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Review: Mark Morris' egalitarian ethos and top-class art
NEW YORK — To get to the theater where the Mark Morris Dance Group is performing this week and next, on the top floor of the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn, you have to enter through what is essentially a neighborhood dancing school.
It’s not just the intimacy, the chamber-music closeness to the appealing dancers and the excellent musicians who are always part of a Morris experience.
It’s the ethos of the place, the liberating conviction that an unpretentious, egalitarian attitude is completely compatible with the highest standards of elite musicianship and art.
Accordingly, it’s appropriate that the two programs this season seem modest. The single official world premiere is technically a half-premiere, and the other selections run mainly to small pieces and pieces made up of many small parts. The modesty is deceptive, though, for these same two programs encompass a nearly new knockout, a major revival and the kind of career-spanning variety that other companies save for big anniversary events.
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Program A does commemorate a centennial, that of composer Lou Harrison. First performed at Tanglewood last summer, it gathers four of the seven works that Morris has made to music by Harrison, with whom he shares, among other qualities, a West Coast openness to influences from across the Pacific.
“Numerator,” the New York premiere on the bill, is a winner. Set to Harrison’s “Varied Trio,” it’s a dance for six men. They start on their stomachs, rising to all fours and then to their feet in a kind of animation of the Ascent of Man. It’s an idea that Morris has used before, but here it’s woven into a male dance that’s as delicate as cherry blossoms and robust as a storm. In the best Morris fashion, its close fidelity to the music is at once underlined and transcended with inspired, where-did-that-come-from imagery.
Danced in long skirts, “Pacific” (1995) gorgeously captures the motion of the not-so-pacific ocean. But Morris created it for San Francisco Ballet, and with its hints of ballet hierarchy, it looks a little foreign on his troupe. The classic “Grand Duo” (1993) is in its native tongue, with ensemble work that has the primitive-ritual mystery and force of the “Rite of Spring” but nevertheless retains a disarming aspect of the hokey pokey.
Program B is more miscellaneous. The second half of “Little Britten,” the premiere, was first shown at last year’s Fall for Dance Festival. Then it was a solo for Apollonian ballet star David Hallberg that wittily played with the shortness of each of Britten’s Twelve Variations for piano and against an expectation of virtuosity. Morris has turned it into a trio and added an opening to Britten’s Five Waltzes. Through a sort of reverse engineering, it all holds together, and what started as a piece for (and about) a particular performer has become a funny, beautiful work for the company.
Even Morris’ most absurd works — like “Pas de Poisson” (1990), revived here, with its tossing of fake fish — are constructions almost impersonal in their concern with form. But casting does matter, and it was momentous for Dallas McMurray to be the first person other than Morris to perform Morris’ role in this season’s major revival, the 1985 duet “One Charming Night.”
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A famous piece of early provocation, not seen since 1998, it portrays the sexual seduction of a willing young girl by a vampire, all within a precise response to Purcell songs (some religious) for harpsichord, cello and countertenor. I never saw Morris in the part, but I felt that the baby-faced McMurray, looking like Eddie Munster, and the avid Sarah Haarmann gave me access to the thrilling audacity and brilliance of Morris back then.
Lately, Morris has been talking about what will happen after he’s gone. But seeing him in “From Old Seville” (2001), moving his portly body in the kind of Spanish steps he first learned as a kid in dancing school in Seattle, I wasn’t thinking about the future or the past. I was grateful for the present.
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Event Information:
‘Mark Morris Dance Group’
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Through May 6 at the Mark Morris Dance Center, Brooklyn; markmorrisdancegroup.org.
BRIAN SEIBERT © 2018 The New York Times
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