Morris Meets Amadeus: Odd, Elective Affinities
<First published online in the New York Times on August 17, 2007>
The most immediately remarkable feature of Mark Morris’s triple bill “Mozart Dances” is that whereas Mozart’s piano writing employs flourishes, trills, cascading passagework, Mr. Morris never once has his dancers do anything virtuoso. But this is just the first odd feature of many.
“Mozart Dances,” in which three Mozart piano works — the Concerto No. 11 in F (K. 413), the Sonata in D for Two Pianos (K. 448) and the Concerto No 27 in B flat (K. 595) — are choreographically linked to become a trilogy, is a major dance composition, and its music was rendered with magisterial eloquence by Emanuel Ax (the pianist in all three), the conductor Louis Langrée and the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra (in the two concertos), and Yoko Nozaki (the second pianist in the sonata).
The Mark Morris Dance Group gave the premiere of “Mozart Dances” at last year’s Mostly Mozart festival and has performed it internationally, bringing it back to Lincoln Center this week. (Yesterday’s performance was to have been broadcast live on PBS.) The program is now played with just one intermission, before the final concerto. On Wednesday night I found it a rich theatrical experience, but also one that often pulled me outside Mozart’s music as often as it drew me into it.
In “Eleven,” the opening dance, the dancers are mainly flat-footed, and what’s odder is that, after the introductory orchestral passage, they’re all women. “Double,” the sonata dance, is performed chiefly by men, who — wouldn’t you know it — are lighter on their feet. Then in the concluding “Twenty-seven,” both women and men are lighter yet, with more sustained lower-body danciness.
Even so, Mr. Morris avoids any hint of bravura. His dances are studded with motifs throughout, like a march on the heels and a slow backward fall. In “Twenty-seven” he introduces one of the heaviest: a woman is lifted in a series of forward hops while she holds an arabesque pose on one leg, not to float as in ballet, but to look her full weight.
Nothing about Mr. Morris’s response to Mozart is stranger than his emphatic use of dance motifs. He’s much more dogged about making us recognize them than (even) Wagner is with his leitmotifs, and much more bizarre in his choice of vocabulary. Some of these motifs don’t even move; they’re gestural poses. I found myself involuntarily labeling several, for example, “Heaven forfend!” (a dancer looks up with hands raised and flexed like shields) or “Look back in anguish” (a female dancer holds a similar position, but while lying on the floor, twisting her neck round as if in pain and alarm).
Other “Mozart Dances” motifs certainly move, as when a dancer, standing with feet together, briskly bobs up to half-toe and down in time to a figure in the music; or a sideways jump, engaging in its slightly galumphingly stiff arrival and the way the upper body swings in the opposite direction from the legs. Almost invariably, as you see these, you think: Who in the world but Mark Morris would have thought of fitting that move to this music? There’s so much physical texture to these motifs, and Mr. Morris is often so acute in his musical phrasing of them, that they can be revealing. This is especially true of the quick and drastic alternation of the closed and open positions of which he’s fond here.
As you see some of these motifs recur from one work to another, however, you start to feel a puzzling and fixed structure of connecting suggestion imposed upon the separate scores. Does this lead you deeper into the music? Certainly not on first acquaintance. Sometimes Mr. Morris does a variation on two of his motifs.
In “Eleven” the women frequently do a pose — it looks like something Degas might have painted a dancer doing offstage — with hands behind the neck, almost as if fixing an invisible necklace, and here it has a finite emphasis, always marking the ending of a musical phrase.
This “Degas” pose comes back in “Twenty-seven,” but it’s midphrase, usually done by somebody jumping or being lifted. The variation itself is witty, but the nudge back to “Eleven” is distracting. To make matters more confusing, and in a self-referential way I don’t associate with Mr. Morris, some of the other motifs — a two-person steeple, a low-winged nightingale — seem to refer to his most acclaimed work of all, “L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato.”
The same overcomplexity occurs with Mr. Morris’s choreographic structures. No one dancer is ever given the stellar position that Mr. Ax has as principal pianist. Lauren Grant is the main soloist in the outer movements of “Eleven,” but the dreamlike slow movement is mainly danced by a group or subgroups of other women. (Is this her dream?) Joe Bowie, in frock coat, is one of the two chief dancers of “Double”: an authoritative senior artist figure, contrasted with the youthful Noah Vinson (whose scenes I found myself nicknaming “Beautiful Dreamer”).
But by the time Ms. Grant and Mr. Bowie return together in “Twenty-seven,” now otherwise attired and usually as part of a quartet, we can’t help but wonder just who they are in Mr. Morris’s dramatis personae. The more so since the solo piano voice in the first movement has already been matched by a series of 12 different male and female dancers, one at a time.
In the course of the evening Mr. Morris takes us through many different layers of Mozartian feeling, evoking ritual, pastoral, expressionism, melancholy, game, fantasia and intimate collaboration. The absorbing “Twenty-seven” quartets for Ms. Grant, Mr. Bowie, Julie Worden and John Heginbotham fuse several of these layers and feel alchemically fused with deep shifts within the music. Then, however, Mr. Morris gives us another quartet, indeed four quartets, and moves on through other structures. And the more closely you follow these, I find, the more you lose grasp of the music.
No doubt further viewings will resolve some of these problems. Still, I don’t think you can follow “Mozart Dances” without being aware of the marked tension that Mr. Morris places between dance and music. Even if you feel, especially in the two concertos, that there is more going on in the music than in the choreography, the stage world stays interesting at every moment. And the Mark Morris Dance Group, amazingly devoid of artifice or apparent calculation, gives this riveting but strange program a beguiling amalgam of inevitability and innocence.
@New York Times, 2007