« TT: So you want to see a show? | Main | TT: Almanac »
January 25, 2007
TT: Old home week
I just got back from the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn, where the Mark Morris Dance Group has been dancing a mixed bill in its own 140-seat performance space. To see a dance company in so small a venue is an amazingly intimate experience, one not so far removed from watching a working rehearsal. It happens that tonight’s program included Sang-Froid, a dance I was lucky enough to see Morris choreograph eight years ago. I wrote about it in a New York Times essay collected in A Terry Teachout Reader:Mark Morris is making a dance—loudly. Dance studios, with their hardwood floors and mirrored walls, are noisy places even at the calmest of times, and Mr. Morris, who is working on a suite of nine dances to the music of Frederic Chopin, can raise a ruckus sufficient to drown out a medium-size riot. All afternoon he has been shouting, whistling, singing and emitting a steady stream of unprintable class-clown wisecracks in his shrill foghorn voice. It's as if John Belushi had decided to take up modern dance, or maybe Ernie Kovacs.
Visitors are often startled by Mr. Morris's antics, but his dancers are used to them. “Mark was loud before he was famous,” says Tina Fehlandt, a charter member of the Mark Morris Dance Group, not unaffectionately. Meanwhile, Ethan Iverson, the company's music director, clatters away at a finger-twistingly difficult etude on an ill-tuned baby grand in the corner of the studio, while a recording of “The Nutcracker”' pas de deux plays irrelevantly somewhere down the hall….
The tumultuous music has inspired Mr. Morris to transform Julie Worden, a handsome young woman who looks like a brainy cheerleader, into a suicidal princess who inexplicably finds herself swept up in some sort of mad Gothic torture fantasy. “Stop!” he screams as Ms. Worden sails despondently through the air for the third time in a row. He strikes a great-man pose and yells at no one in particular, “Isn’t it fun to be the cho-re-o-gra-pheur?”
Not only did Morris make all four of the dances I saw tonight, but he also appeared in one of them. The second movement of Italian Concerto is a male solo set to one of Bach’s most passionate instrumental arias. Morris is fifty, stocky, and gray-haired, and he rarely appears on stage anymore save to take curtain calls, but to see him execute the grandly sweeping arm movements of Italian Concerto is to be reminded that great dancing is far more than a mere matter of agility. He still fills his space to overflowing, and no sooner does he stride out of the wings than your eye goes straight to him and stays there.
Watching Italian Concerto and Sang-Froid at the Morris Center took me back to the days when I was seeing two or three ballet and modern-dance performances a week. I came late to dance, and it had so overwhelming an effect on me that I threw myself into it head first, in time becoming a dance critic and, eventually, the author of a book about George Balanchine.
I still love dance, but in recent years I’ve been spending so much time covering Broadway and regional theater that I rarely get to see Morris or Paul Taylor or New York City Ballet. Maybe that’s why tonight’s performance hit me so hard, to the point that my eyes actually filled with tears at the close of Love Song Waltzes, a moment about which Joan Acocella wrote beautifully and evocatively in her 1993 biography of Morris:
At the end of Love Song Waltzes one man waltzes each of the other eleven dancers off the stage, one by one, until finally he is alone. He pauses, and then, as the lights go out, he walks offstage by himself. For a dance that has taken the group as its subject, this is a stark ending, an admission that, the group notwithstanding, we are also alone, and we die alone. (The ending looks like a death.) But this does not undo the meaning of what has come before. Insofar as we transcend aloneness, we do so in the group. And what the group does is dance. It is significant that when the man is left alone on the stage, he stops dancing. He doesn’t waltz out; he walks out. When the others are gone, the dance is over, literally and figuratively. Dance and the group are the image of life as against death.
Balanchine choreographed the same set of Brahms waltzes in a totally different but no less moving way in Liebeslieder Walzer, my favorite of all his ballets. I regret to say that I haven’t seen it for years, and it’s been at least two years—far too long—since I last saw New York City Ballet. Fortunately, a blogger friend is taking me to an NYCB performance of Liebeslieder next Thursday. I don't like to wish time away, but after seeing Love Song Waltzes, I can hardly wait.
Posted January 25, 2007 12:00 PM
