For reasons unfathomable to me, Cal Performances persists in 8:00 start times most evenings, which means that, no matter how enticing their offerings, I'm mostly not going to bother with them unless it's something I think I would really regret missing, which is why I found myself in Zellerbach Hall at 8:00 last Saturday for the second performance of the Bay Area premiere of The Look of Love, Mark Morris's tribute to the late Burt Bacharach.
As usual with the Mark Morris Dance Group, the musical accompaniment was live; Ethan Iverson, who performed the same function for Morris's Beatles piece, Pepperland, had arranged the songs (as well as an excerpt from the soundtrack to The Blob) & performed piano as part of a small jazz ensemble, accompanying the sweet, stylish, & haunting voice of Marcy Harriell (who also designed her own elegant black gown).The songs were mostly familiar, or half-familiar, to me, & they do have an uncanny way of sticking in your mind for many days after you hear them.
Another frequent Morris collaborator, Isaac Mizrahi, designed the costumes, which were evocative of that peak Bacharach period, the 1960s, with their bright shades of pink & orange offset by muted moss green, though, in typical Morris style, boundaries, of gender among other things, are blurred (women & some men are in tunics or short dresses, some are in pants & tanktops), so this work in no way looks like a simple exercise in candy-coated nostalgia. When I tried to figure out exactly how many colors there were in the costumes, I realized that there were many more than I had first assumed; there was orange, for example, but when I tried to see how many other orange pieces there were, none of the other shades quite matched the first, & what looked like a unity turned out to be a series of subtle variants.
The dance achieves the same effect: what at first might seem straightforward, a swooping celebration of love, breaks down into something more complicated & ambiguous. There are ten dancers, & some chairs, & a single deep color glowing on the back wall, a color that harmonizes with the costumes & that changes from time to time (lighting by Nicole Pearce). There are duets, but often with tension as well as longing between the two lovers; or a third dancer/lover appears to distract the couple in different ways. As often with Morris, there is some straightforward illustration of the words: dancers mime sneezing to "You get enough germs to catch pneumonia" from I'll Never Fall in Love Again; during an extended riff on the opening of Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, as the instruments plink like the first drops plashing down, the strolling dancers pause, lift out their hands to check (was that a random drop, or the start of a downpour?), tilt their heads back to catch a few drops.
Sometimes the gestures slide from literal to metaphoric: during Do You Know the Way to San Jose?, as the "stars who never were" are pumping gas, there is a rapid, tight, up-&-down movement of a clenched fist that suggests pumping gas but also deep reserves of barely suppressed anger & frustration. There is graceful swirling, but the most passionate & dramatic moments are for love expressed through jealousy & anger. In one of the later movements the dancers, at different times, sit in one of the chairs & move their arms up & down in a way that suggests a bird's wings, but a bird whose flapping isn't quite wide & powerful enough to lift it up into the air (the effect is of frustration & longing).
This is not a dark & gloomy dance, though. Even something as potentially sinister as the creeping sounds of The Blob have a comic element to them. There are moments of dazzling, intricate beauty, as in the complicated patterning of the lines of dancers in Walk on By (I wanted to see that movement from the balcony instead of my front-row orchestra seat). The last number is I Say a Little Prayer, & we leave the complications of love with a benediction towards the loved one – but are the various lovers still together? Will they stay together? Maybe, maybe not; what matters is the generous gesture outwards.
Before the curtain rose Morris came out & gave a brief, witty speech in which he mentioned last year's visit by the troupe to Cal Performances, which was cancelled after the first performance when COVID hit the company & they had to shelter in place, on the other side of the country from their usual home (that was why, for the first time in years, I missed a visit from the MMDG). He was happier to see the full houses on this visit. He then dedicated the performances to the memory of Bacharach. It was a fitting & touching tribute.
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