Mark Morris Dance Group: The Look of Love

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.

Dido dances

The Cal Performances season opened this week with the annual visit of the Mark Morris Dance Group, in a revival of Morris’s 1989 classic, Dido and Aeneas. Philharmonia Baroque played Purcell’s music. I was at last night's performance.

I have seen Dido several times, but only when Morris was still dancing Dido/the Sorceress; sometimes it is part of a double-bill and sometimes it’s on its own. Both methods work; it certainly is a rich enough hour on its own, but it worked strangely well coupled with the company’s shortened version of 4 Saints in 3 Acts (though I think they did 4 Saints first; I would have reversed the order, so that you had earthly suffering followed by heavenly joy). The first time I saw Dido it was a stand-alone and it must have been shortly after the Belgian premiere.

I think the most recent time was also a season opener for Cal Performances. I saw it twice in that run, and it was fascinating to see how Morris adjusted his performance for the second night – the first night there had been a pre-performance party for donors and maybe people had too much wine, since there was some laughter at what were seen as Morris’s more flamboyant gestures (I liked having a man dancing Dido and the Sorceress because of the link to ancient Greek tragic theater, but I am relentlessly aesthetic and high-minded and there’s always the danger some people are going to assume it’s meant purely as camp, if you can describe camp as "pure"). The next night, all the gestures that evoked laughter were made sharper and more angular and there was no laughter.

Morris has transitioned to conductor of the piece, shaping an alert and well-paced performance from Philharmonia Baroque (though for some reason the pauses between scenes struck me as held just a bit too long; as always, though, I can’t rule out that I was just being weird). The piece survives and triumphes with its second generation of dancers. Domingo Estrada Jr was a virile and sensitive Aeneas, expressing both a lover’s suffering at abandoning Dido and a leader’s recognition that he must move on with his troops (it’s quite an achievement, particularly in this short and Dido-centered opera, to make Aeneas this sympathetic; we are empire-dwellers but like to pretend that love is the obvious choice over duty).

Amber Star Merkens was a perfect choice to take over Morris’s role; in fact she somewhat resembles the younger Morris (particularly in her flowing tangle of dark curls, which she ties back for Dido and loosens for the Sorceress, just as Morris did), though I think she’s taller, leaner, and more sinewy. (Maile Okamura was nicely contrasted as a daintier, sympathetic Belinda.) Merkens makes little gestures count for a lot, as in her final confrontation with Aeneas, as the tender slight movement of her hand (to “by all that’s good”) gives way to the injured dignity of “it’s enough that once you thought of leaving me.” Her Dido is regal and moving. Her Sorceress is cynical and nihilistic and amused. She’s dazzling in both roles.

Stephanie Blythe certainly provided the vocal equivalent, with a beautiful, hall-filling voice, so expressively used, particularly in the suicide aria at the end, when Blythe and Merkens together indelibly expressed Dido’s sorrow and dignity and beauty. Philip Cutlip was distinguished as Aeneas, but had a few slight vocal bobbles. The other soloists (Yulia Van Doren as Belinda, and the First Witch Celine Ricci as the Second Woman and the Second Witch, and Brian Thorsett as the Sailor) were all strong. The chorus was very good and actually enunciated more clearly than some of the soloists (of course, I was sitting right in front of them, my view of the stage slightly blocked by the rising curl of the cello; such are the hazards of preferring the front row).

When Dido and Aeneas touch, it is briefly, and often at a distance from each other (arms extended, space between). The Sorceress is isolated, even from her attendants (Noah Vinson and Dallas McMurray), except for one moment, when she reaches the climax of her evil plan to destroy Dido, and they jump up on her, one on either side, and balance for a moment of glee. Usually she disdains even them, and is clearly and amusingly bored by their baroque repetitions and repulsed when they or any of her attendants come too close to her. We see Dido and Aeneas make love, but we see the Sorceress masturbate alone while her attendants scamper behind her; afterwards she wipes her finger with a bored “well, that’s over” expression. It's profoundly moving to see royal Dido's suicide brought about by this solitary hater of human joy, and a rich connection to have one dancer play both parts.

The setting is stripped down, with a vague blue and gray map of the Mediterranean glowing palely as backdrop to the Carthage scenes, reminding us that Aeneas has to go off and found Rome, and with black banners streaming down for the Sorceress. The dancers' movements are frieze-like and angular and often resemble classical Greek vase paintings. Even many of the movements in a line proceed at an angle. But then there are odd jittery moments thrown in, or little crude jokes, reminding us that more is going on here than an attempt to recreate the vanished (and partly unknowable) style of the Greek tragedies.

The gender ambiguity continues, with the corps, both men and women, portraying female attendants, male sailors, and in-between witches. (The Sailor’s solo is jauntily danced by Lauren Grant.) They do this by switching their black skirts to black pantaloons (I don't know if they just hitch them up or whip them off; their tank tops are always black). Some of the men have slightly crimsoned lips and gold hoop earrings. Dido has glittery silver nails and Aeneas’s nails are black.

At the end the stage slowly darkens as the attendants slip off in pairs through the curtain center stage, behind the dead queen prone on the bench facing us, her head bowed down towards us and arms extended out on either side. Belinda remains and takes a seat on the right side of the bench near her dead sister, and bows her head as the stage reaches almost total darkness.

Mark Morris at Cal

The Mark Morris Dance Group made its annual visit to Zellerbach Hall this week, under the aegis of Cal Performances, so I made my usual visit to see them, on Friday and Saturday. All three pieces were west coast premieres, though not all were new; the first piece, Behemoth, premiered in 1990. It was an exceptionally well-chosen program; the pieces all played off each other in interesting ways.

