Mark Morris Dance Company
Saturday, May 22, 2010 at the Paramount Theater
Seattle Symphony Orchestra and Tudor Choir
To write about the most recent Seattle appearance of the Mark Morris Dance Company, I have to start at the end of the program. Before the final strains of Antonio Vivaldi’s Gloria in D had faded away, the crowd in the Paramount Theater was on its feet, cheerly wildly for Seattle’s favorite dance son. Morris is the local boy who made good, an international choreographic sensation, a Macarthur “genius” award winner who is still in the prime of his creative years. Perversely, I have shied away from Morris’ Seattle appearances in recent years. All that acclaim and adulation, who could possibly live up to the hype? Still, when the opportunity presented itself for me to see the Mark Morris Dance Company with the Seattle Symphony and the Tudor Choir, I thought, why not? And, at the end of the show, if I wasn’t cheering wildly with the rest of the audience, I left the performance with my dance jones sated.
The bill was a medley of three of Morris’ older dances. Gloria, created in 1981, was the earliest work on the program, and the evening’s capper. In a newspaper preview, Morris told an interviewer he decided to conduct the Symphony and Choir himself for this dance, to get a fresh perspective on piece that has become old hat for him. (His appearance in the orchestra pit sent his fans into another giddy round of applause.) Gloria is an interesting example of how Mark Morris earned his reputation as a musical interpreter. His dancers are almost a visual embodiment of Vivaldi’s music, sometimes in synch with the harmonies, other times providing contrapuntal accents. As the lights come up, we see two men, one standing, the other lying face down. The other eight dancers enter, and immediately drop to the floor, prone. One by one, they rise, perform abbreviated solos, then resume their places among the face-down pack. As the piece progresses, the dancers are grouped in twos and threes, and each little unit performs a particular set of movements. I couldn’t help but imagine each dancer as a single note of music, three together forming individual chords, and the groups of three as illustrations of Gloria’s compositional structure. Despite this intellectual game, and the technical prowess of the dancers, Gloria just didn’t have enough dynamic range, musically or kinesthetically, to sustain my attention.
Perhaps I’d been lulled by the two earlier dances? The evening opened with A Lake, created in 1991 for the White Oak Dance Project. It begins with a tableau of seven dancers standing, barely lit, against a blue backdrop. They become visible only gradually, the way you start to discern a landscape as dawn breaks. After each movement of Haydn’s Horn Concerto No. 2 in D major, the lights seemed to evaporate up into the ceiling above the stage. The effect was stunning, as if some spirit was sucking that light heaven-ward. Designer James F. Ingalls has created a small masterpiece of lights. The dancers are equally luminous; in particular, David Leventhal was a sprightly, joyful presence in dance’s third movement. He’s very small, but his energy filled the stage in this duet.
Jesu, meine Freude followed A Lake. It was the most satisfying work of the evening, notable for its seemingly endless array of hand and arm movements. From the get go, when two dancers are positioned one behind the other and undulate their arms like a multi-appendaged Hindu deity, to the intricate patterns the dancers create with their hands (small triangles formed with thumbs and forefingers, or palms folded one over the other, creating the kind of shadow birds you make with your hands to amuse little children) Morris’ ten company members deploy their upper bodies as energetically as their legs and feet. The dancers are clad in white: the men, topless, wear wide-legged trousers. The women float across the stage in ethereal dresses. Bach’s composition may derive from Christian liturgical tradition, but this dance is spiced with an earthy sensuality that’s accentuated by all those heaving, sweaty male torsos. As the Tudor Choir members use their voices to praise Jesus, the dancers show us that it’s just as appropriate to worship the holy through their bodies.
Unfortunately, the evening’s pleasures were somewhat marred by the venue. The Paramount has a restored grandeur that, while aesthetically pleasing, adds nothing to the building’s functionality as a place to watch dance. The Paramount’s sightlines, even from the center of the house, are only fair. There just isn’t enough rake to provide full view of all that’s happening on stage. And for this particular performance, that was really a shame. If Mark Morris is known as a master of music, he is equally talented in the full use of the stage, horizontally and vertically. His dancers extend their legs and arms in arabesques that demonstrate clean, crisp lines that would make a ballerina envious. Morris arrays them on the floor, prone or supine. They sit, kneel, or perch atop one another’s shoulders, creating levels of interest from the ground up. Combine these poses with strong jumps, spins and carries, and you have an array of interesting things to watch. It’s a shame they weren’t always easy to see.
Mark Morris founded his company thirty years ago, when he was in his 20’s. The three dances on this bill were all at least 15 years old, creations of a young man one assumes had not yet reached the height of his choreographic powers. You can’t help but wish we in his hometown had a chance to see more of Morris’ current work (PNB presented a 2001 dance last season). Mark Morris is only in his mid-50’s, yet he’s influenced a couple of generations of contemporary dancemakers, both in this country and abroad. Who does he look to for artistic inspiration? Maybe next year he’ll bring newer dances to Seattle, and we’ll get a chance to find out where Morris’ work is heading.
