Mark Morris Descends to the Underworld ...
<First published online in the New York Times on May 4, 2007>
Orpheus, the isolated musician whose sufferings take him to hell and back, is the most potent archetype of the creative artist in Greek mythology, as he has remained for the performing arts since the Renaissance. Onstage we know him in innumerable works, from Monteverdi’s opera to the Stravinsky-Balanchine ballet and a Tennessee Williams play, but none have more enduring dramatic resonance than Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice.” Since Gluck and his artistic collaborators built this opera with extensive dance opportunities in all three acts, it has always attracted eminent choreographers, and three of the greatest have chosen also to direct it: George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton and now Mark Morris.
But is Orpheus’ story ancient or modern? Balanchine’s 1936 staging at the Metropolitan Opera, designed by Pavel Tchelitchew, had hell as a concentration camp, scenery of changing three-dimensional effects and astounding lighting. Mr. Ashton’s 1953 Covent Garden production, starring Kathleen Ferrier, was designed by Sophie Fedorovitch in stylized Grecian designs.
When Mr. Morris first staged “Orfeo” 11 years ago for the Handel and Haydn Society, Adrianne Lobel and Martin Pakledinaz, designing, gave it the Grecian look. (Christopher Hogwood conducted a period-instrument account of the score, with Michael Chance as Orfeo.) That staging, which I saw in Edinburgh, came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1996.
But now Mr. Morris returns to “Orfeo” at the Metropolitan Opera, with James Levine conducting, and modern instruments. And this time, following Balanchine’s Met precedent, Mr. Morris, working with Allen Moyer (décor) and Isaac Mizrahi (costumes), makes it modern-dress.
Well, sort of. Orpheus (all in black), Euridice (in full-length white), Amor (sneakers, wings and pink T-shirt) and all the dancers (in a range of jeans, skirts, dresses and sneakers) look contemporary. But the outsize chorus — placed behind the action along three tiers, observing and commenting — is dressed by Mr. Mizrahi as witnesses from history, with individual costumes, ranging from Cleopatra to Hiawatha. The effect, like so much in Mr. Morris’s form of theater, is both campy and schematic.
Of the few great artists working today, Mr. Morris can be the most schematic, as he is here. Act I, being mourning, is gray and dark, with choral wave effects and a few gestures of grief earnestly delivered by Orpheus and his dancer friends. Act II, Scene 1, with its furies and damned spirits, is darker yet, and the dances are studies in confinement, with imagery of attempted escape and angled, staccato body language. (Mr. Levine, a superlative dance conductor throughout, complements this with the hammering emphasis he brings to the great chorus “Chi mai dell’Erebo.”)
The Blessed Spirits of the next scene, by contrast, are white and legato, flowing with serene body lines and celestial circle patterns. Act III, Scene 1, in which Orpheus and Euridice are on the exit route from hell, is a diagonal tunnel carved through a glittering black rock face. (For both characters this is the most important scene. So it’s irritating that Mr. Moyer makes them visible only from the waist up.)
And the finale, in which Amor reconciles husband, wife and friends, is the array of bright color we’ve been craving, with movements combining legato and staccato and a range of formations and patterns.
With both singers and dancers facing front much of the time, it’s easy to feel that Mr. Morris is not so much telling a story as delivering a message, which — since each dancer exchanges black, white and colorful versions of the same costume — is surely about ways of seeing the world. The focal point is mainly David Daniels as Orfeo. What’s fascinating in his performance is that, while his diction is at its most incisive, and his singing embodies Orfeo’s musicianship, his focus (eyelids lowered) is so often not on us or things or people but on himself.
And so this “Orfeo,” like Mr. Morris’s danced account of Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas,” may be read as a psychodrama. This modern, bipolar, self-absorbed, history-conscious artist paints the world black when things go wrong; then escapes to a pure world where all is white; and needs real help to be shown that life is a kaleidoscope.
As in his 1996 production, Mr. Morris employs Gluck’s first Italian version of the score, from 1762. This opera’s various textual issues are as complex as those of “Hamlet” or Verdi’s “Don Carlos.” Let’s just say that the 1762 score omits some of the numbers and vocal lines familiar from later versions. In 1996 Mr. Morris placed intermissions after both Act I and Act II. Now he runs it unbroken: it lasts some 90 minutes.
Admirably, it often happens in a Morris production that the best feature is the music. That is so again here. But the next-best feature, as in the 1996 staging, is the almost constant involvement of the Mark Morris Dance Group. (At least three of these dancers were in the earlier version. I think, too, that Mr. Morris employs a few of the same choreographic motifs as before.) There are times, especially in Act I, when his staging seems like an unintegrated collage of gestural motifs. But the more closely you watch the dancers, the more that impression fades.
Actors often speak of the importance of truthfulness in performance; these dancers exemplify it. In the final scene a recurrent dance image of collaboration is a “chair” lift, in which one dancer is carried across the stage by others, as if seated. Astonishing how much fun this becomes. Watching, you feel as if you were being borne through the air too.
@New York Times, 2007