All three pieces used the entire company, and though there are solos in Behemoth, and individual actions, my main impression is of a group, and groups of groups, as in the folk dances Morris studied. The dancers are dressed simply, in tight shorts or the occasional pair of tights, and shirts, mostly sleeveless; the costumes are all in solid shades of green, mustard, or black; sometimes the shorts and tops match, more often they don’t. On the left breast of each shirt is a peculiar small rectangular badge, with a tiny mirrored circle in each of its four corners. The occasional reflection off the tiny mirrors forms the only “set” on the bare black stage; the pale shifting lights look like re-forming constellations, or tiny squiggling creatures seen under a microscope, or the pale autoluminescence of some blind underseas creature.

The opening movement is quite slow, and the gestures are repeated throughout the different segments; the arrayed dancers slowly lift one leg, they slowly lift an arm, they squat like sumo wrestlers, they form a circle with their arms and bend to the left, so they look like a q. Many movements throughout are slow and controlled, though occasionally the dancers (or parts of them) shiver, or they tremble like marionettes.

This is the piece unique in Morris's output in that it is performed entirely in silence, though as we all know, concert halls are never “silent.” I’ve been reading Kyle Gann’s interesting new book, No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’ 33”, so I’ve been thinking about these things in particular, though anyone is aware of these issues at some level who goes to a concert hall hoping to hear, say, Beethoven and instead hears Beethoven through a scrim of talking, cell phones, coughing, and cellophane crinkling. Silence is very powerful and disturbing to people, like celibacy, possibly because both seem like an almost perverse denial of natural tendencies and like a sort of spiritual challenge or assertion of spiritual superiority. There are some noises the dancers make, as in the moments when they all clap, and some accidental sounds they make, as when their bare feet squeak as they slide across the floor.

The audience on Friday was surprisingly respectful of the silence, except for the occasional cough; last night by contrast several cellphones went off, despite the usual announcement, and there were several loud volleys of coughing, which I can’t help thinking of as the eternal internal adolescent rebelling against the enforced silence (you never hear coughs like this in the auditorium before or after the performance); though of course the rule is mostly there as a courtesy to other people, something adolescents rarely think of, especially adult adolescents. We even had the outburst of giggles that follows a greater than usual barrage of coughs.

But it’s so difficult for people to surrender themselves even briefly and just sit there and listen (4 minutes and 33 seconds is not a long amount of time, yet how tense and uncomfortable Cage’s piece is for many people). Even in the ten-minute “pause” between Behemoth and the second piece, many around me were pulling out their electronic toys – seriously, if you’re so important, or so restless, that you can’t last an hour without checking your e-mail/Facebook/eBay auctions/whatever, or you can’t sit ten minutes after a dance without distracting yourself with an electronic game, you should probably just go to a bar.

As NA mentioned to me last night, the dance creates its own music – not so much in any sounds that result intentionally or accidentally, but in the sense of rhythm, and also in movement through and in time. As its name implies, Behemoth is a vast piece (around 40 minutes long), with something primitive and mysterious about it; some short segments seem like fragments of dances, as if the movements were continuing after the darkness fell. It’s an interesting piece for Morris to make, because although it has many of his usual characteristics (the folk-dance influence, for example), it seems like a deliberate rebellion against his reputation as the ultra-musical choreographer, and his reputation as a wit and jokester. The effect of the piece was ceremonial and fairly somber.

I think some members of the audience, particularly last night, wanted Morris the flashy comedian and didn’t know what to make of the piece. Frankly, I didn’t know what to make of them, and went wandering during the intermission so I wouldn’t have to listen to their silly conversations. But I’ve been watching Morris’s group for decades now, and I’ll just watch wherever he wants to go.

Speaking of Morris’s wit, and of Kyle Gann, the second piece, Looky, had plenty of both. This is a piece from 2007, set to Gann’s Studies for Disklavier, which is a set of player-piano pieces that sound almost like simple scales and studies until the notes start to go “wrong” and it sounds jaunty and captivating. I think the costumes for this one are a combination of costumes from other pieces – I’m sure I recognized several from the Hard Nut (Julie Worden was wearing her older sister mini dress, for example). Some of them look like ordinary things to wear (Michelle Yard in her simple black dress) and some were definitely not (John Heginbotham in pants and jacket both decorated in small squares, each square made up of pale gray and dark gray triangles – by the way, I still think of those two as St Teresa and St Ignatius, thanks to Morris’s production of 4 Saints in 3 Acts). Samuel Black’s elegant muscularity was draped in the flowing oversized silky white pants and tunic of a stripped-down Pierrot, which may be why on Friday the piece reminded me of the melancholy festivities of Watteau. Last night it looked more antic to me. As with the party scene in The Hard Nut, there’s a lot going on in each section of the dance, and I think you’d have a different impression every time you saw it.

After the post-Behemoth pause, the house goes completely dark, to let the audience know it’s time to pay attention again, and so, wittily, when Looky begins we aren't looking at anything – we can only hear the piano at the back of the stage. A spotlight gradually lights it up, and we see that it’s a player piano – which strikes many in the audience as a novelty worth pointing out to each other, even though it’s really all you can see at that point. Then we see Dallas McMurray sitting in a Hard Nut tunic on the back of the stage. What follows are a series of short scenes, mostly about looking, and mostly about looking at various forms of art. There’s a gallery or museum scene, a dance performance, a brawl in a Western bar as imagined by a boy.

The scene of the dance performance is particularly witty; several of the dancers sit in chairs, chair and dancer leaning to the right, looking variously intrigued and mostly bored, while the other dancers strike picturesque poses; two of the most bored-looking viewers are in front, with the dancers behind them; when the dancers strike their final tableau, the two suddenly wheel around, as if they’re suspicious that they've just missed something. There’s a lot going on in Looky, and a lot of it is about how people interact or not with art; in the final scene, a solitary viewer wanders between two rows of dancers unmoving like statues, all striking baroque poses, until suddenly they surround her, violent and threatening, and the piece abruptly ends, with an image of the viewer overwhelmed to the point of danger by Art.

