Anatomy of a Morris misfire

Pretty vacant: Mark Morris's Socrates

I've always been a fan of Mark Morris, so I was surprised as anyone that his big premieres at Celebrity Series last weekend proved so boring.  I was even more shocked, however, to read the praises heaped on them, particularly Socrates, the elaborate, exquisitely pretentious pantomime that concluded the program.  The gap between these kudos and Morris's actual achievement was all the more troubling because it reminded one how rarely actual criticism surfaces in dance reviewing (almost as rarely as it does in theatre reviewing!).  For the slow, onstage death of Socrates illuminated a central, critical issue in the Morris oeuvre  - and to pretend otherwise is to avoid any accurate insight into his work, and mistake what's truly great about this particular artist.

The first offerings of the evening - The Muir, set to ballads and folk songs arranged by none other than Beethoven, and Festival Dances, to a piano piece by Johann Hummel, were charming in their way, but also felt overly familiar from their opening steps - they were simply too much like many other Morris dances to make much of an impression.  Both were roundelays for several couples, romantic and ironic by turns, that floated between modes of balletic, modern, and folk dance.  They were subtle, wry, and definitely had their moments, but you could feel Morris treading water in them.

Then came Socrates, set to Erik Satie's un-categorizable Socrate (the composer himself called it a "symphonic drama in three parts," but it's obviously not a drama) - and I knew from the opening moments that Morris was in deep trouble.  He has claimed to have been drawn to the work for decades - and if so, this amounted to a kind of subconscious death wish; for Socrate is, rather obviously, precisely the kind of music to which Morris cannot choreograph.

But let me explain a bit more about Morris, Satie, and this particular piece.  Morris, as has been widely discussed, returns again and again to two deep sources of inspiration: his early training in communal (read: folk) dance, and his intuitive understanding (and adoration) of classical structure.  Community and structure; those are his pole stars.

But Satie's aesthetic was almost as far from this formulation as you can get - he was an eccentric kind of semi-recluse whose claim to fame rests on a series of deceptively simple (but deeply de-stabilizing) musical miniatures.  Although Satie wasn't "only" a composer; he was more like a kind of deadpan provocateur at large (for the record, he called himself a "gymnopedist," whatever that is).  Many classical music fans are unaware, for instance, that Satie mixed it up with both the Dadaists and the Surrealists, debated André Breton and Tristan Tzara, and helped Man Ray build his first readymade; he even composed a film score for René Clair.  He knew everyone and did everything, yet he almost seemed to wander through his career, a distant sort of melancholic isolate.

Socrate reflects this characteristic Satiean mood; it treats the philosopher's execution - one of the great tragedies of Western history - with a pellucid calm, and foregrounds the account of his death (from the Phaedo) with odd, alienated quotations from the Symposium and the Phaedrus.  In the first of these, Alcibiades (himself a figure of tragic complexity) compares Socrates to the satyr Marsyas, who was flayed alive by Apollo for the sin of pride in his musical ability (an eerie parallel to Socrates' own death, btw).  In the second episode, Socrates and Phaedrus visit the site of a notorious rape and murder (of Orithyia by Boreas, the north wind); but they only muse on how the scene of the crime is now graced with "shades and gentle breezes;" indeed, at the exact spot where the doomed girl was killed, they remark that "the little stream is delightfully clear and bright."

Clearly Satie was after something like the opposite of catharsis in Socrate; rather than the purgation of emotion, he seems to desire a kind of passage past it, to a realm utterly beyond it; he is considering Socrates' death in precisely the same way the philosopher himself mused on the death of Orithyia (actually, perhaps at an even greater emotional and intellectual distance).

David's The Death of Socrates

But from the first moments of Socrates, we sense Morris violating the composer's intents by instead whipping up a middlebrow weepie - albeit one of a suppressed, exquisitely rarefied type.  Satie insisted that the emotional color of his work was "white," perhaps even "white on white" - but Morris draws his palette almost directly from David's sentimentally noble Death of Socrates (above); indeed, the dancers flutter by in tunics and skirts (by Martin Pakledinaz) that could have been lifted directly from the painting.  Thus Satie's remote, ironic tranquility is immediately replaced by a delicate, busy prettiness.

Not that this is entirely alien to Satie; after all, Socrate itself is lovely, if repetitive; it's essentially a series of similar cadences, voiced with only the subtlest of differences, and the slightest variations in rhythm.  What's more, in the reduction of the score performed at Celebrity Series, the four voices of the original have been reduced to one, making the work "whiter" and more mono-tonic than ever.  But then it's clearly meant as a "clear and bright" musical stream, much like the literal stream running across poor Orithyia's deathbed.

