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.

the devil's disciple

The Aurora Theater is currently presenting The Soldier’s Tale by Stravinsky, a dark little fable brightly told about a soldier who foolishly gives the Devil his violin in exchange for riches (well, there's more, but it's better not to know it in advance). Donald Pippin of Pocket Opera did the clever rhymed translation of CF Ramuz’s book, and Jonathan Khuner did the musical arrangement of Stravinsky’s 1918 work, with “musical collaboration” (which I think means “performance,” though maybe they also worked on the arrangements) by Earplay. The music is very attractively jazzy; if I were listening to it cold I would have guessed that at least parts of it were by Kurt Weill in his Berlin days.

I went to a preview performance on a Tuesday, since Aurora’s Tuesday shows start at 7:00. The work is slightly over an hour, so it occurred to me that if they’d started on time (instead of about ten minutes after the hour) we would have been getting out around the time most theaters were just starting their performances. I’d rather have the time after the performance than have to waste it beforehand, so I love the Aurora's Tuesdays.


The show was conceived by former SF Ballet dancer Muriel Maffre, who also played the Daughter of the King, operated the soldier puppet, choreographed the work, and co-directed it with Aurora Artistic Director Tom Ross. Not surprisingly she dances exquisitely and memorably in her bit at the end, though equally memorable in a different way is the Devil’s flailing contorted dance which follows; the Devil, billed as The Devil in Various Disguises, is Joan Mankin, with a wild mop of reddish hair and a progressively greener face. Mankin has a weirdly sexy Lotte Lenya-type vibe going on, and it says a lot for the power of Maffre’s quieter performance, and for L. Peter Callender as the elegant narrator, that they can hold their own against her manic energy.

I do wish they would rethink the design of the marionette soldier, which has a large moon-white cranium tapering down into a narrow pointed chin and dark almond-shaped eyes – the total effect is just too Roswell/Area 51 and I initially found it kind of off-putting. After a while, as with most puppets (except the human kind) I got used to the looks and stopped seeing him as a puppet, but I kept getting occasional space-alien flashes from him.

Other than that, I found the whole thing generally delightful, with enough twists and enough ambiguity to hold the interest. I was amused to see that this work, like Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, also has a key scene involving a card game with the devil featuring the Queen of Hearts; I have no idea what to make of this, but it might make a stumper of a trivia question for those so minded.


This show would make a wonderful holiday treat for sophisticated children. But don't let the lack of children, sophisticated or otherwise, stop you from going, since it's also a wonderful holiday treat for adults (I thought about going to the Nutcracker this year, since I haven’t seen it in many years, but then I realized that I felt kind of pervy going solo to the Nutcracker, which I realize is a weird reaction, but there it is. Anyway, no worries about going solo to this enjoyable show).

It runs through Dec 18; call the box office at 510-843-4822 or go on-line here if you don't mind that they assign you a random seat rather than let you see everything available (I do mind so I always call the box office, and they are always very helpful).

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.

The Royal Danish Ballet is somewhere in here

Tuesday I went to the opening of the Royal Danish Ballet’s stand at Zellerbach Hall. The evening had some pleasures, which I may or may not get to, for reasons you may or may not see.

The show started at the inevitable 8:00 PM. I’ve been complaining for years about the standard 8:00 PM start time and everyone has assured me that it can’t possibly change and no one has ever once offered me a solid reason why. If someone can actually offer me such a reason (as in, “X percentage of our audience comes from X distance and they have to start out after 5:00 and it takes them X amount of time to travel,” and not as in “it’s so civilized,” a reason I will accept only when I live in a civilized country), then I will just write it off as part of the suckitude of life and adjust myself accordingly.

Until then, I figure I get to make this complaint at least once for every time a performance group talks about “increasing the audience” and “putting butts in seats” and blah blah blah while never actually changing a single significant thing about their operations (starting a Facebook page doesn’t count). So by that measure, I figure I get 77, 863 more opportunities to bitch about the 8:00 PM start time – oh, wait, did you hear that? Make that 77, 864 more opportunities! You know what – I think I’ll just keep the meter running on this one.

It’s just the inertia of habit. Every job I’ve had here in California has started at 8:00 AM (or earlier), and this is true of everyone I know. When people respond to me on the start-time issue they sometimes snobbishly imply that theater-goers, at least the ones who really count, just need to be important enough to stroll in late the next day. But you know who can’t get away with that? Teachers, nurses, bankers, clerks, doctors, executives . . . uh, well, just about everybody. And most of those people are not even going to consider going to something that doesn’t even start until 8:00 PM. I know this because plenty of them have told me so.

Performance groups blather endlessly about how to get 20-year-olds into the theater but it really isn't that tough to get 20-year-olds to try different things – that's what being 20 is about. I would think the obvious second part of the problem, only there doesn’t seem to be much thought given to it, is how to keep them coming back once marriages and mortgages and the grimly grinding reality of daily work take over. The sad news, and apparently it is news, is that the sexy years fleet away and the exhausted decades settle in, and unless you’re young, retired, or a member of the small cranky band of foolhardy (and unencumbered and relatively solvent) performance addicts, you are going to go for the sensible bedtime whenever you can.

And not only does the 8:00 PM start time ensure you generally get home late enough so that the next day is a gruesome ordeal – there are also hours to kill between the end of work and the start of the show. I’m genuinely curious how people fill this time, because I am finding it more and more difficult, as the brick-and-mortar bookstores and music stores close (and books and music themselves lose physical reality and join the wireless world humming around us).