After the intermission came the most recent of the pieces, Socrates, which premiered last February. It’s set to Satie’s Socrate. I recently read Nadine Hubbs’s interesting book, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound, which makes Socrate seem like one of those secret wellsprings of alternate modernism (that is, the Franco-American school of such as Thomson, Copland, and Rorem, as opposed to the followers of Schoenberg). (By the way, I recommend the book, but reading academic prose is like reading Chaucer; it makes perfect sense when you’re immersed in it, but if you pick a page at random it can seem like a foreign language.) I had heard recordings of Socrate, but this was my first time live; its effect reminded me of the effect of Barber’s Knoxville Summer of 1915; both tread into deep emotional territory but in a gentle way, as if you’re being cradled by a melancholy wisdom. Live music is always an attraction of the Morris company, and Colin Fowler on piano and tenor Michael Kelly gave an outstanding rendition of Satie’s work; without distorting its simple, straightforward textures, they subtly varied its declamatory style to avoid possible monotony.

The dancers are semi-nude, dressed in filmy skirts or short togas with bare (or half-bare) chests for the men and loose-fitting tops for the women, in soft shades of olive, rose, sky-blue, and wheat. The back of the stage is divided into two large blocks of color, the right half black, the left sort of golden wheat. Classical (or neo-classical) art is evoked throughout; dancers frequently strike a reclining river god pose, or are arranged as if they were sculptures on a pediment (this may sound artificial and obvious, but it’s too fluid to look that way during the dance; I didn’t really register the pediment effect until the second time I saw the piece). Rows of dancers frequently cross from one side of the stage to the other, with graceful, controlled and dreamlike movements, as if you were seeing a classical frieze come to life. The famous uplifted index finger from Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Socrates is a frequent motif, particularly in the third segment, the death of Socrates.

The first segment is the Portrait of Socrates, in which Alcibiades describes what his friend is like. The dancers are in pairs, each clasping one end of a rope, knotted in the middle, which joins them. They could just drop the ropes and go off on their own, but no one does. The image made me think of the fable told in the Symposium, in which love is caused by each person searching for his or her original other half. It’s a portrait of a companionable society, as is the second section, On the Banks of the Ilissus, a pastoral scene in which Phaedrus and Socrates walk along the river shore, discussing the pleasures of nature, and, briefly, the nature of myth. There is no one dancer who plays “Socrates” or any of the other speakers; the identities shift among them, individually and as a group.

The longest section is the final one, showing the calm resolution of Socrates in the face of his court-ordered death, and the sorrow of his friends. He refers gently to the mourning rituals they will engage in for him (Phaedo will cut his long hair, a cock will be sacrificed to Aesculapius). They try to hide their tears. He commends the goodness of his jailer, who has often come to talk to him during his imprisonment – another image of companionable communication as the highest human good. Sometimes the dancers mirror the actions described by the words: they lift the dying Socrates's feet, or touch his chest where his heart would be, each playing "Socrates" in their varying turns; or they rub their elbows together when the chirping of crickets is mentioned. Other times the movement is more abstract and patterned. When the piece ends, all the dancers are lying on the floor, then after a brief pause slowly and slightly lift their legs and arms – an image of the final death shudder, or of rebirth.

The total effect of this dance is so moving – a peaceful wisdom in the face of the arbitrary and ignorant. There’s something flowing and elegant about the movement, and something about the deep reservoir of feeling hidden behind, that makes watching this dance a profoundly restorative experience.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: December

This is mostly a New York month, since like all the cool kids I’m going to the Met to see From the House of the Dead. This will be my first time hearing something at the Met that is not in English and composed before 1960 (my Met operas are Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Great Gatsby, and An American Tragedy). Anyone judging solely from my experience would have a very odd idea of what the Met is about.

In addition to the Janacek, I’m seeing Le Nozze di Figaro and the new Bart Sher production of Les Contes d’Hoffmann.

And after my second, Saturday matinee viewing of House of the Dead, I’m following Esa-Pekka Salonen across Lincoln Center to Avery Fisher Hall, where he is conducting the New York Philharmonic in Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, the Ravel Piano Concerto in G, and La Mer.

I have a few open nights so I’ll see what’s playing when I get there. But the night before I leave I’m seeing One Night, a Schubert/Beckett combo with Mark Padmore singing Winterreise (or, since I believe he’s singing it in translation, Winter Journey) while Andrew West plays the piano and Stephen Dillane recites (I assume) the Beckett.

Back in the Bay Area, San Francisco Performances has some wonderful pianists on its schedule: Angela Hewitt on December 1 and Marc-Andre Hamelin on December 15.

In Berkeley Cal Performances presents Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut, the only Nutcracker worth seeing. (If you disagree with me on that, check out Saturday Matinee’s guide to local Nutcracking. And if Christmas means choral music to you, check out the choral roundup at Iron Tongue.)

Cutting Ball Theater has extended its run of The Bald Soprano until December 12.

Shotgun Players presents that beloved holiday classic, The Threepenny Opera, which was my favorite musical until I discovered Sweeney Todd.

