effect more consistently long ago. Well, on to the next twenty years and welcome to the establishment.