I already get to theaters early. And as a non-driver, I walk or take public transportation, so you can’t get places any more slowly than I already do. I eat dinner slowly, sometimes even at places with waiters. And I still have hours to wait. There’s only so much aimless wandering you can do before you start feeling the need to rethink what you’re doing with your life, which kind of drains the pleasure out of a show. What are people doing and where are they coming from that the performance can’t possibly start until shortly after 8:00 PM?

And please don’t suggest that I go to a bar and “relax” with a drink or two. I loathe bars. And I already spend too much money on my theater-going without adding in the cost of overpriced drinks (universal truth: any place that sells food makes its profit on liquids). And by nature I’m already bleary-eyed and have a small bladder – alcohol is not going to improve my evening. And how much time can you kill in a bar anyway before some kind soul helpfully suggests AA?

At least in Berkeley I can go to Moe’s Books, my favorite bookstore. There are the increasingly frequent occasions when the oppressive sense of unread volumes starts crowding in on me and I have to flee in existential terror, but other than that, I can always manage to kill a fairly pleasant, or at least neutral, hour in there. Of course, I generally walk out having purchased more books, and if there’s one thing I really need to do more of, it’s spend more money I don’t have on more books I don’t have time to read.*

What’s that? You’re waiting for the dance stuff to start? So was I, pal, so was I.

OK, so I decided the 8:00 PM hassle and a late night were worth it to see Bournonville’s company in Bournonville’s La Sylphide, which I had only seen on DVD. This program (La Sylphide and Flindt’s The Lesson) was only being done on Tuesday and Wednesday, so I didn’t have a choice about not going in the middle of the week. A friend of mine had a perfect ticket for sale. It was expensive, but, again, I decided it would be worth treating myself.

I get to Zellerbach (still so much time to kill, but I'm tired of wandering) and the lobby monitors are telling us that there will be two twenty- to thirty-minute intermissions. I’m not sure why they’re telling us this until I realize the program only lists one intermission. I’m standing at my front-row seat waiting waiting waiting for the magic 8:00 PM hour, leafing through the program (which is a little tough to see because it’s too dim in the auditorium for comfortable reading) when a member of the Berkeley Symphony down in the pit asks to borrow my program so she can see which piece comes first. She can’t figure it out so I show her the page where it says The Lesson comes first. I’m sensing a haphazard quality to the evening. I am not yet particularly alarmed, however.

Matias Tarnopolsky, the Director of Cal Performances, who seems like a charming fellow, comes out and tells us about the intermissions and reminds us to turn off etc etc. Lights dim (even further) and the dancing finally begins! The Lesson is a sardonic little tragicomedy, performed with unemphatic precision and superbly calibrated moves. I’m enjoying it tremendously! Then the lights come back up. I see that it is about 8:30 PM, since it is a fairly short piece. We start the first intermission.

It lasts an hour. The audience (perfectly behaved during the small amount of actual dancing we’ve seen so far) is starting to get restless. Someone behind me remarks on how well-behaved the audience is, saying that if this were Paris they’d be throwing things. That starts to sound like maybe a good idea. Eventually it looks as if La Sylphide is finally going to start, which means we’ve had to wait until about 9:30 PM before the main attraction even begins. I am no longer feeling quite so happy.

The curtain goes up and it immediately becomes apparent what the delay was: the set, the interior of a Scottish castle complete with large fireplace, large window, and double staircase, is elaborately, and let me say almost tediously, detailed and realistic, and needed a corresponding amount of set-up time. And the fairly elaborate set for The Lesson needed to be taken down first.

Here’s the thing about sets: on the one hand, it’s quite interesting to see La Sylphide done in the same sort of set and style that a ballet-goer in 19th century Denmark would have seen. On the other hand, I don’t really care that much about having elaborately realistic sets. I mean, I am susceptible to their charms and recognize the importance of setting, but I’m not that invested in “realism” on stage and it’s not really crucial to my theater-going experience that the set look exactly like a photograph you might see in a brochure for a Scottish bed-and-breakfast, and I’m not going to walk out of there thinking how ineffably charming it was to see a real ceiling or how profoundly moving I found it when the dancers went up and down the stairs.

Clearly the Royal Danish Ballet or whoever is handling the sets simply cannot install and remove them in a non-absurd amount of time. I realize that things go wrong in live theater, but this is not just “one of those things,” one of those almost endearing mishaps that remind us that live theater happens in the moment: this is a huge miscalculation and a major fail and a time-wasting fuck-up of vast proportions, and I hope you can see past all those italics that what’s especially irritating is that the evening could have maybe absorbed the delay a bit better if the show had started even half an hour earlier instead of at goddam 8:00 PM.

So La Sylphide finally starts. I am determined to enjoy it. Let me repeat that it’s already 9:30 PM. Our hero James (Mads Blangstrup) is sitting in a chair, sleeping, which is probably what I would be doing if I were at home, so I empathize with our hero. Our Sylphide, the insufficiently ethereal Caroline Cavallo, enters, and I try to avoid guilt by association but can’t help noticing she bears an unfortunate resemblance to Sarah Jessica Parker, the hacky star of the trashy Sex and the City. I try to put that out of my mind, but I’ve seen precious little dance for the amount of time and money I’ve spent so far, so I’m not in the most charitable mood. She is grinning and hopping around, looking very physical. I was expecting more unworldly melancholy from the role that made Taglioni a legend. Despite the perkiness our Sylphide is, as required by the plot, irresistible to our James.