On Motifs of Mark Morris

Mark Morris brought two west coast premieres to Berkeley this week, along with a revival of V. I was at the Saturday performance. Visitation is set to Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 4 in C major, Op. 102, No. 1; after a pause we saw Empire Garden, set to the Ives Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano, S 86. After an intermission comes V, set to the Schumann Quintet for Piano and Strings in E-flat major, Op. 44. The excellent live music was provided by Michi Wiancko and Cordelia Hagmann on violin, Jessica Troy on viola, Wolfram Koessel on cello, and Colin Fowler on piano. There was much excitement halfway through V when the cellist announced that he had broken a string and we had to pause. The dancers were lined up in the dark and after a moment went back to the wings. By the time someone made an official announcement explaining the pause, we were ready to go again; the dancers ran back out to their diagonal line and the audience fortunately quieted down fairly quickly.

The applause was more vociferous for V; some of that might be increasing familiarity, since it’s been here before, and some might be because it’s in the familiar Morris style: lyrical yet earthy, with witty touches. Both Visitation and Empire Garden are more somber pieces. Even the lighting (by Nicole Pearce for these two pieces) is more subdued. Visitation’s costumes (Elizabeth Kurtzman for both these pieces) are in subtle shades of gray and maroon and dark green. For a while I thought Visitation didn’t have any lifts or leaps; then I realized that it did, but in a smaller-scale way. It’s a piece that’s more psychological than spectacular, and I think would only get more interesting on repeated viewing. Because of the smaller-scale movements, it has a tremendous effect when a dancer goes up on the front part of the foot, like going on tippy-toes. There were some interestingly odd boxing/martial arts sort of moves, but again enacted as if the dancer were suppressing them.

It seemed like a very inward piece, as if it were about the complicated emotional relationships among the specific group of people dancing. It would be interesting to see it with different dancers in the roles. I realized several years ago that I’ve been watching the Mark Morris Dance Group long enough so that I recognize the dancers and the different qualities they bring, though I’m definitely not at that stage with any ballet companies (hearing from someone who does have that familiarity with the San Francisco Ballet is one of the pleasures of reading Saturday Matinee).

Empire Garden seemed inward in a different way, as if it were about a community rather than a group of individuals, a politically contained community. At several points two of the dancers are next to each other and bend forward so that a third dancer can climb on their backs and kneel forward towards the other dancers, mouth open in a big “O” as if they were political orators, or gargoyles (or both). The marches and traditional tunes Ives uses also contributed to the political air, as did the costumes: martial tunics, most with broad horizontal or vertical stripes. The tunics were brightly colored but the effect was not cheerful or bright. I particularly liked the busy second movement, with its mélange of people marching and moving and even doing what I think is called the pony.

I wonder if we’re seeing the beginnings of a different style for Morris (I almost said a late style, but I hope there’s much more to come, so I’ll just say different), a more somber, inward, and reflective style. Watching Romeo and Juliet: On Motifs of Shakespeare last year, I wondered if it was a turning point or a detour. I went to three performances, and did not regret it, though the reactions of others generally seemed more subdued. I think people were hoping for a masterpiece to set beside L’Allegro ed il Penseroso, or The Hard Nut.

Romeo and Juliet frequently reminded me of The Hard Nut, since both works basically deal with adolescents coming to grips with their sexuality. There was one lovely moment for Lady Capulet and Juliet, when the mother, remembering her own young life, mirrors the movements of her daughter; it reminded me of my favorite moment in The Hard Nut, when Drosselmeyer starts by mirroring the movements of the Nutcracker Prince, then dances with him, and then urges him toward Marie, his future partner.

But the Hard Nut has a fragmentary story, and Romeo and Juliet is more like a traditional story ballet than anything else Morris has done. That means there’s a lot more pantomime. And while people remember the intense passion and poetry of Romeo and Juliet, I think they tend to forget the plot mechanics: the plotting Friar, and the starving apothecary, and the poison that mimics death, and Count Paris’s marriage proposal, and Rosaline, Romeo’s first beloved, and so on. It’s not just passionate pas de deux; there’s a lot of plot to get through. And in the great tradition of ballets that grind to a halt in the third act so all the main characters can gather and watch the minor characters have their moment to shine, we get some delightful but totally extraneous dances from the Capulet servants while Juliet, feigning acceptance of Paris’s proposal, sinks into her poison-induced coma. (The poison takes effect long before the dances are over.)

The subject wasn’t chosen by Morris, and he doesn’t usually deal with the passions of first love, which is fine with me, since it’s not a subject I’m particularly drawn to either. No doubt he was intrigued by the challenge, since you have not only one of the archetypal love stories but a series of interlocking communities. I loved the way the dances in private homes (as in the Capulet ball) are aggressive and martial, while the public square is frequently filled with the sort of light-hearted dancing you might expect at a ball.

Much was made of the so-called “happy ending” to this work, as if it came from Morris or some general American resistance to tragedy. But it was Prokofiev and the happy-think art commissars of Soviet Russia that wanted the lovers united. And people have been sticking happy endings onto Shakespeare since the Restoration (check out the hilarious production of Romeo and Juliet at the end of Part One of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Nicholas Nickleby). Even the recent Baz Luhrmann film insisted on letting the lovers revive at the same time so that they could die together (in Shakespeare, Romeo is already dead when Juliet revives). And the thing is: I’m not convinced that what Morris gave us was exactly a “happy ending.”

The lovers have run off together. With ironic abruptness, the feuding families declare peace and Count Paris takes a new bride. The last scene shows the two lovers dancing together in the dark blue as the candle-lights turn to stars. The light fades out as they circle each other round and round, and crucially, it seems to me, not quite touching. Wherever they are, it’s pretty clear they’re not coming back to town, and you don’t get the sense there will be any grandkids. In effect, they’re dead. And life is going on without them.

