The longer you live, the older you get. Hmm. This not-exactly-apocalyptic statement refers (obliquely) to recollection. When I attended Jacob’s Pillow’s 90th Anniversary Gala last week, memories crowded in. Sixty-eight years ago, I made my debut on the Pillow stage in Taken With Tongues: A Study in Fanaticism by Harriette Ann Gray. Crammed into two cars (or was it three?), we dancers and … [Read more...]
Dancing on the Green
“Ooh that feels so good!” The speaker was not involved in a semi-pornographic film. She was a teenager watching a filmed pas de deux at a summer dance festival years ago. Others shushed her; this was art! Indoctrinated, did they even notice that the male dancer, hoisting his partner overhead, had placed one hand on her crotch? Please be forbearing when I tell you that this memory edged into my … [Read more...]
Four by Morris
I’ve seen Mark Morris’s work for many years, starting in 1980. I remember him dancing half naked with a mane of black curls in his 1984 O Rangsayee. I interviewed him in Brussels, when he and his company had taken over the Théâtre de la Monnaie (1988 to 1991).A few years ago, I watched him rehearse his dancers in one of the nine studios in the Mark Morris Dance Group, built on a corner in … [Read more...]
The Worlds of Mark Morris
Mark Morris can be a playful fellow, and for his latest work, Sport, he collaborated with a playful musician, who was no longer living. Erik Satie wrote his Sports et Divertissements in 1914 (an unfortunate date) and published it, updated, in 1923. His original little book consisted of an introduction and the scores of twenty piano pieces under a minute in length, illustrations of each by Charles … [Read more...]
The Unslaked Fires of Love
The White Light Festival presents Layla and Majnun, directed and choreographed by Mark Morris. How many poets have compared love to a flame and passion to a consuming fire— love that can obsess you, drive you mad? In the ancient tale of Layla and Majnun, the hero was born with another name; “majnun” labels him as one losing his mind over love for Layla, and, ironically it is that madness … [Read more...]
Dancing with Lou Harrison
The Mark Morris Dance Group celebrates the centennial of composer Lou Harrison's birth. In 1991, the composer Lou Harrison wrote a piece for gamelan and harp and called it In Honor of the Divine Mr. Handel. On June 28, 2017, in Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Hall, the Mark Morris Dance Group premiered a work, Numerator, set to Harrison’s Varied Trio for violin, piano,and percussion. The title of … [Read more...]
Operas That Dance
The Brooklyn Academy of Music presents Mark Morris: Two Operas, March 15 through 19. On the last day of July, 2013, I saw and heard an unforgettable performance in Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Hall. Mark Morris had directed Benjamin Britten’s Curlew River for a cast of Tanglewood Fellows and paired it with his 1989 visualization of Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, performed by the Mark … [Read more...]
‘Tis the Season
Mark Morris's The Hard Nut at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House. Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut sets the knowing audience at the Brooklyn Academy laughing in ways that most ballets set to Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker do not. But I doubt that ballet aficionados in St Petersburg in 1892 found their eyes moisting up either. This revival of Morris’s music-wise, tradition-flouting version melds human … [Read more...]
India in New York
Mark Morris curates "Sounds of India" for Lincoln Center's White Light Festival. Mark Morris has made many trips to India, beginning in 1981. I’ve only gone in my dreams. My fascination with the country’s dance styles came from seeing New York performances by visiting companies, dipping into epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, treating my dance history students to videos and master … [Read more...]
Dancing with Music
The Mark Morris Dance Group performs in its own Brooklyn space. Music often takes Mark Morris in directions I couldn’t have anticipated, as the programs for his company’s season at the Mark Morris Dance Center make clear. Only occasionally does a score’s history enter the picture, and, if it does, it enters with an enigmatic twist. His 2005 Cargo is set to Darius Milhaud’s La Création du … [Read more...]