I notice that James’s fiancée, Effy (Camilla Ruelykke Holst), not only looks kind-hearted and sensible, she is way hotter than our Sylphide. Since James has an endearingly mischievous and cute rival, the slim young farmer Gurn (Nicolai Hansen), I’m thinking Effy would be better off not wasting her time with the moony James. Such is the cruel arbitrariness of plot, Effy must pine for James, at least through this act. Madge the Witch (Lis Jeppesen) shows up, and though my spirits are temporarily restored by delight at seeing someone known as Madge the Witch, I wonder if she is supposed to look so young and act so cartoony. We waited an hour for Act 1, and it lasts just half an hour. The lights come back up, and I have a dilemma, because we’re just starting the second intermission, and it’s already a bit past 10:00 PM.

I find an usher and ask her for a realistic guess at the performance’s end time, or at least an estimate of Act 2’s length. Act 2 lasts slightly over half an hour. The performance’s end time is apparently anyone’s guess. So, best-case scenario: the second intermission is only half an hour, meaning the show ends slightly past 11:00 PM, meaning I get home (not even to bed, just home) slightly past midnight. But I have no reason to think the best-case scenario is what’s going to happen.

We could easily be looking at another hour-long intermission (or even longer; I'm not sure how much time is required to remove a Scottish castle and install a misty forest), meaning we don’t get out of there until after 11:30 PM, meaning I don’t get home (again, not to bed, just home) until after 12:30 AM, or maybe even closer to 1:00 AM, depending on when I get to the BART station and when the train arrives.

We could even be looking at the possibility of the performance lasting past the last train, meaning I’m not only up the creek without a paddle, I’m up the creek without a canoe, unless I want to spend Act 2 nervously checking my watch and barging out of there at the witching hour whether the performance is over or not.

No matter what the case, my alarm is going off at 5:40 AM, and I have to spend from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM the next day being sentient and productive. These mental calculations are not conducive to appreciating the artistry on display, since all I'm thinking about is the clock and the various schedules and the time, and I am increasingly irritated at the whole situation.

Also, since I was up early and at work all day, I am already getting dark circles around my eyes, which is frankly kind of sexy, I think, but I am also starting to drool and go cross-eyed, which is sadly less sexy. I realize I’d better cut my losses and leave, which is not something I normally do, but I also realize I'd better submit to reality. I realize I am missing Act 2, which is what I had most wanted to see. I realize I am not the only person leaving due to worries about train schedules and running time and getting to work the next day. I assume they are all as unhappy and irritated as I am. How many will come back?

I don’t usually engage with reviewers here, because, well, why would I, but I have to say I’ve skimmed some of the reviews of that evening (by the way – I have no idea when it actually ended – does anyone out there know?) and have seen no mention of the stupefying and disastrously long intermission(s). While I am needless to say delighted at the enjoyment of people who were given free tickets and do not have to show up for their non-arts-related jobs early the next morning, their readers, who are potentially paying customers, should have a fair idea of what they’d get for their time and money.

Theater-going is supposed to be a pleasure, not an ordeal, and aesthetic delight is available in diverse ways and forms, including many that are not only less expensive, but are not going to leave people dragging through the next workday. Referring in passing to a long evening doesn’t cut it – Gotterdammerung is a long evening, but you go in knowing what you’re in for and you get a whole lot of Art for your time and money and at the end you get to see the universe burn up so everyone leaves happy. Last Tuesday night the proportion of dance to the proportion of irritatingly wasted time was like the proverbial ham in the boarding-house sandwich.

Obviously Cal Performances didn’t realize how long the intermissions would be (though shouldn’t someone have realized, and done something?), and I don’t mean to single them out, because they are far from alone in their bizarre adherence to the archaic 8:00 PM start time, and they consistently present things that are generally worth the hassle. But let’s look at this from the perspective of a paying customer, like, oh, let’s say, me: I paid $90 for a ticket, plus BART fare for a trip to Berkeley I wouldn’t have taken otherwise, plus the cost of a dinner I wouldn’t have eaten out otherwise, plus the cost of books I wouldn’t have bought if I hadn’t had to kill so much time before the curtain, and that is a lot of money when I didn’t even get to see the part of the show I most wanted to see because of poor planning and outmoded start times. And have I mentioned how much time I wasted waiting for 8:00 PM? As far as I’m concerned, my happily anticipated evening was a fiasco.

Confidential to Jolene and Lisa and anyone else who meant to get a ticket and didn’t: in case you saw some reviews and regretted missing this: don't. You dodged a bullet.

* The latest purchases at Moe's: Alexander Theroux's The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, Mary Shelley's The Last Man, and Ezra Pound's Translations.

the Little Mermaid dances

San Francisco Ballet closed out its season a fortnight ago with a week-long revival of John Neumeier’s The Little Mermaid, based of course on the famous Hans Christian Andersen story. I bought a ticket for the Friday performance, mostly lured by the thought of hearing Lera Auerbach’s score. I had the impression that the show itself would probably be more of a splashy spectacle and fun pantomime than anything else. It turned out to be unsettling, moving, profoundly searching, and in general astonishingly good. I’m sorry I only got to see one of the casts. The forthcoming DVD is sure to be worth a look (before its DVD release I think it’s being shown on Great Performances, but KQED will no doubt bury it at some inconvenient hour so they may continue to deluge us with superannuated baby-boomer rockers and overblown popera schmaltz).