Irony, separation, distance: maybe these struck me in the new works as well as Romeo and Juliet because Morris is a genius at conveying convincing joy, which I think is a fairly rare quality. I’m not talking about the exhilaration of watching skilled dancers, I’m talking about joy as a quality expressed by dancers as the meaning of their dance. Bodies are inherently tragic, sagging broken back to the earth; even when you admire the youth and beauty of the dancers, it’s inescapable, and part of the poignant appeal of dance, that those qualities will not last long. That may be why I loved Morris’s version of 4 Saints in 3 Acts so much: like a painting by Fra Angelico, what might seem insipid and saccharine is instead strong and lifts up the heart into realms of rose and sapphire and gold.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: September

Things I'm either seeing or wish I could see this month:

Coming right up on September 9, check out the Jack Curtis Dubowsky Ensemble at Meridian Gallery in San Francisco. I really loved Dubowsky’s Eisenhower Address, which I heard last year. This should be fun.

The New Century Chamber Orchestra opens its season September 10-13 with pieces by Bach and Mussorgsky.

The San Francisco Symphony opens with a Mahler Festival; Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the Mahler 1 and Susan Graham sings the Ruckert Lieder.

San Francisco Opera opens with Il Trovatore, conducted by new music director Nicola Luisotti and starring a promising cast: Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Sandra Radvanovsky, Stephanie Blythe, and Marco Berti.

I ended up not subscribing or donating to Cal Performances this year, mostly because I got tired of giving them more money each year and each year receiving fewer of the seats I wanted. But this is probably the most exciting month they have this season: the Mark Morris Dance Group in Empire Garden and Visitation, both west coast premieres; A House in Bali, a new “dance-opera” with music by Evan Ziporyn; and a recital by Christine Brewer.

San Francisco Performances, on the other hand, is currently very high on my good-will list, partly as a carry-over from last season's Elliott Carter centennial weekend and the Philip Glass Music in 12 Parts, but also because I thought they were one of the few local groups that was offering an exciting and adventurous upcoming season. Definitely check out their offerings. Most of what I’m seeing is in 2010, but this month I am going to Thomas Hampson's recital.

Cutting Ball Theater opens its Hidden Classics reading series with The Knights by Aristophanes on September 27. Rare as it is to see Greek tragedy, it’s even rarer to see Greek comedy.

Don't change a hair for me, not if you care for me

And here’s a special St Valentine’s Day half-price heart-shaped box of links for my readers, starting with some hilarity from the Onion.

I had more or less forgotten the day until the Opera Company of Philadelphia sent me an e-mail urging me to “treat my Valentine to Turandot!” I sometimes wonder if Marketing Departments ever bother to look up the plots of the operas they’re trying to sell. On the other hand, maybe they’re just having their little joke: marketing + bad love choices = St Valentine’s Day! At least it wasn’t The Rape of Lucretia, which I am going to see in June, by the way.

Here’s something else to look forward to: a DVD release of Messiaen’s St Francois d’Assise! This production is from De Nederlandse Opera (which recently brought us the first official recording of Dr Atomic, thereby retaining European supremacy in recording modern operas) and stars Rod Gilfry, and I have to admire a singer who can portray both Stanley Kowalski and St Francis.

And the line-up for the next season of Dancing with the Stars has been announced, and though I realize “stars” is being used loosely (I wasn’t really expecting Brad Pitt to suit up), I don't know who a lot of these people are. That's not that much of a problem, because really, what do I care? And at this point the professional dancers are better known anyway and on the upward curve of their careers (some nights it's like watching multiple little versions of A Star Is Born). But seriously – Denise Richards? You have to worry a little when Charlie Sheen is the mature, responsible partner.

The worrisome trend to me is the boast that there are several “real-life couples” on the show, since there seems to be an increasing emphasis on "relationship drama" rather than, you know, "dancing." Maybe the ratings got a big boost when viewers were wondering if Derek Hough and his partner from a few seasons back (sorry, I can't remember her name, and all this searching and hyperlinking is wearing me out) were dating. I liked her until she had a teary-eyed meltdown over the criticism of her hip movement. I'm a weeper myself, and granted she was at a severe disadvantage next to Derek’s serpentine hips, but, you know, keep it together. And she really did need to work on her hips.

Since then we’ve been treated to an increasing number of emotional outbursts, the most inexplicable being Lacey Schwimmer’s announcement that she just couldn’t keep on trying to please Lance Bass, who seemed fairly mild-mannered and tractable. Given her announcement that he was her teenage crush, I’m thinking he was just the victim of her issues, but maybe she was reacting to stuff we hadn’t seen. Or maybe not, since he seemed as befuddled by the surprise attack as the viewers were. There was a priceless shot of his sad blank face looking slightly puzzled when she stormed out. But full points to them for dancing to “I Kissed a Girl.” Witty choice!

I assume the “relationship counselor” who came to talk to the finalists was just a joke that didn’t quite work. Poor Cody Linley, bursting into tears. I was both amused and creeped out to hear him mention that there was a website dedicated to his eyebrows. I do know people with an eyebrow thing. Not to mention any names, of course. His Hannah Montana co-star Miley Cyrus is seriously creepy – she was shown greeting him at her "Sweet 16" birthday party in Disneyland, and I thought I was watching a 45-year-old divorcee trying to pick up her son’s naïve high-school teammate.

Another thing they need to stop doing on that show: having the little kids dance. Yes, these kids know it’s a competitive field, which means sometimes they lose, but no one that age needs to lose on national TV before millions of viewers, especially if they’re not just watching, they’re deliberately choosing to reject you. (Or maybe the viewers don’t vote on the little kids – I always leave the room during that part, so I really don’t know. I should probably get Tivo.) It’s the difference between playing sandlot baseball and playing in the Little League World Series on ESPN.