And appropriately enough, Morris has lined up his dancers into flattened planes of movement (sometimes just a skipping kind of walk) that recall both ancient friezes and - particularly in the flutter of their skirts - the rippling surface of a brook.  So at first you think that perhaps Morris is simply going for a "clear and bright" choreographic stream to match Satie's.

But soon you can feel him groping for some sort of musical frame on which to drape his steps, and it just isn't there.  And that's bad news for Mark Morris.  For musical structure has always been the backbone of his greatest dances, from L'Allegro to V; the complexity of his accompaniment has been what granted him depth and resonance, as his steps and gestures went through the subtle repetitions and variations of the music.  Indeed, I've often said that if you want to truly understand how a particular piece is put together, how it builds, you have to watch a Morris dance set to it.

The flip side of this, however, has always been that without a helping hand from his composer, Morris can get simplistic and obvious; sometimes he has even resorted to sign language to get his point across. Indeed, perhaps because of his unconscious grounding in folk dance, he seems unable to build abstract dance structures, as Balanchine did; and he has never managed the kind of conceptual contradictions that are the M.O. of people like Jiří Kylián.  To be blunt, Morris has always been a kind of choreographic slave - if not to the literal rhythm, like Grace Jones, then to the structural rhythms of his music.

But Satie was careful to eliminate almost all traces of structure from Socrate; it simply has no architecture.  So Morris works hard against the tiny cross-currents in its beats, and occasionally almost conjures some choreographic interest from them. Almost.  But elsewhere he's reduced to pantomime to get through his "story" (making this perhaps his first "story ballet"); or he attempts to float big, squashed, symbolic patterns (for "dialectic!" and "self-knowledge!") that roll past us like posters.  Worst of all, as is his wont, Morris makes everything a group effort; the stage is crowded, and there seem to be multiple Socrateses and Phaedri; indeed, when the great philosopher swallows his hemlock, everybody dies, dropping gracefully to the floor like so many artfully choreographed Attic flies.

And it's poignant, all right - it's just completely wrong.  And misses entirely the true point of Socrate - which is a coolly gnomic vision of the ironic outcome of tragedy.  Not that many of the work's reviewers have picked up on that; indeed, most made remarks along the lines of "It's impossible to watch this without crying!" (An impressively block-headed response.)  Sigh.  I admit I'm almost more irritated with Morris's reviewers here than I am with Morris himself; I've often seen actors drawn inexorably to roles that would prove their undoing, so in a way I think of Socrate as an accident just waiting to happen.  It's the cluelessness of these critics that bugs me.  To them, the simple prettiness of Morris's effects, and the way they're attached to earnest intellectual intents, counts as "success" enough.

And it didn't help that for once even the musical - or at least the vocal - performances were weak at Celebrity Series.   Socrate was written mostly for mezzos, but is sometimes sung by tenors, as it was here - only singer Michael Kelly didn't have the full range of the piece at his command, and had to scrape through the upper notes in falsetto.  There were weak vocals earlier in the program, too; the ensemble for The Muir simply didn't have the power for a space the size of the Cutler Majestic.  Fortunately the instrumentalists were quite a bit better, particularly pianist Colin Fowler.  But Socrate seemed a little beyond everybody else's grasp, both onstage and off.

Mark, Mozart, and mystery

The opening tableau, before a striking design by Howard Hodgkin.

Mozart Dances, the Mark Morris epic abstraction which finally got its Boston premiere last weekend at Celebrity Series, starts slow. Indeed, its entire opening "act," titled "Eleven," (after Piano Concerto 11 by you-know-who) opens with an intro from the men of the company, then settles into an intriguingly pensive set of variations for its women (with the commanding Lauren Grant serving as our guide, I think, to a series of anxious moods) - but never quite reaches the level of depth and complexity you expect of Morris at his best.

But it turns out he's just warming up. Mozart Dances blooms in "Double," its second act (set to the beloved double piano sonata, K. 448) which rivals Dido and Aeneas, L'Allegro, V, and the other best things Morris has ever done. There's been a sense for the last few years that Morris was past his great works, but how anyone could watch "Double" and still believe that is beyond me.

As is often the case with a Morris masterpiece, "Double" meditates on the psyche of both the individual and the group. It's (mostly) set on the company men, with Joe Bowie in a dark morning coat serving as a kind of host (or perhaps harbinger of doom). But its central "character" (and, we guess, an extension of Lauren Grant's persona from "Eleven") is Noah Vinson, who enters springing like a gazelle but soon crumples into a swoon in the mournful Andante. This sequence - which features a rippling, mutating ring of dancing men, one of Morris's most haunting conceits - is the core of Mozart Dances, and strikes an unusual note in the choreographer's oeuvre, in which "the group" is usually the happy salvation of the individual.

