![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/AJ-all-festival-dance-hi-res-10.jpg\" "\\"MARK")
<\/a>The Mark Morris Dance Group in Festival Dance<\/em>. Photo: Stephanie Berger<\/p><\/div>\n In 1931, No\u00ebl Coward walked out of the first public performance of William Walton\u2019s Fa\u00e7ade: An Entertainment<\/em> in 1923, and a critic described the music for flute, clarinet, trumpet, saxophone, cello, and percussion as \u201crelentless cacophony.\u201d Coward may have been put off by the fact that Edith Sitwell, the author of the poems that formed Walton\u2019s libretto, sat behind a screen and read the text into a megaphone that poked through.<\/p>\n Ernest Newman, however, writing in London\u2019s The Sunday Times<\/em>, said of Walton, \u201cas a musical joker he is a jewel of the first water.\u201d You could say that of Mark Morris, too, and it was a midsummer delight to hear him read Sitwell\u2019s text alongside soprano Lucy Shelton at Tanglewood\u2019s Seiji Ozawa Hall, while members of the Mark Morris Dance Group performed his 2002 Something Lies Beyond the Scene<\/em> and Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center <\/em>expertly played Walton\u2019s score. (The performances took place June 28 and 29.)<\/p>\n Sitwell didn\u2019t want Frederick Ashton to use her poems when he choreographed his Facade<\/em>; the ballet is performed <\/em>to the orchestral suite alone. However, as anyone who has read Sitwell\u2019s poems or heard the 1970 recording of Fa\u00e7ade <\/em>by Dame Edith herself, tenor Peter Pears, and the English Opera Ensemble knows how wonderfully eccentric the texts are and how deliciously they are timed with the rambunctious instrumental music. (You can sample that recording online: www.youtube.com\/watch?v=j5AlUOJs2dI<\/em><\/a>). The twelve poems that Morris has chosen from the more than forty that Walton eventually set to music require that the readers be able to stretch out words soothingly in, say, \u201cLullabye for Jumbo\u201d or speak the lines of\u00a0 \u201cSomething Lies Beyond the Scene\u201d in 6\/8 time (the sixth beat being a pause): \u201cWe bear velvet cream,\/Green and babyish\/Small leaves seem; each stream\/Horses’ tails that swish. .\u00a0\u00a0 .\u201d<\/p>\n Other lyrics like those in \u201cTango-Pasodobl\u00e9\u201d require a precise, top-speed fusillade of words, which Morris recites with gusto. Shelton is especially fine in the caressing passages that hint at summer by the sea in long-ago Le Touquet, or on the Spanish coast, or in an English garden, although I had trouble making out her words at first.<\/p>\n Lauren Grant and MMDG men (an earlier cast of Something Lies Beyond the Scene<\/em>) in “Lullaby for Jumbo.” Photo: Ken Friedman<\/p><\/div>\n The choreography sometimes pounces on the images the words conjure up and sometimes slides only into the mood and rhythms they engender. In \u201cTango-Pasodobl\u00e9,\u201d Noah Vinson peers around the legs of four other performers as if they were the trees mentioned in the poem.\u00a0 In \u201cLullabye for Jumbo,\u201d seven dancers suggest the body, head, and waving trunk of an elephant while Chelsea Lynn Acree rides it. In the wintry scene depicted in \u201cBy The Lake,\u201d Laurel Lynch and William Smith III are a mournful pair, and other couples pass through shivering. There\u2019s also a great deal of boisterous, playful, or tender dancing.<\/p>\n The costumes by Katherine Patterson consist of black pants and T-shirts in various pastel shades. Each of the ten dancers must have a whole set, because they\u2019re always changing colors (in \u201cJumbo,\u201d for example, all the performers wear blue shirts, while Acree is in a pale pink one). Michael Chybowski\u2019s lighting makes them glow, even on beautiful Ozawa Hall\u2019s rather untraditional stage.<\/p>\n Tanglewood’s Florence Gould Auditorium, Seiji Ozawa Hall, set up for a music concert.<\/p><\/div>\n Rock of Ages<\/em> (2004), like Something Lies Beyond the Scene<\/em>, premiered at the University of California\u2019s Zellerbach Hall. I\u2019d never seen it either. In the past, it has been performed by two men and two women; at Tanglewood, Rita Donahue, Amber Star Merkens, Maile Okamura, and Michelle Yard were the dancers. They wear short, royal blue skirts and tops, and Nicole Pearce\u2019s lighting gives them a backdrop to match. The piece <\/em>is set to the Adagio from Franz Schubert\u2019s Piano Trio in E-flat, D.897, excellently played at for the performances in Ozawa Hall by three of the Music Center\u2019s New Fromm Players: Alexander Bernstein (piano), Alex Shiozaki (violin), and Michael Dahlberg (cello)<\/p>\n Michelle Yard and Craig Biesecker in an earlier cast of Rock of Ages<\/em>. Photo: Susana Millman<\/p><\/div>\n .The title is something of a mystery, although the heroic, six-note, dotted pattern that guides the \u201cB\u201d section echoes the rhythm of the well-known hymn \u201cRock of Ages\u201d (and even, at one point the three notes that sigh \u201ccleft for me\u201d). The music, a nocturne, is ravishing, and Morris has captured the hushed, questioning quality of its \u201cA\u201d section beautifully. <\/p>\n In the beginning, the violin and cello play the melody (in thirds, I believe); the piano enters underneath and ripples a modest answer. But after the opening passage is repeated, the piano takes over the melody, while a plucked violin comments sotto voce. Morris has picked out this duality in various ways. Donohue and Okamura make simple, large, contrasting movements close together in the center of the stage, then come forward in unison, ending the passage facing away from the audience, their hands clasped behind their backs, their heads turned to the side, their gazes high. Yard and Merkens have their own slightly different pattern centerstage, as I remember, but repeat the other pair\u2019s unison passage. (Hear the music at www.youtube.com\/watch?v=K3M38okVTX8<\/a>.)<\/cite><\/p>\n (L to R) Michelle Yard, Rita Donohue, and Julie Worden in an earlier performance of Rock of Ages<\/em>. Photo: Susana Millman.<\/p><\/div>\n The Adagio is slow and sonorous, with hints of darkness. Merkens falls, and the other three don\u2019t immediately notice her. When they do, she lifts her head and legs awkwardly, then rolls to lie supine for a few moments. But this strange little drama isn\u2019t typical of the choreography. Whether the women are thrusting into the more assertive \u201cB\u201d sections\u2014 lifting one another, leaping\u2014or responding to the soft statements of the \u201cA,\u201d you feel that they are intent on fitting into a pattern, complementing one that\u2019s already established, answering a question that another has proposed. At the end, they turn and walk offstage one by one, then reappear, gaze at one another and at the place where they’ve danced, then slowly exit at the four separate corners where they began.<\/p>\n The program was clearly chosen to show off the talents of the young Tanglewood Fellows, as well as the company\u2019s marvelously musical dancing. The program closed with Morris\u2019s 2011 Festival Dance<\/em>, with Johann Nepomuk Hummel\u2019s Piano Trio No. 5 in E, Opus 83, played by pianist Ryan MacEvoy McCullough, violinist Micah Ringham, and cellist Dahlberg again. In this ebullient work, we get to see relative newcomers Lesley Garrison and Spencer Ramirez mingle with the more seasoned Morris dancers like those mentioned, plus Samuel Black, Domingo Estrada, Jr., Aaron Loux, Laurel Lynch, Dallas McMurray, and Jenn Weddel.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>