Mark Morris and Purcell in King Arthur’s Court
<First published online in the New York Times on March 12, 2008>
At a performance by the Paul Taylor Dance Company at City Center last weekend, the man in front of me told me how he loved Mark Morris’s production of “King Arthur” at New York City Opera. He’d seen it in Berkeley, Calif., and he hoped soon to have seen it seven times.
What to say in reply? I’ve traveled long distances to revisit some Morris productions myself. And, to repeat a point I made in these pages not long ago, I consider him one of the four living choreographers who have made dances that stand as classics. But I found this “King Arthur” dismal at its 2006 world premiere in London (when it was better sung), and I like it less on a second viewing here. What’s more, it reminds me of problems with Mr. Morris’s work that I’ve had intermittently since first seeing it in 1984. And the biggest of them comes close to the heart of his enterprise: the way he sets dances to music.
It’s worth pointing out at once an issue that often occurs when you are first becoming acquainted with the musical method of a choreographer. Dances by George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, Mr. Taylor, Mr. Morris and others can at first seem very literal, that is, step-for-note. I remember feeling this way with my first encounters of certain works by each of them, and dancegoers have likewise said to me, “Oh, is this kind of slavishness what you mean by musicality?” Usually, though, I - and they - have soon found how much more there is to see and hear than those moments when sound and sight seem too tied for comfort.
With Mr. Morris, however, his lesser recent works keep bringing me back to this problem. Even his greatest creations - “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato” (1988) and “Dido and Aeneas” (1989) - have had passages that come perilously close to Choreographic Musicality-by-Numbers.
For example, his Dido does the same peculiar jump (one leg bent sideways, one arm raised) each time the word “Heav’n” repeats (“To Earth and Heav’n I will complain!/To Earth and Heav’n why do I call?/Earth and Heav’n conspire my fall”). In Purcell’s score the singer hits the same high note on each “Heav’n,” and so does Mr. Morris.
That’s not just step-for-note, but gesture too. From his emergence in the 1980s onwards, he has been the most gesture-laden of modern choreographers.
In his dance versions of vocal music like Purcell’s “Dido” and Handel’s “Allegro” you can scarcely miss how specific gestures are connected to certain words. Unlike ballet mime, the gestures don’t often have literal meanings. Though Mr. Morris has said that “Dido” is full of movements from American Sign Language, I doubt the hearing-impaired conversant with that system could translate what Dido’s “Heav’n” jump “means.”
When you hear the music, however, the jump feels peculiarly judicious. The strange angle of that sideways leg, the weighted emphasis of the jump (which doesn’t go high), the upward stretch of the raised arm all catch a quality of heroic strain in the vocal line.
In “Dido,” as in most of his works, Mr. Morris contrasts this motif with others that are very dissimilar, and in the best of these contrasts we find we’re watching an unusually rich construction. Especially since about 2001, Mr. Morris has been applying gestural motifs to nonvocal scores in an equally marked way. Even when these motifs have been danced, they have a very marked staccato stress - staccato in the sense of “cut off” - that’s often not evident in the music they’re accompanying.
At its weakest, the gesture-for-note method starts to feel like point scoring: or, if you prefer, dance as a row of visual tacks banged on to the music. (Mr. Taylor’s musicality, by comparison, is more suspenseful and unpredictable.) What emerges in some Morris works is a kind of opaque expressionism. These dynamically cut-off, underlined motifs seem to be crying out, “Meaning!” - only we can seldom tell what they’re trying to mean.
That too is fine - you can spend decades arguing about what Wagner leitmotifs like the so-called Renunciation of Love and Redemption by Love actually mean - as long as the motifs are set in compositions of real substance. I don’t like Mr. Morris’s “V” (to Schumann’s piano quintet), but it’s well built.
In “King Arthur,” however, the structure is weak, and the motifs maddening. To words like “fly” (hands fluttering), Mr. Morris’s gestures are just campy, a kind of in-joke that encourages the audience to join his snigger-fest. When the word “love” comes round in sets of three, Mr. Morris sets one set with three deliveries of the conventional love gesture (hands on heart), another set with three jumps (i.e., for joy), and yet another one with three lifts (i.e., it’s you I love). This ought to be charming. But the timing is so nailed, and the “meaning” so dogged, that the effect is of Mr. Morris ramming the words down our throats.
As a result, there are now large parts of Purcell’s score I feel I can’t bear to hear again. Meanwhile, Mr. Morris often makes his dancers look weaker than they are: there is a circle dance in which they are asked out of nowhere to do a forward jump (jeté en attitude, arms opening à la Bournonville), and the phrasing is so clumsy that you notice less the dancers’ warm, open manner than the low elevation and the thudding arrival.
What “King Arthur” amounts to is a very labored and very flimsy attempt to charm. No choreographer can ever have given us a more intricate maypole dance than the one here, but so what? It feels methodical at every moment. The one in Ashton’s “Fille Mal Gardée,” which is relatively naïve, has an exhilaration that catches my heart even after the 60th viewing. Mr. Morris keeps showing how hard he is working. Also, alas, how fatuously.
@New York Times, 2008