{"id":565,"date":"2012-03-07T17:02:58","date_gmt":"2012-03-07T22:02:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=565"},"modified":"2012-03-08T10:39:37","modified_gmt":"2012-03-08T15:39:37","slug":"so-ludwig","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2012\/03\/so-ludwig\/","title":{"rendered":"So, Ludwig. . ."},"content":{"rendered":"
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(L to R) Chelsea Lynn Acree, Noah Vinson, Maile Okamura, Amber Star Merkens in Mark Morris's A Choral Fantasy. Photo: Juliete Cervanted<\/p><\/div>\n

Ludwig van Beethoven must have had more stamina than he\u2019s usually credited with. If you research his Fantasy in C Minor for Piano, Orchestra, and Chorus<\/em>, Op. 80, you find that its first public performance in 1808 ended a program that lasted four hours and included among its nine items the premieres of Beethoven\u2019s Fifth and Sixth symphonies (conducted by the 38-year-old composer), his Fourth Piano Concerto (played by the composer), and three movements of his C major Mass. No wonder he forgot that he had cancelled a repeat in the Fantasy<\/em>\u2019s second variation and went ahead with it, while the other musicians obeyed his original orders (the results that, wrote one assisting musician, \u201csounded not altogether edifying\u201d).<\/p>\n

Enough disarming trivia. Beethoven\u2019s program closer, to which Mark Morris has set his beautiful new A Choral Fantasy<\/em> is no dreamy meander. Sixteen years later, the composer built the \u201cOde to Joy\u201d that closes his Ninth Symphony on elements of the theme that\u2019s varied throughout the Fantasy<\/em>\u2019s many-sectioned second movement (and its finale). Despite sighings and tricklings away and soothing moments, this glorious music aspires toward triumph, with words that sing of nature\u2019s beauties and of the art that offers them up to the heavens.<\/p>\n

Thinking back on the Brooklyn Academy of Music\u2019s March 1 premiere of the Morris work, I don\u2019t think it would be a good idea to associate dancer Amber Star Merkens with the busy Beethoven at that 1808 concert, or too closely with the solo piano. It is nevertheless true that she, along with pianist Colin Fowler, exhorts, leads, consoles, and sustains the 14 dancers who give a dancing presence to the strings and woodwinds of the Mark Morris Dance Group Musical Ensemble (Stefan Asbury, conductor) and the voices of Trinity Choir (Julian Wachner, conductor). It is also she who, after a very brief solo to the first movement\u2014an Adagio\u2014seems by her gestures to pull the others onto the stage.<\/p>\n

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Amber Star Merkens. Photo: Julieta Cervantes<\/p><\/div>\n

Isaac Mizrahi has costumed all the dancers identically in what look like trim green tracksuits\u2014high-collared and sleeveless. Tapes both narrow and wide form an X on their chests and a sort of harness effect on their backs; curly gold braid runs down the pantlegs. Depending on the movement at any given time, the performers can make you think of soldiers, of athletes, or of school crossing guards. Michael Chybowski\u2019s lighting saturates the backdrop with colors\u2014by turns red, blue, green, pearl. For some reason, the musicians pause for long seconds between the sections, and we stare at the empty stage, waiting for the next onslaught of dancers.<\/p>\n

They enter running, leaping, or marching, disperse and re-enter.\u00a0 In one smart maneuver, a line marches in one direction and another heads toward the opposite side of the stage, as if they\u2019re ready to engage in separate offstage battles. Two squads arrive simultaneously in contrapuntal leaps and crouches. Dallas McMurray and William Smith III engage in a combative arm game in one corner (you strike, I block). Before long, the space has become a playground with three people here, four there, five over there. They uncoil in chains, cluster to lift another person high, fall to the ground.<\/p>\n

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(L to R) Amber Star Merkens, Lesley Garrison, Chelsea Lynn Acree leaping. Photo: Julieta Cervantes<\/p><\/div>\n

Merkens, the leader, can appear unexpectedly\u2014often in the quieter piano passages\u2014 and leaves without warning. (I\u2019d have to see the dance again to understand all the musical correspondences that engage Morris).In the end, Morris reassembles elements of all the variations he has concocted, while the singers unleash Beethoven\u2019s paean to love and strength, to harmony and grace.<\/p>\n