The major change from Andersen’s story is the introduction of an Andersen figure, The Poet (Pascal Molat). In a reflection of Andersen’s own complicated sexuality (I mean, everyone’s sexuality is complicated, but Andersen’s was a bit outside the normal range of complicated), the Poet is mourning the impending loss to marriage of his beloved friend Edvard (Pierre-Francois Vilanoba). Much of what we see, except for Edvard’s love for his Henriette (Vanessa Zahorian), is a projection of the Poet’s wishes and fantasies – though perhaps all of what we see is the Poet’s projection; it’s certainly possible that part of his strange melancholy make-up is an underlying desire to be rejected and misunderstood. And the Little Mermaid, the personification of his feelings for Edvard, is definitely an odd being, far from Disney’s cheerful Ariel but also far from Andersen’s delicate devoted maiden. She’s a strange little creature (I mean, everyone is strange, but she’s a bit outside the normal range of strange).

Even underwater she’s not quite like her sister mermaids. We see her floating, her tail waving in the waters. This is accomplished by a simple but ingenious method: three male dancers, dressed in black like the kuroko (one of several influences from traditional Japanese theater in the staging), lift her and arrange her flowing blue-green dress to form the tail, and then carry her so that she swims. After her deal with the Sea Witch (danced by Garen Scribner, in black trousers and low-cut red shirt, with a small skull as a belt buckle, his dead-white face painted like a kabuki demon’s in black and red streaks) she lets him have her tail in exchange for legs. It’s done very simply – she’s rolled among the Sea Witch’s minions, and as she rolls her long flowing skirt comes off – but the effect is terrifying, like watching a rape, and it leaves her almost unclothed, and exposed.

Her movements on land are oddly froglike. She is never quite comfortable there, and never quite fits in. She mopes after the Prince/Edvard, even at his wedding, and clearly is never going to manage to behave like the normal people. In fact it’s not surprising that the Prince sticks with his sunny lovely Princess, who he thinks saved him from drowning (though it was really the Little Mermaid), rather than switching to the strange suffocating love of this amphibious girl.

Perhaps because I had recently seen Pascal Molat dancing Petrouchka, I was frequently reminded of the lovelorn puppet. Lisa saw the same program and wondered if a woman had ever danced Petrouchka. In a way, that’s what the Little Mermaid is. Like Petrouchka, she’s not a normal human; she moves awkwardly, shoulders hunched, feet pointed out, arms awkwardly crossed in front of her. In one vivid and painful moment, she’s sitting on the ground, grief-stricken, and she radiates the pain of rejection, down to each of her toes, splayed out and held unnaturally.

The movement throughout, not just in individual small moments like that one but in groups (ranging from the difference between the Prince’s strange contorted first pas de deux with the Little Mermaid, as contrasted with his more conventionally ballet-pretty first pas de deux with the Princess, to a psychologically probing pas de quatre for Poet, Prince, Princess, and Mermaid, to such ensemble numbers as the sailors exercising on deck) reveals so much that I can see why the show is sometimes criticized as repetitive – when you see the Poet at the very beginning, hunched under his book, you instantly can tell so much about him that further display might seem redundant.

I didn’t find the show unnecessarily repetitive, for the ironic reason that I had been sick enough to skip the play I was supposed to attend the night before and to stay home all day Friday (I’m better now, thanks, but it took a while). So instead of feeling emptied after working all day and irritated at having to kill three hours after work before the show started, I was comparatively rested and less likely to feel that they just really needed to keep the story chugging along: instead, I felt, it’s a dance, so let them all go ahead and dance.

So I enjoyed the scenes that were, strictly speaking, perhaps a bit extraneous, and mostly just to show dance, like the raucous exercises of the sailors on deck (though there were several things going on there as well: the sailors were following the movements initiated by the Poet, so we could see that the unfolding story was under his direction; the angular athletic moves on land contrasted with the undulant movements in the underwater scenes; and the score wittily undercut with gentle satire the land-world the Mermaid longs to join, quoting the Brecht/Weill Army Song from the Threepenny Opera and even in passing the famous fate theme that opens Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony).

Since I had first decided to go based on the score, I should mention that it was wonderful and wide-ranging. There was a large and interesting orchestra. Beforehand (I was in the front row, very far over to the right, though only once or twice could I briefly not see the action) I watched one of the percussionists carefully fill glasses with enough water to create the right glass-harmonica-like ethereal wailing when he rubbed their edges. He would test them, hit the tuning fork, and then adjust the amount of water. I was right in front of the percussion section. A couple of times a sudden blow on a big drum or a cymbal crush would make me jump a little.

At the end there is an apotheosis, one that reminded me of Swan Lake and Mark Morris’s Romeo and Juliet: the Poet has been in frockcoat and formal wear throughout, but now we see him half-naked, wearing loose white pants. (We've seen the bodies of the other male dancers before, but not the Poet's until this moment.) The Mermaid is also in a flowing white garment, as when she was first transformed. They are alone, dancing together in the white box that had earlier held them individually, but now their movements are no longer frenzied but gentle and harmonious and in rhythm with each other. The violins fade to a whisper as the lights dim and they keep dancing together as darkness falls and stars come out around them.

Afterwards an audience member, who had been several times, said to me that she felt very privileged to have seen the performance, and I knew exactly what she meant, and felt the same way. It was one of those lucky nights when the audience is perfection – you only noticed them when you occasionally realized you weren’t noticing them. After a couple of days of unpleasant heat the weather had cooled down with a pleasant breeze and when I reached the BART station I only had to wait three minutes for a train, and instead of the usual jampacked four-car train they run at that hour, there were nine cars and plenty of space and quiet. These things all contribute to the experience of the evening, though the main thing is seeing an absolute knockout of a show. And to top it all off, my hair, which is longer than usual, was – though I should not be the one to say this, but no one else is going to – swirling perfectly.

These are the magic nights that keep drawing us back to the theater.