Another thing they should never do again: Cloris Leachman. It wasn’t so much her limited dancing skills as her constant need to be the center of attention that really annoyed me. My jump-the-shark moment with her was when Cody and Julianne were being interviewed after their dance (poor Cody! that kid was abused a lot) and Cloris came over and started pawing him. Possibly she just thought he was a camera. I’m sure the audience would have been equally delighted if those had been, say, Mickey Rooney’s liver-spotted claws caressing barely-legal flesh. But we all know that old women aren't rude, self-centered, or camera hogs: instead, they’re feisty. That's a pretty absurd and condescending attitude, especially toward a woman who made movies with Mel Brooks, but she certainly took advantage of it. When she finally left she announced to Carrie Ann, “I know you didn’t mean what you said” (referring to her comment from the week before that it was sad to see Toni Braxton leave when she was starting to improve, just so that Leachman could continue flopping around, though she phrased it more gently than that). Guess what, Cloris? She did mean it.

But the most painful moment of all was when Carrie Ann made Susan Lucci stand up and say, “I’m a good dancer!” or whatever empowering you-go-girl nonsense she made her repeat. I thought this was an incredibly degrading thing to do to a woman of her professional standing and, how shall one say, life experience. But improved self-esteem (justified or not) was a leitmotif with several of the other women. Strangely, the only man who was treated to these little confidence-building discussions was Lance Bass, which of course had absolutely nothing to do with his position as the only openly gay contestant.

Well, I do really enjoy the dancing. And I even like the Superstars of Dance segments; most of them, anyway. I think I was a little misled when they started off with Alvin Ailey. I wasn’t exactly expecting Pina Bausch (though that would be fun) but maybe Mark Morris. . . . But I’m very naïve about these things. When I heard that there was a movie coming out named Gigli, I assumed (as one naturally would!) that it was about Beniamino Gigli. I thought Ben Affleck was kind of odd casting. In my defense, there have been movies about Caruso, though it’s not much of a defense since Caruso is a very different sort of cultural figure; it's like Carreras and Pavarotti.

In any case, here's one more sweet link for you, before we toss the empty heart aside (empty except for the sour quince log, of course): Defamer’s pairings of the upcoming DWTS cast and some of the great choreographers. That's entertainment!

what light through yonder window breaks

Cal Performances usually makes its announcement of the upcoming season in late April, but here’s an exciting preview to help make up for disappointments caused by other season announcements, and yes, I’m looking at you, War Memorial Opera House: they will be presenting Mark Morris’s latest evening-length work, Romeo & Juliet: On Motifs of Shakespeare, on September 25 – 28, in Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley. These will be just the second performances after the July 4 – 9 world premiere at Bard College.

Here’s some intriguing information from a letter to the Friends of the Mark Morris Dance Group, sent appropriately on Valentine’s Day:

“This new production will be set to the original manuscript by composer Sergey Prokofiev and dramatist Sergey Radlov, recently discovered in Moscow by musicologist Simon Morrison. Forced to change his original work by Soviet cultural officials in 1935, Prokofiev’s manuscript includes a different ending from Shakespeare’s traditional, tragic finale and nearly twenty-five minutes of never-before heard music.”

Damn! Not only Mark Morris – a Prokofiev premiere!

Oddly enough, though I have, in decades of Shakespeare watching, seen R&J on movie and television screens, or various permutations of it danced by guys in tights and girls in tutus or played by orchestras or sung by suspiciously dancey West Side gangs, I have never seen a live performance of the actual play, though as with all of his plays I’ve read it many times. I haven’t exactly sought it out, but I haven’t avoided it either; the young love thing isn’t really a magnet for me (Angelo and Isabella are actually my favorite Shakespearean fun couple). I have noticed that most productions I read about are really staging the idea of West Side Story rather than what Shakespeare wrote: they make it about two historically and culturally opposing groups, like Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, or Jews and Palestinians on the West Bank, or something like that, whereas Shakespeare makes it completely clear that the feuding houses (“two households, both alike in dignity”) are pretty much identical. He very pointedly does not even specify an origin to the feud, something he could easily have done in two or three lines.

I’m very intrigued by the “On Motifs of Shakespeare” subtitle. In Joan Acocella’s excellent biography of Morris, she points out that the keystone of ballet, the male-female pas de deux, has not played a huge part in Morris’s work, and obviously R&J calls for that, so I can’t wait to see what he does with this material. I’m also very curious about the changed ending – a tragic finale would seem to be the point, and I’m not sure what sort of apotheosis the Soviet censors would object to. Just another reason to buy a ticket, I guess.

MMDG has set up a special new website about the production and the musicological issues; you can find it at http://www.lovelives.net/, which I like as a name because Love Lives can be either adjective/noun or noun/verb. Nicely done!

See the Music

I spent two evenings last week at Mozart Dances, because I knew anything by Mark Morris would be worth seeing at least twice. Last year’s wonderful King Arthur, a parade of theatrical views of Britishness, was more of a staged opera; instead of having singers in the pit and dancers on stage (as in Dido and Aeneas, his other Purcell evening) both were visible and involved in the action, but the movements for the singers were inevitably simpler than they would have been for dancers. This time there was no opera or other vocal work as a basis; I can’t think of another of his evening-length works that is so free of story-lines, no matter how submerged or fragmentary (as in L’Allegro ed il Penseroso or Four Saints) they might be. The backdrops (different for each of the three dances and black-and-gray except for the third, which includes red; other colors are supplied by the lighting) are large curvy abstractions that look like details of Japanese brush paintings, greatly magnified. Mozart Dances, as the name implies, is more dance than narrative; the title is basic and descriptive and the three dances are named Eleven, Double, and Twenty-Seven after their music (Piano Concerto No. 11, Sonata in D major for Two Pianos, and Piano Concerto No. 27, and even those with eyes obstinately shut all evening would still have enjoyed Garrick Ohlsson and Yoko Nozaki at piano, and Jane Glover conducting the Berkeley Symphony). Morris’s ability to capture music in movement is always noted, but even after years of seeing his works it amazes me that the movements seem so inevitable yet so fresh. Mozart swirls and the dancers swirl; there’s a looping figure and the dancers make a looping figure, but it never seems like a reduction or a simple equation; in other words, it looks obvious but no one else could or has come up with it, which might be a good definition of genius. He has even succeeded in dancing about architecture (I’m thinking of the “Populous Cities” section of L’Allegro), which can only give heart to those who try to write about music.