Here things are more complicated. Vinson seems to "die" not once, but twice (appropriately enough for a dance called "Double"), and when the women of the company return (to book-end the men's introduction), they seem to have wandered in from Balanchine (they're the girls from Serenade, or maybe La Valse), in ghostly gowns of tulle. I've never seen Morris so explicitly reference another choreographer before, and I felt that for once he'd gone meta (Balanchine was often quoted on the impossibility of choreographing to Mozart); still, this strange interpolation - somehow both light and sad - seemed to only enhance the mystery of the work.



The finale, "Twenty-seven," (after Piano Concerto No. . . well, you get the idea) is nearly as strong as "Double," and, in classic Morris fashion, pulls together patterns and motifs from the work's earlier sections into an elegant, if again somewhat enigmatic, synthesis (above). The emphasis here is generally on the couple, rather than the group, and the many symbolic gestures - generally expressions of frightened defiance or appeals to heaven - that dot "Eleven" and "Double" are this time interwoven with new motifs of acceptance (my favorite was a lovely little descending curlicue for one hand that read as a leaf slipping from a tree - like so much of Morris, it served as both musical and emotional expression).

But Mozart Dances doesn't end with either the triumph of L'Allegro and V, or the resigned transformation of Dido; it suggests some new emotional alignment for the sensibility (his own) that is always Mark's central theme, but it's so cross-cut with hope and melancholy that it's hard to perceive at first precisely where the choreographer has landed in terms of tone. Of course, perhaps that's the whole idea. Mozart famously has an aura of mystery, and this time, so does Mark. Then again, it always takes time, and several viewings, to fully appreciate a great Morris dance; something tells me this one may require more than the usual amount of attention.

And as a final note I must also add that, even given the high level of musical quality one expects from any Mark Morris Dance Company performance, Mozart Dances set a new standard. The wonderful Jane Glover - whom we last caught at Handel and Haydn last fall - conducted with ravishing delicacy in the pit, and even though I know it's stupid to pretend that any pianist can render a "definitive" account of Mozart, I'm nevertheless sorely tempted to claim that the great Russell Sherman and Minsoo Sohn did just that in their marvelous reading of the double piano concerto. This was an extraordinary evening of dance and music, and an extraordinary moment in the city's cultural life.

What Mark meant; or, Dido and Aeneas 20 years on

It was almost twenty years ago that I saw Mark Morris perform the role of Dido in Dido and Aeneas, in the Cutler Majestic, opposite the great Guillermo Resto (at left). Craig Smith was in the pit, conducting Emmanuel Music, and Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson sang the role of Dido. It was the American premiere, and one of the dozen or so evenings of my life that I will never forget (that's probably true of a number of people there).

Now, of course, both Lorraine and Craig are gone, and Morris is no longer dancing; instead he took Smith's place in the pit at the recent Boston performances (and acquitted himself quite well, as we knew he would). And Dido went on without him (at least onstage), and without Craig, or Lorraine, or Guillermo (who has also left dancing), or actually any of the dancers in that first premiere. If that sounds mournful, well, it is; I think it's hard for many younger Bostonians to appreciate quite what the emergence of Mark Morris in Boston and Berkeley meant at the time, and how the now-departed stars of the Boston music scene contributed to bringing it about. Mark was the big news in dance, and after a controversial period in New York, and rejection by Belgium, his reputation was cemented by us. It was one of the Boston community's single greatest artistic contributions of the last few decades, and it was a thrilling time to be thinking about dance critically - it was one of those moments when new art appears in a form which one can tell in one's gut has an air of greatness about it, but which is still mysterious, which has yet to be explicated.

Not that you'd realize any of this from the local print response to Morris; Boston embraced him, but some local critics did not. Over at the Phoenix, for instance, Jeffrey Gantz is still pretending the revolution didn't happen. "Was it meant to be camp?" Gantz wonders cluelessly of Dido, which, like almost all of Morris, slips easily from tragedy to irony and back. Of course to be fair, Gantz was always hampered in his appreciation of Mark by what appears to be homophobia; he just can't see how dance could be about something other than skinny sylphs being partnered by studs in dance belts, and the cross-dressing in Dido still has him in a tizzy. Indeed, he actually writes: "when [Dido is played by] a man, this Dido and Aeneas represents the attempt of homosexual love to break free of external disapproval and internal guilt." I'm trying hard not to laugh as I read that, but I'm afraid I'm failing. Really, what a maroon. You'd think this was 1969 and Mark had choreographed The Boys in the Band. Earth to Jeffrey: Mark Morris, and gay men in general, are no longer plagued by "internal guilt," and even "external disapproval" is dying a rapid death. Indeed, Mark's famous turn as Dido wasn't so much revolutionary as a confident announcement that the revolution was over. He was a gay man crossing gender lines to play a woman in a company marked by general diversity of shape, race and size, for a dance audience for whom this was no longer a big deal. (Needless to say, Gantz doesn't like dancers of normal weights either, and even approvingly quotes James Woolcott's notorious putdown of Joan Acocella and Mark, "Joanie Loves Chunky" - need I point out that Woolcott himself is morbidly obese?)