Muybridge/Stein/Glass/Childs/LeWitt/Glass

Luckily for concert-goers looking to kill time, some museums have late hours Thursday, so I went back to SFMOMA for another look at the Eadward Muybridge exhibit before heading across the street to Yerba Buena for Lucinda Childs’s Dance.

I had been to the exhibit once before, a relatively quick lunchtime visit. Even more than in most photography exhibits there are lots of fairly small pictures (the famous motion studies), so repeated visits are helpful. There are plenty of other photos from earlier in his career, though, including some vast and remarkably crystalline panoramas of early San Francisco, which are of obvious historic and nostalgic interest to locals.

I was interested to see that Muybridge was one of those artists whose technological and aesthetic advances were linked to a fairly conservative, status quo outlook. Maybe that outlook is just an attempt on the part of a deeply weird man to stay connected to what he sees as normal society. Much of his earlier work was commercial, including some beautiful shots of Central America that were actually meant to entice investors. The labels by some of the motion studies point out that those of men tend to concentrate on manly activities (uh, OK, acts of normative masculinity) such as boxing and other aggressively athletic acts, though honestly I’m not sure what they expect given the aim of showing sequentially how certain actions take place: it would be pretty funny to do a motion study of a portly guy sitting at a desk with his office paperwork, but that’s only funny if you’ve already done the more obvious athletic activities.

At the end of the exhibit we see how Muybridge himself was one of those moving towards the invention of motion pictures, which are probably the central art form of the twentieth century. The show included a short film strip recently put together from some of the motion studies, mostly of animals. I think it was while once again watching Intolerance several years ago that a passing close-up of some chickens moved me deeply with the thought that those chickens were long dead. I mean, all the people involved were also long dead (with the possible exception at that time of Lillian Gish), but this feeling always strikes me more strongly when I see old films of animals, perhaps because the animals are just filmed by fugitive chance and people are more usually intentionally filmed.

I had been thinking a lot about repetition and routine anyway, partly because I was re-reading some Gertrude Stein and partly because I was feeling particularly trapped in my own exhausting routines, when even things that are supposed to be fun seem compulsive and joyless. So much of life is just maintenance. It’s day after day, and your repetitions make a personality and that makes a life.

Muybridge always reminds me of Philip Glass, though for a much more mundane reason than a similarity in their work (the repetition with slight variations of a small unit so that it seems the same but ends up very different): Glass wrote a stagework about Muybridge, The Photographer, which I had seen long ago in Boston, and that CD was one of the first two I bought (the other was Handel’s Solomon, in a then-new recording by John Eliot Gardiner). Muybridge had shot and killed his wife’s lover and was acquitted on the grounds of justifiable homicide, right around the time he did his motion studies, and that is the subject of The Photographer. I can still hear the high chorus singing “a gentleman’s honor.”

On to a more recent show. I headed over to Yerba Buena for Dance, a collaboration among Glass (music), Lucinda Childs (choreography), and Sol LeWitt (film). Dance is a revival of a 1979 piece, which is repeatedly described as a groundbreaking and seminal masterpiece of minimalism; I can’t say I know enough about the dance scene in late 1970s New York to judge that, but it’s a stunning work still.

Gertrude Stein in Paris in the 1920s is one of those fervent, febrile, magical scenes that a certain type of aesthetically inclined person daydreams of. Yet I always wonder what I would have noticed or felt if I had been there – among day-to-day survival efforts, would I have appreciated or even noticed that I happened to be in the place to be? New York in the 1970s seems to be turning into one of those scenes. At the time (I was in my native California and in college) New York mostly had the reputation of a dirty, dangerous, and very expensive place to live. And now I see more and more memoirs about what was going on there then that make it all seem so exciting and glamorous and youthful.

Dance is made up of three sections, each about twenty minutes long. The music is instantly recognizable as Philip Glass. The second piece, which features a solo for a woman dancer (originally Childs herself), had a more solemn tone and the third had kind of a honky-tonk undercurrent. LeWitt’s film is of the dance itself, and is coordinated with the live performers. Sometimes we get a different angle (say, looking downward) on the dance, sometimes we get close-ups of the dancers, sometimes we get split screens. None of it seems overly busy or distracted, however: generally we see the ghost dancers moving in rhythm with the live performers. Since this production uses the original film, there is the added poignancy of seeing the past recaptured and brought back to life, imposed like the memory of a previous performance on what we’re seeing.

The movement, like the music, tends to be deceptively simple, and you have to pay attention and notice the small variations, though it's easy to fall into an almost otherworldly trancelike state, as the dancers often whirl like the dervishes who induce meditative ecstasy with their twirling. Dancers move across the stage by themselves in a straight line. They twirl. They extend both arms sideways from their shoulders, usually with one slightly higher than the other, the way children would if you told them to dance. The costumes are very basic white pants and leotard tops for both men and women, so that depending on how far back you are you can’t always tell immediately which is which.

Having been around in the 1970s, I think I was surprised that something so elegant came from that era. Movie, music, and movement all have a clarity that reminded me of Mozart. As the almost generic title suggests, Dance is stripped down. You can sit there bored that you’re watching what seems to be the same thing over and over or you can pay close attention and start noticing how different it all is.

Afterwards there was a talk with Lucinda Childs, who came out to take a bow. She must be around 70 now but is still recognizably the elegant dancer we saw in the film. It was getting late enough so that I reluctantly decided I should skip the talk, since I had to get up and go to work the next day.

