The Attack of the Exhibits, Starring a Spooky Piano
<First published online in the New York Times, May 22, 2007>
BOSTON, May 20 — In January the choreographer Mark Morris gave us a world premiere to Bach’s “Italian” Concerto in his own Brooklyn dance center. On May 2 the full production he staged and choreographed of the three-act Gluck “Orfeo ed Euridice” opened at the Metropolitan Opera. Now this irrepressible artist has knocked off another world premiere, for the new Institute of Contemporary Art, memorably located on the waterfront here.
In “Orfeo” Mr. Morris showed us a huge chorus of famous spectators in the background. Both celebrity and observation are in the foreground in the new piece, “Looky,” which opened less than two weeks after “Orfeo.” I caught up with it over the weekend.
There’s a spooky, surreal quality to its comedy. The music is “Studies for Disklavier” by Kyle Gann; thanks to musical instrument digital interface, we watch the keys of a Yamaha grand piano, upstage right, moving of their own accord, as if played by a ghost.
The first of the five sections has no dancing at all; Mr. Morris, in a satirical mood, demonstrates the self-conscious body language of people at an exhibition, reverential about the nonexistent art, more relaxed with one another than with looking at what’s on show. (The dancers wear a gamut of black-and-white costumes from at least six other Morris dances.)
Later on there’s dancing, mainly in ballet style, but just as important is the audience onstage: standing, sitting, kneeling, tilting sideways and so serious that something’s got to give. Sure enough, a later episode shows them in social mood, inhaling (don’t ask; it’s all mimed anyway), passing out and picking fights, though there are still fragments of art dance for them to look at when they’re up to it.
Mr. Morris keeps undercutting the act of performance. In one scene he has everyone else dance in a tight box of space stage left, while Joe Bowie lies, face down, across the piano stool stage right, apparently dead and wholly ignored.
Mr. Gann’s music, by the way, ranges from quasi-Chopin to quasi-Scott Joplin, always (shades of Conlon Nancarrow) in a way that suggests that the left and right hands are playing different pieces by the same composer. Mr. Morris gets everyone dancing in ragtime, only to give us a museum scene in which the dancers become a dense corridor of sculpture, with individual visitors passing through. (The sculptures change shape between visitors.)
“Looky” ends with a nightmare image: all the exhibits pouncing on one unsuspecting innocent.
“Looky,” a funny piece with few laughs, is so odd and so fresh that it makes a perfect first-half closer in a Morris quadruple bill — perfect at any rate at the Institute of Contemporary Art: If you went upstairs before the show, you saw people looking at the Louise Bourgeois exhibition just as seriously as if they were in “Looky.”
The rich rest of the program was “The Argument” (1999, to Schumann’s “Fünf Stücke im Volkston”), “Candleflowerdance” (2005, to Stravinsky’s Piano Serenade in A) and “Grand Duo.”
I’ve been watching “Grand Duo,” in which Mr. Morris charts individual neurological impulses and brings them together into a choral war dance, since it was new in 1993, and I still find that this is a work that changes my breathing as I watch. The music is Lou Harrison’s Grand Duo for Violin and Piano (ardently played here by Steven Beck, pianist, and Georgy Valtchev, violinist).
There seems no end to the complexity, sophistication and intoxication of Mr. Morris’s choreographic response. The music takes off in your head as you watch; this is as great a masterpiece as any he has made. You can laugh at it now and then, but its overall impact is closer to tragedy, and overwhelming.
@New York Times 2007