You could always find narratives in Mozart Dances, if you were so inclined, of course. Anytime you have a dancer break away from a group, run into a group, move with a partner, or end up on stage alone, there’s an implied and fluid story. There are sudden jabbing gestures and moments when a group will stop and look upwards expectantly, or point at each other or gesture imploringly, and then the moment sinks away, but the cumulative moments help move the dance beyond the purely graceful and fluid, just as Mozart does with the music if we have ears to hear it. The first dance opens with alternate male and female dancers in a line; the men step forward, dance, and then exit the stage, leaving the entire rest of the dance to the women; this is the sort of subtle disjunction (I kept expecting a symmetrical return at the end or suchlike) that helps give a deeper ambiguity to the loveliness. Like Mozart, Morris is very witty, but I have to say I don’t find his work what you might call “ha-ha funny” the way some seem to; I’m sure everyone at any abstract dance has had to put up with the sort of audience member who giggles ostentatiously at the witty parts, lest the surrounding rows think she didn’t get it, but I think Mark Morris the Fabulous Personality can color views of what Mark Morris the choreographer is actually doing. I’ve seen him interviewed and he’s outrageous and hilarious and over-the-top in a kind of old-fashioned gay way (he also objected strenuously to having his work described as camp, which I thought was revealing), and audiences can bring that to their viewing: when he did Sylvia for the SF Ballet, some writer at the local paper made the astonishingly stupid remark that “everyone” was surprised that he treated the work seriously. I don’t know who “everyone” is, but anyone who’s paid attention to his work could have told them that Sylvia is exactly the sort of thing he would be serious about. Several years ago he did Dido and Aeneas here; the first evening was the season opener, and (I’m totally speculating here, I should point out) the party atmosphere and champagne (for the big donors and schmoozers, not for me) might have gotten to people, including Morris, because there were some giggles at his Dido. It was fascinating to return the next evening and see how he responded by making certain gestures more severe, by toning down the hair tossing, and otherwise connecting his Dido with the world of Greek tragic drama rather than drag revues; there was no giggling the second night. Even The Hard Nut, the most overtly comic work of his I’ve seen, is not a parody or deconstruction of the Nutcracker but its own thing, complete with moments of sob-inducing beauty (the pas de deux between the Nutcracker and Drosselmeier, for instance, which I have actually heard audiences giggle at, presumably because two men dancing together is by nature a campy joke). Making a separate, non-satirical thing of the Nutcracker is pretty difficult to do, based on the evidence of Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker!, which is fairly enjoyable but completely lacking in the psychological integrity or emotional depth of the Hard Nut. What brought all this up is the moment in Mozart Dances when one of the men runs down a double row of dancers and leaps into the arms of a lone man at the back of the stage. I guess there was a Looney-Tunes quality to it since it involved sudden running and jumping, but I also found it incredibly poignant, which is something your standard pratfall is not going to be. But then sometimes audience laughter makes me feel like a particularly ponderous German professor of metaphysics, straining his whole life to define the origin and purpose of wit in the weltschmerzy Weltanschauung.

Making it a mostly Mozart weekend, on Sunday evening I went to Il Re Pastore, performed by Philharmonia Baroque at First Congregational Church in Berkeley, an elegant brick rebuke to my former home, the Unit III dorms across the street. It’s like a New England Congregational Church, but higher and broader, which may be what gave the voices a strange reverberate halo in the first Act; I noticed the top-notch cast (Lisa Saffer, Heidi Grant Murphy, Michael Slattery, Iain Paton, and Margaret Lattimore) adjusted their voices to the space for Act Two. Philharmonia eschews surtitles, I assume because of expense and difficulty (since they perform in so many spaces, not all of them intended as concert halls), so you get the paper-turning, -crinkling, and -folding obbligato. I read the libretto beforehand and decided I only had enough energy to listen without reading along as well. The plot is fairly simple and involves an Emperor first causing and then solving romantic complications among two couple. Beautifully as everything was sung, I wish they had avoided the temptation to play the resolution for laughs; this type of story might be alien to us, but it’s not inherently ridiculous, and in these days when what used to be our country is lumbering imperially through the world, a bad enemy and a worse friend, it might not be such a strange idea to seek instruction on the clemency and justice appropriate to Emperors. But perhaps I’m just being the ponderous metaphysician again.

dance to the music of time

As we get older, most dance becomes a form of nostalgia. Not only are dancers, by the nature of what they do and why they do it, generally young and attractive, with a physical and emotional flexibility long past most of the audience (except the eager students standing in the back), but the stories tend toward first love or beloved nursery tales. Even abstract ballets usually have a subtext of early romance or of primitive emotions we start controlling once we’re out of the nursery. I went to SF Ballet’s Program 5 because of the Mark Morris/Lou Harrison Pacific, but it was the closing SF Ballet premiere performance of Fancy Free that weirded me out and made me wonder about dance and the past and present.