Since he was here in association with this revival, yesterday afternoon Philip Glass gave a solo recital, presented like Dance at Yerba Buena by San Francisco Performances. Before each piece he went to the microphone and introduced it briefly, in a low-key and often humorous way. He was dressed entirely in black, except for a thin cloth bracelet of bright red around his left wrist. Once I noticed the bracelet, I also noted that the piano stool had two thin bands of the same shade of red around the seat cushion. And then I noticed that the microphone he used when he spoke had a band of a similar shade of red around it. This was probably just a coincidence but was visually striking in a minimalist way.

He sat at the Steinway, slightly hunched over and completely absorbed. He is not a histrionic player. His sound is clear, liquid and sparkling. There was only the briefest of pauses between pieces in a group, but you could always tell when he was starting a new piece (in other words, contrary to what some believe, all music by Philip Glass does not sound alike). The pieces ranged over several decades: Six Etudes (1994-1999), Mad Rush (1980), Metamorphoses Nos. 2, 3, 4 (1989), Dreaming Awake (2006), and the Wichita Vortex Sutra (1990).

He mentioned that several of the pieces “had been blessed” by being used for dances by Lucinda Childs and Molissa Fenley. He was very generous in his remarks about all his collaborators. He told us that he used to perform Wichita Vortex Sutra with Allen Ginsberg, but after Ginsberg’s death in 1997, he didn’t play the piece for about ten years. Then he realized that Ginsberg, who couldn’t always perform in person, had made a recording for him to use, and that he could still use that, so he started performing the piece again. He does sometimes perform the piece with other speakers (“Patti Smith or my cousin Ira”), but, just as LeWitt’s film brought back the Dance of the 1970s, we had the recorded voice of Ginsberg reciting his great anti-war poem, Wichita Vortex Sutra, to Glass's beautifully hymnlike, meditative music. It's always special to hear a composer perform his own music.

The encore was actually two pieces (I didn't catch their names and SFP hasn't listed them on its site yet) which were written about ten years apart but which, he eventually realized, coincided in key and mood, so that he performs them together since they are coincident even though there was ten years between composition . He self-deprecatingly noted that some people say they can’t tell when one piece ends and the other begins, but he “thinks they’re just drifting off.”

Program 7

I made my first trip this season to the San Francisco Ballet last Friday, for the opening night of Program 7. First up was Petrouchka, to Stravinsky’s music, staged by Isabelle Fokine with the choreography by her grandfather, Michael Fokine, and scenes and costumes after Alexandre Benois. Since I’d recently finished reading Apollo’s Angels, Jennifer Homans’s history of ballet, I was eager to see this landmark. It’s much more of a pantomimed play than the other more abstract pieces on the program. There’s a very specific story (it helps to read the synopsis beforehand) about the sad clown Petrouchka (the Nijinsky role, danced by Pascal Molat) and his hopeless love for the Ballerina (a peerlessly doll-like Clara Blanco), who is in love with the more vigorous Moor (Daniel Deivison, his face painted blue).

Petrouchka in love is a bit of a sadsack, with his shoulders drooping and his big mittened hands often held in front of his crotch, suggesting the physical frustration behind his unhappiness. Though he is unhappy in love and subjugated by the Charlatan (Ricardo Bustamente), he is ultimately triumphant: a sadsack, but also a trickster. This was a treat to see, with colorful and elaborate sets and costumes in a folk Russian style; it’s interesting to get a glimpse of what it might have been like to attend the Ballets Russes.

Emil deCou conducted and the music was excellent, though what I remember most vividly is the sustained drumming between scenes. The second piece, Underskin, was set to Schoenberg’s elegant and mysterious Transfigured Night, choreographed by Renato Zanella in an elegant and mysterious way. I thought this was the most powerful segment. The setting is just some large shafts set leaning in the middle of the back of the stage. The lighting (designed by David Finn) is low throughout. A woman (Sofiane Sylve) enters, dressed in a tight black outfit that glitters like snakeskin. Her movements (she enters again past the halfway mark and then again at the end) are bold and outward in a way the movements of the others are not; even when there are six or seven couples on stage their movements are more intimate than hers, as they shift and struggle. There are suggestions of stories, but no specific plot. At the end, the dancers turn their backs to the audience and form a fist in their right hands, which are bent upwards at a 90 degree angle. They start moving towards the back, except for one woman, isolated in a spotlight to the left, who stands there, while the woman in black moves towards her. Large red petals fall on the woman in the circle of light. It’s very striking and enigmatic and powerful.

The third and final piece was the world premiere of Number Nine, choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon to Michael Torke’s Ash. This was the first time it had been danced in public, and even though I thought the piece wasn’t living in the dancers the way it would after further performances, it was still vivid and joyful and ended the evening on a high note. It’s fairly brief but packed full of moves that sometimes seem balanced between classic ballet poses and gymnastics. It’s vigorous and athletic as well as graceful. The backdrop is a series of bright jewel-like colors, and there are four main couples, each wearing matching bright colors, along with the corps de ballet. “I just love all the colors!” I heard one man exclaim, as the audience let out.

Paul Taylor at San Francisco Performances

Last night I saw the Paul Taylor Dance Company, presented as usual under San Francisco Performances, in Program C: Brief Encounters, Three Dubious Memories, and Brandenburgs.

Brief Encounters, first performed in 2009, is set to music by Debussy (all of the music was pre-recorded). Though it’s about (insofar as it’s about something besides movement) fleeting romance, it avoids the tragic and is fairly light-hearted, as indicated by the punning title: briefs are all the dancers wear. The men are in black briefs and the women are in black bikini briefs with a black bra-top. The costumes are by Santo Loquasto, who also did the set, which is a large sepia-toned drawing streaked with darker brown of a receding arched corridor, which looks both like a Renaissance architectural drawing and a modern drawing, which adds to the overall timeless dreaminess of the piece, as does the mostly dim and twilight lighting by James Ingalls as well as the shimmering music of Debussy.