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(L to R) Merkens, Garrison, Okamura, Rita Donohue, Laurel Lynch, Acree in Four Saints in Three Acts. Photo: Julieta Cervantes<\/p><\/div>\n

At the BAM programs, A Choral Fantasy<\/em> was preceded by Morris\u2019s charming 2000 visualization of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein\u2019s opera, Four Saints in Three Acts<\/em>, <\/em>which premiered in New York in 1934 with an all African American cast. Both music and choreography have a sturdiness and a lilt that captures the faux-na\u00efve quality of Stein\u2019s words (sample: \u201cSaint Teresa and Saint Teresa and Saint Teresa Seize and Saint Teresa might be very much as she would if she very much as she would if she would to be wary\u201d). In this work, Morris\u2019s close setting of steps and gestures to the text\u2019s images and the music\u2019s notes enhances the opera’s subtle traces of primitivism. The reiterated dotted rhythm of \u201cSaint <\/em>Te-re-sa and\u201d powers many of the festive dances among the cohort of saints led by Teresa of Avila and Saint Ignatius Loyola\u2014mystic and soldier.<\/p>\n

These two having been Spaniards,\u00a0 Elizabeth Kurtzman has dressed the women in full, swishing skirts topped by cream-colored shawls, and Morris has introduced spiced versions of dances like the Sevillanas and, maybe, the Valenciana. The bare-chested male saints, however, wear white pants that make them look like Mexican peons, and Maira Kalman\u2019s several delightful painted backdrops also evoke Mexico with their red-orange-pink juxtapositions. The dancers\u2019 formations and blunt, buoyant movements remind me of the clay \u201csantos\u201d of the American Southwest.<\/p>\n

The solo singers voice the various saints, and two, a Comp\u00e8re and a Comm\u00e8re, sing the stage directions, while the chorus comments. Listening and watching Four Saints <\/em>for the second time a decade after its premiere, I\u2019m struck by how Morris makes dance sense out of the playfully surreal words, creating his own games. In one scene, Saint Ignatius and Saint Teresa act like doorkeepers at a select nightclub deciding whom to let through the gap in the front curtain that bears Stein\u2019s unevenly printed libretto. Maybe they\u2019re going to a church picnic, maybe into heaven.<\/p>\n

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Saint Teresa (Michelle Yard) and Saint Ignatius (Samuel Black). Photo: Julieta Cervantes<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019m also struck by the earthiness of this gathering. We might as well be at a village wedding, or a feast-day pageant in which the nicest girls and boys in town get to play saints. Once, the curtains part on kissing couples, and the communion between Ignatius and Teresa is fond and physical. Michelle Yard as Teresa projects a spiritual rapture, but it\u2019s produced by her joy in all that she sees. Then there\u2019s her costume. This beautiful, voluptuous woman is wearing a full, filmy white smock that doesn\u2019t begin to hide her white underpants. No wonder Saint Ignatius\u00a0 (splendidly performed by Samuel Black) is smitten.<\/p>\n

A program of Mark Morris\u2019s works often sends most spectators home elated. In the case of these two dances, the mingling of what you see and what you hear creates a vision of instrumentalists, singers, and dancers gathering ardently together in the fields of the music\u2014rain or shine.<\/p>\n

In regard to those supremely musical dancers, Yard tore a calf muscle in the middle of the second performance, and Rita Donohue, who also dances the role, stepped in. Sad news, a gallant save. The accident ought to remind us that every one of the MMDG members is vital to the work, memorable, and, in some deeper sense, irreplaceable.<\/p>\n

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Michelle Yard triumphant. Photo; Julieta Cervanted<\/p><\/div>\n

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Ludwig van Beethoven must have had more stamina than he\u2019s usually credited with. If you research his Fantasy in C Minor for Piano, Orchestra, and Chorus, Op. 80, you find that its first public performance in 1808 ended a program that lasted four hours and included among its nine items the premieres of Beethoven\u2019s Fifth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":568,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[109],"tags":[267,268,265,266],"class_list":{"0":"post-565","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-contemporary-dance","8":"tag-gertrude-stein","9":"tag-ludwig-van-beethoven","10":"tag-michelle-yard","11":"tag-virgil-thompson","12":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}