Amber Darragh and Craig Biedsecker as Dido and Aeneas.

Okay, claws in. As I said before, time marches on; and even if Dido and Aeneas proves timeless, right now it's on the "cusp" of timelessness, when it must break free of its original cast (and political cast). These days, the double role of Dido and her nemesis is played by either a man or a woman, on alternating nights (Amber Darragh, above and Bradon McDonald, below). I saw Bradon, not Amber, in the Boston performances, so I can only vouch for the latest model of the "drag" take on Dido - and already, inevitably, there's a distinct difference in the piece because of Morris's and McDonald's differing personae. Where Mark was tragic in a larger than life way -and made almost a brassy Sorcereress - McDonald is delicate and more internal, and his Sorceress is more tormented and perverse. McDonald's presence draws the piece away from its original classical stance (indeed, much of its initial appeal was its demonstration that diversity and classicism could dance hand-in-hand), and further down the twisting road of psychoanalysis (always implicit in the doubled central role). As a result, the most resonant moment in the dance is now the chorus's lament "Great minds against themselves conspire," as Dido descends toward her self-destruction.



Dido and Aeneas, of course, is about more than merely Dido - indeed, in formal terms it's a handy guide to the tropes and quirks of Mark Morris, especially the tropes and quirks that drive people like Gantz crazy. Sometimes, when I'm watching Dido, I ponder whether this is something close to the synthesis of dance and theatre practiced by the ancient Greeks - not only does Mark swing confidently between individual and choral movement, but he's far less interested in the modernist abstraction than he is in straightforward communication, both of dramatic story and musical structure. Thus he usually choreographs directly to the beat (rather than dancing around it, like Balanchine), and his movement edges toward mime, as well as an intriguing kind of symbolic gesture that's really his own. Often in Morris, one senses a deployment of abstract gesticulation that has been organized according to the musical variation of the piece (in Grand Duo, for instance, the dancers move from what appears to be a gesture for "agriculture" toward one that might indicate "industrialization" or "information"). In Dido, there's not only this pure symbolism, but also chunks of American Sign Language worked directly into the choreography (as when Dido signs her desire to "forget" Aeneas). This, of course, is another nod toward cultural inclusion, but it's also an intriguing intellectual statement - this is dance that is literally communication.

Needless to say, this leaves the erotic spine of both romantic and modernist dance far behind, and perhaps that's what Mark's critics can't really get their heads around. But of course to many of us, that's what make him special - that great ideas and feelings can be communicated in dance sans the sexual structure of ballet, but instead through what amounts to a kind of apotheosis of folk dance, or shared experience (there's always an overwhelming sense of community in Mark's great dances, particularly in their sudden bursts of joy). Thus some longtime Mark fans worry that his newer dancers aren't as diverse in size and shape as they used to be - and indeed, they are getting a bit more homogenously thin and muscled. Of course they're also getting more technically adept - that's the trade-off, I suppose, that Gantz and his ilk might pounce on. But can't they at least see that it is, in the end, a trade-off, and that a certain disinterest in technical extremity - like his disinterest in sexual conformity - is, in a way, what Mark Morris means?

Dido returns

Above is the climax of the famous Mark Morris staging of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, which electrified Boston (and yours truly) when it opened here way back in 1989. Well, Dido is back, only this time Morris is in the pit, conducting, rather than on stage. But will it be as compelling as everyone remembers it sans Mark? Clearly it will no longer be a statement about gay identity - but its inspired mix of dance and mime may prove all the more enduring without that political context. You can decide for yourself at the Cutler Majestic through Sunday. Tickets and more information available here.

Here's one way to better spend our arts $

Many of this blog's readers were scandalized when I advised against giving money to such major local players as the BSO and MFA. How better could their money be spent?, some wondered. Well, here's one way: by bringing Mozart Dances, by Mark Morris, to Boston. We're just about the only one of his traditional touring spots that isn't seeing it this year. We will be seeing him, yes, in the recast Dido and Aeneas - but why can't we see both?