There isn’t really a storyline to the dance but anytime you have beautiful almost-naked people in movement together emotional tanglements are going to suggest themselves. Dancers chase and are chased and switch partners. There are male-male couples as well as male-female ones. There are struggles and unhappy partings, but such moments are poignant rather than tragic, given how fleet and fluid the movements are. The dancers appear curiously light and weightless, even when they are slumped downward in a lumpy line. There is the occasional use of props – a woman with a mirror, and man with a knife that is quickly knocked out of his hand – but the props felt a bit gimmicky to me and the piece seemed stronger when it was just movement.

The dance seemed a distanced, wistful yet ironic look back on love. A piece like this always makes me think of Troilus at the end of Chaucer’s poem, looking down on earth in spirit and laughing at how much he suffered there.

The dancers are listed in the program and their bios are given, but since there are no pictures to go with the names I’m really not sure who is who. Some of them I can guess based on how they’re listed in the program – the guy listed first on his own line was probably the soloist, and the second piece has a few characters with names, so by process of elimination. . . . that’s a lot of unnecessary guesswork. I wonder why they didn’t just run their pictures.

After the intermission came Three Dubious Memories. I love that as a title for a dance, but felt a little mixed about the piece itself. This is its premiere season. There are four movements: As Remembered by the Man in Blue, As Remembered by the Man in Green, As Remembered by the Woman in Red, and Threnody, each set to contrasting music (all from Peter Elyakim Taussig’s Five Enigmas; Taylor uses movements 1, 3, 4, and 5). The first movement had a driving rock-like beat of the sort I dislike with the occasional country-western inflection, I don’t remember what the second piece sounded like, the third had a sort of boppy 1950s-style jazz inflection, and the fourth was elegiac strings. A love triangle among the woman in red and the men in blue and green is enacted from a different perspective in the first three movements, which sounds a little more interesting than it is since the three stories are fairly similar.

In one, Woman in Red is with Man in Blue; Man in Green enters, clearly feels betrayed, and there is a struggle. Then the Woman in Red is with the Man in Green; Man in Blue enters, clearly feels betrayed, etc. The fights between the men are broad and cartoony, with wide swings that clearly don’t make contact and kicks to the crotch, which makes it difficult to take seriously whatever affectionate but standard emotions the initial couple has evoked. The woman looks very unhappy in both scenarios, as well as in her own, in which she comes upon the two men, who after an initial brotherly struggle are now holding hands and walking together (a movement also used in Brief Encounters to indicate two men were a couple). This time she's the one feeling betrayed. There was quite a bit of knowing laughter from the audience at this scenario, though I don’t see why it’s inherently funnier than the other two: her pain and humiliation are just as real, or unreal, and the interrupted couple is just as connected as the earlier ones. But the audience, which was filled with male-male couples, seemed to find this particular episode naughty in some titillating way.

There is a brief pause after the first two sections but the fourth, Threnody, flows right into the third. This piece belongs to the Choirmaster, a man clad in light gray and accompanied by seven choristers, also in light gray. As the section title indicates, this was a more somber follow-up to the caricatures we had just seen, and the final tableau, with the Blue, Green, and Red characters piled up and entangled and the Chorister standing over them, evoked some real emotion for the first time in the dance. The idea of different perspectives of the same event is always fascinating, and so is an exploration of the dubious nature of memory (why can’t I remember what the second piece sounded like? It was just last night! Perhaps I will remember later, sitting somewhere else, thinking of something else, when I can’t correct what I wrote), but for me the piece by and large felt a little slick.

The triumph of the evening was the third piece, 1988’s Brandenburgs (set to movements 1 and 2 of the Brandenburg #6 as well as Brandenburg #3). It opens with one man surrounded by three women on the right side of the stage, and five other men arrayed on the left (and it closes in the same tableau). The costumes are both stripped-down and modern and rich-looking and evocative of the past: the five men to the left are in deep forest green sleeveless unitards that stop at their knees, with the shoulder straps elaborately embroidered in gold; the three women are in flowing moss-green sleeveless dresses that also extend to their knees, with the gold embroidery as a thin belt (and I think also as trim in the bodice); and the solo male was bare-chested, with his lower half covered by lighter pea-green tights and a wide belt of the gold embroidery. The dancers are barefoot, which adds to the spring-like atmosphere evoked by all the green and by the elegant, burbling music.

There are virtuosic spins, and cheerfully flowing patterns; here the quick contacts between dancers are joyful rather than poignant. There are many exuberant leaps, and at the end of some movements the exiting dancer gets in a few more quick tiny leaps before disappearing behind the curtain, as if the sheer joy of leaping compelled him to cram in as many as possible while he can. Several times after a dazzling spin one of the women, a dark-haired beauty, would extend her arms to us as if asking us to join her in wondering at and delighting in what she had just done, and she would grin endearingly at us, and it was impossible not to smile back at what we had all come to see: all the beautiful young dancers fleeting by in joyful precision.

drink to me only with thine eyes

Friday before last I had my first exposure to Nico Muhly’s music and Stephen Petronio’s dance group at I Drink the Air Before Me. Music and dance were enjoyable but I felt a bit disappointed with the hour-long work (though I should also say it didn’t help that I had seen the Merce Cunningham troupe the night before, and that I was starting to get sick with the flu and a migraine). But the piece just seemed too mild.