This isn’t a comment on the performance – the boys are charming, the girls are charming, the music is peppy and American in that Bernstein way – but on the fact of the presentation of this work. For one thing, and the Bush administration would like us to forget this except when it’s convenient for them, we’re at war right now. When I think about our fighting men, I’m not thinking of three sailors from the heartland wowed by the big city and hoping to meet a girl. I think about immense damage, both physical and mental, about Pentagon attempts to prohibit any footage of the coffins coming back, and of a peculiar hysteria that claims to support the troops but wants them invisible (as with the memorial crosses put on the Lafayette hillside, which have been attacked as an attack on the troops – I don’t even want to understand the thinking there). I’m sure the Ballet didn’t present this piece as propaganda, but that’s exactly why it seemed so weird to me. Here the fighting men are three nice young guys having a dance off to impress the two girls, and about a block away the Quakers are holding weekly peace vigils while the death tolls mount. The only hint in the program of this irony is the aside that Fancy Free is a period piece. But whose period nostalgia is this? Most of the audience did not participate in World War II, or even Korea, I would guess, based on simple mathematics. This is not a past that most of us had, though perhaps it’s the past most wished they had had, when they imagined that life was young and fresh and you'd dance to get the girl (though, in a further example of how the past is a different country, I thought at first that the girls were hookers – the set designer may want to move that lamp-post). That may actually not be any more of a phantom than my memories of a youth filled with loneliness, isolation, and humiliation. Perhaps my angsty self should be watching anguished modern dances in small, inconvenient venues, but then I really don’t like the audiences there either.

To move backward through the program, we had The Fifth Season to music by Karl Jenkins, choreographed by Helgi Tomasson. I enjoyed the music. I enjoyed the dancing too, but throughout there was an air of the expected about the movements. That was preceded by Carousel (A Dance), which hints at the musical's story in its fairly brief running time. It’s very beautifully done, but I think the real star is Rodger’s music – I don’t think it’s a stretch to call Carousel beloved. (I do absolutely hate “Soliloquy” – I once decided not to buy a Thomas Hampson CD because, according to my calculations, it took up at least one-fifth of the running time – but “If I Loved You” is probably my favorite Rodgers and Hammerstein song, though to be honest I’m more of a Rodgers and Hart guy.) The aging cherub next to me was not the only audience member humming tunelessly along and patting his plump thigh in approximate time.

The evening opened with Pacific, which is the reason I was there. It’s hard to explain why Morris’s dances look so spring-green to me, even as I get older. It might be because he avoids the usual subjects I mentioned earlier – first love, nursery stories. In her excellent biography of him, Joan Acocella mentions that most of his work, unlike that of most choreographers, is not based on the male/female pas de deux, and her subtle point is that it’s easy to assume this is because Morris is gay, but the deeper reason is that he came to dance through flamenco, which is largely solo, and folk dancing, which is usually in groups. In other words, his wellspring is not ideology but artistic structure and logic. The freshest artists tend to be those obsessed with form.

It didn't fall in a day, either

As part of my Nathan Gunn tour of America, I am going to Houston in a month for L'Incoronazione di Poppea (with an Astros/Cardinals game in between performance dates). I have seen it once before, in a po-mo production at SF Opera, which I liked better than some reviewers did; I think it suffered with comparisons to the Mark Morris production of Rameau's Platee that was running in Berkeley at the same time (is that the first mention of the genius Morris here? It won't be the last!) but it had a lot going for it, not least a performance of the Empress Ottavia by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson that was so intense it frankly threw the opera off balance. But I decided to watch the three available DVDs to prep for the trip. The original plan was to watch them all in one weekend. It's probably just as well that it didn't happen that way, though all three are different enough, not just in staging but in music (given the various controversies over the score and historical performance practices). Not only was the scoring different, but two had Nerone played by tenors and one by a mezzo, while two had Ottone played by countertenors and one by a baritone (this is Gunn's role in Houston).
First was a 1993 production from the Schwetzinger Festspiele, with Patricia Shumann as Poppea, Richard Croft as Nerone, and Rene Jacobs conducting. This was a good standard production, I thought, but for some reason they omit the prologue in which Fortune and Virtue argue over who has the power, only to be interrupted by Love, who points out that she (or he, in the form of Cupid) does. For some this omission will knock this one out of the running, and indeed I'm puzzled as to why they left it out. It may seem like an outdated bit of Renaissance allegory, but (1) it sets up a larger framework for the rest of the story and (2) if you don't have at least some taste for Renaissance styles you're probably not going to go for this opera anyway.
Next was the Raymond Leppard version with Maria Ewing and Dennis Bailey from Glyndebourne. I understand from those more steeped in musicology than I can claim to be that Leppard's version is controversial. I found it enjoyable, not being too caught up myself in continuo arguments and sackbut controversies. It is probably the one least likely to freak out the regular opera goer (that is, someone approaching it back from the nineteenth century works, rather than someone moving forward in time from early music), what with the absence of countertenors and, if my memory is correct, the nurses played by women instead of en travesti. I don't consider that a recommendation, but I'm not perverse enough to rule it out on those grounds either.
Third (and this was last night's viewing, so it's fresher in my memory) was Christophe Rousset's version with Les Talens Lyriques, with Cynthia Haymon as my favorite of the Poppeas and Brigitte Balleys as Nerone. This is the longest of the DVDs, and is probably the fullest and most "authentic" musically. But if you're looking for spectacle, this bare stage version is not the place to go. Also: what's with the incredibly butt-ugly costumes? Why would you hire a gorgeous woman like Haymon to sing the seductive Poppea and then dress her like Raggedy Ann? Why were they all in baggy fuzzy caftans, some festooned with what looked like carpet samples or failed macrame projects? And why was Poppea's nurse Arnalta dressed like a refugee from a Russian Constructivist version of Alice in Wonderland? This is more a version to be heard than seen, I guess.
I've heard rumors there's another version forthcoming, with William Christie conducting, but so far no sightings on the Amazon. . . .