The title is from The Tempest, though I soon realized when the dance started that there was no attempt to tell that particular story. Instead, according to Petronio’s statement in the program, the work “was inspired by storms, both environmental and internal, and the whirling, unpredictable, threatening and thrilling forces of nature that overwhelm us.” The ad for the performance featured several mostly-naked dancers splayed against a splashing stream of water. Nothing on stage was as dramatic or as fun as that image (I kept waiting for the water to make its entrance. . . .). Very little seemed unpredictable, threatening, or thrilling, either. I had the impression of lots of swirling. Towards the end there were two brief pas-de-deux, the first between two men and the second a man and a woman, that stood out for their emotional engagement, but soon melted back into the swirling. (I think the dancer in common to both those interludes was Joshua Tuason. Sorry, I don’t remember the others for sure – as I said, I was coming down with something and putting a lot of energy into not coughing). There was a brief moment at the end where there seemed some sort of moment of peace. But to my eye nothing really built or was developed. The score started with the sort of thumping rock-like bass line that I hate, but then more interesting music was added on top. I started liking Muhly’s music more as it went on, but as with the choreography I felt mildly entertained rather than converted or persuaded.

Afterwards, at the far front end of the BART platform at Montgomery Street, waiting for the train, I saw a rat running in circles. It started circling closer and closer and I started to worry that it had rabies or something since it wasn’t scuttling off at the presence of humans, though admittedly there were only one or two of us down that far. Its swirling echoed the hour of swirling I had just seen. The train arrived before the rat did anything vicious.

final Merce

The taqueria where I usually eat before events in Berkeley has taken rather charmingly taken to handing out fortunes with their burritos. Thursday before last mine said “An interesting musical opportunity is in your near future.” That’s always good to know. Then I headed to Moe’s, my favorite bookstore, to kill some time. Of course I ended up buying more books, which is something I really don’t need to do. But I had intended to buy some plays by Wallace Shawn after hearing him read several weeks ago, and I found some, and since you never know what you’ll find at a used book store I also picked up an attractive hardbound edition of The Golden Bowl, which I’ve been meaning to re-read since I haven’t read it since I was thirteen, which was so long ago it’s as if I haven’t read it at all. So I was feeling elegiac and subject to chance when I finally was in my seat for the opening stand of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Legacy Tour.

MCDC had a long association with Cal Performances and I know I’ve seen them before, though I couldn’t tell you offhand how many times. I don’t recognize the dancers from year to year, the way I do with Mark Morris. This is MCDC’s final tour before they disband (Cunningham died in 2009, aged 90). I thought this meant that Cunningham, in a final and full embrace of the concepts of chance and impermanence, was simply dissolving his life’s work, which I found very moving – many of us talk a lot about the transitory nature of existence and the mutability of life and so forth, but secretly we all hope that future generations will pore over any scrap we leave behind, the way classics scholars pore over any little fragment left by centuries-dead poets celebrating their brief moment on earth. It was almost unsettling to me that Cunningham would renounce that common human wish to retain power over the future, as if he were the Cincinnatus of dance.

It turns out that I hadn’t quite understood correctly: although the MCDC is being disbanded (which is perhaps the final lesson Cunningham learned from Martha Graham), there is a legacy plan in place to continue his work (you may read about it and support it here). And presumably some of this final generation of dancers trained by Cunningham will continue the apostolic succession in their own creative life.

The first piece was Pond Way from 1998, set to Brian Eno’s New Ikebukuro (for three CD players – I wonder if the CD player as musical instrument is on its way to becoming like the ondes martenot), with a backdrop of Lichtenstein’s Landscape with Boat (so large it looked almost abstract, with the tiny boat in the lower left-hand corner, which gave it a very Japanese woodblock-print sort of look). My memory of this is of a very quiet, flowing dance, that was almost hypnotic – I was very surprised when it ended to find that half an hour had gone by; I would have guessed we’d only been watching for ten or, max, fifteen minutes.

During the intermission the woman on my right and I ran down the list of collaborators (Eno, Lichtenstein, Cage, Rauschenberg, Cunningham himself) and tried to remember which were still living. She said, “I have the feeling tonight that I’m communing with the dead,” and I think that spirit of appreciation and farewell was common in the audience. It does seem as if a major chapter in the history of American avant-garde creativity is now closed, though of course these things just metamorphose and never really end. Incidentally New World Records has issued a fascinating ten-disc set of music composed for Cunningham’s dances. I’ve just started listening to it, but the sounds really evoke a certain era – I put a disc on and am in a darkened, quiet theater, watching people in leotards move in a way that is unexpected and yet completely right. I haven’t even looked at all the contents yet; but there’s of course lots of Cage, and Feldman, and some Christian Wolff (who was there Thursday night, performing Cage).

After the first intermission came Antic Meet from 1958, set to Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra, with décor by Robert Rauschenberg. The décor must be the props used: a chair strapped to a dancer’s back, a sweater with four arms and no neckhole. There were lots of witty references to traditional dance steps. The epigraph to the work, quoted in the program, was Ivan Karamazov’s “let me tell you that the absurd is only too necessary on earth.” Indeed the dance did evoke a spirit-lifting attitude of absurdity.

After the second intermission we had the third and final piece of the evening, Sounddance from 1975. The title is from Finnegans Wake, so there was the feeling that the program had been designed to reference many of Cunningham’s touchstones: Joyce, Cage, Rauschenberg. . . . This was a more vigorous piece than the other two. But after about half an hour (all the dances were about half an hour) it too ended. The audience gave the performers an enthusiastic and affectionate ovation. And then the lights came back up and it was all over, so we all had to go home.

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.