The Amateur_An Independent Life of Letters

by Wendy Lesser

  Mark Morris himself does not dance in L’Allegro, so the first time I ever saw him was when he came out at the end to take his curtain call. Morris’s curtain calls are an art form in themselves—I have come to be quite a connoisseur of them, in the years since—but I didn’t realize that then. All I knew was that I couldn’t take my eyes off this tall, slightly bulky, curly-maned, weirdly beautiful, absolutely commanding figure. (The next day, watching him perform in a mixed program with Mikhail Baryshnikov, I had the same experience, to my even greater surprise: I had never before seen anybody who could draw my eye away from Baryshnikov.) Standing to applaud at the end of L’Allegro, surrounded by the rest of the clapping, screaming BAM audience, I felt the charge of the choreographer’s presence as if it were a blast of electricity. “He’s like a rock star!” I said to my friend Mindy, a dance critic who had brought me to the performance.

  Later, as we were climbing into our taxi in front of the auditorium, I saw Morris emerge from the building with a small group of people—heading out for a late dinner, perhaps. When they passed near us, I stuck my head out the taxi window and yelled at him, “You’re great! It was great!” He turned toward me and beamed an angelic “Thanks!” Hiding within the taxi, torn between her embarrassment at my outburst and her pleasure at my enthusiasm, Mindy wryly pointed out to me that the name of the cab company, which was emblazoned on the side of the car facing Morris, was “CHEERS.”

  I knew nothing of Mark Morris’s history at the time, but I subsequently learned that this particular production was something of a watershed in his career. Before L’Allegro he was widely viewed as the bad boy of modern dance. “Boy” can be taken almost literally here: he was twenty-four when he founded his own company, and all of thirty-two when he choreographed L’Allegro in 1988. Lovey, Morris’s 1985 dance set to music by the Violent Femmes, has the dancers, who are dressed in shabby underwear and nightclothes, miming sex acts with little naked dolls. As the choreographer of John Adams’s opera Nixon in China and the director of dance for the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, Morris was famous for spitting in the face of bourgeois audiences, for taking previously inoffensive art forms and lending them an earthy, streetwise capacity to offend. This reputation does some violence to the truth, for all of Mark Morris’s work is in some way respectful (to its musical sources, at the very least) and none of it has the irritating “Gotcha!” quality that one finds in the work of artists who have one eye cocked on audience reaction. Nor was L’Allegro Morris’s first satisfyingly beautiful piece—though it remains, I think, his most satisfyingly beautiful piece to date.

  I am using the term “satisfyingly beautiful” in a very specific sense, a sense that’s been suggested to me by the choreography of Mark Morris. From what I have seen of his dances (and I’ve seen less than a third of his hundred or so pieces—some, alas, only on videotape), I conclude that Morris is after two very distinct effects. One of these has to do with asking a question, testing out a theory, opening up an area of inquiry; the other has to with providing a worked-out, completed (if only temporarily final) answer. In the first category I would put such dances as Ten Suggestions (which he originally choreographed in 1981, to piano music by Tcherepnin) and Three Preludes (made, to Gershwin’s music, in 1992). Each of these pieces carries its tentativeness in its title; each, as it happens, is a solo in which Morris has alternated with Baryshnikov. In such works he seems to be trying out certain ideas about dance and about life. What difference does it make to have the same gestures performed by two very different bodies? How can casualness combine with precision? How can props be used? (Ten Suggestions features a hula hoop.) How do hands dance, as well as, or in contrast to, feet? How is stillness a kind of dancing? How can we keep a dance in our mind once the dancer has disappeared? Where do dances come from, and where do they go? You can watch these two pieces over and over again, with Morris or Baryshnikov, on stage or on tape, and still feel that, however much you discover each time, their essence has escaped you. Their only graspable point is that they cannot be grasped. They experiment with and comment on the ephemerality of dance.

  And then there are the other Mark Morris dances, the ones that seem to hand you a full goblet and allow you to carry it, ever so carefully, away. These pieces from which you can drink your fill include Dido and Aeneas, his evening-long work to Purcell’s opera, in which Morris himself plays both Dido and the Sorceress. But the dance needn’t be long to be complete. Gloria, an early work to Vivaldi, has this quality; so does the 1992 Beautiful Day, to a cantata that may be by Bach. Nor need such a dance be set to classical music: Lovey seems to me to be one of the filling, satisfying pieces, though the beauty with which it satisfies is a fierce, antagonistic, frightening kind, not at all like the welcoming beauty of L’Allegro.

  There does seem to be a connection, though, between Morris’s use of vocal music and the kind of satisfaction I’m referring to. His questioning, what-if, how-does pieces are all set to purely instrumental music—or, in the case of the 1990 Behemoth, to no music at all. In the vocal pieces, the words are not just there to provide plot (a device which we sometimes confuse with satisfaction or completion), for a Mark Morris dance can include elements of plot and still be both wordless and open-ended—as is Wonderland, for instance, the 1989 dancenoir set to Schoenberg. No, the importance of vocal music appears to be that through it, in combination with dance, Morris can engage the whole body. The satisfying beauty of a piece like L’Allegro comes from the sense that everything which can possibly be used has been used—that the world, at least for a brief moment at the end of the dance, has no inexhausted possibilities.

  If this makes satisfaction sound like death, it may help explain why Morris feels the need to keep making the open-ended kind of work. To obtain a sense of completion is not the only desirable end of dance, for either its viewers or its makers. We want to feel at times that things remain unanswered; we want to sense the lure of the ungraspable and be reassured by the possibility of change. The ephemerality of dance is not just its tragedy. It is also its blessing, for it connects dance with our lives, whose completeness is not a quality we either can or wish to see.

  With his particular form of choreographic genius, Mark Morris has managed to incorporate some of this changeability, this lifelikeness, even into a completely satisfying work like L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato. Departing from both Milton (who ended with Melancholy) and Handel (who, in typical eighteenth-century mode, ended with Moderation), Morris begins and ends the piece with Happiness. That is, he turns Milton’s and Handel’s linear structure into a circle—just as he does in the final moments of the dance itself, which ends as a large, fast, joyous circle dance culminating in a single moment of upward-reaching stillness. The many dancers have become a single motion, and unity has been imposed on division, but not by arriving at a logical and irrefutable compromise. Morris has simply chosen—arbitrarily, personally, and whimsically—to end on a note of happiness. Nothing in either the world or this work of art leads you to conclude that happiness is a necessary or permanent outcome; and yet the moment feels right, and final, and true.

  Part of what makes it feel final and true is that, like any moment in dance, the ending of L’Allegro is only temporary and contingent. This is one of the things dance and its ephemerality can teach us; this is one of the things Morris has taught himself through his experiments, his “suggestions” and “preludes.” When one gets to the end of the music, one must choose an end to the dance, but that end is not a permanent stoppage, not a closure for all time. It is an end only to that particular piece, and in another work, under other circumstances, the choreographer might just as arbitrarily and personally choose the opposite course.

  When you attach yourself to a cherished artist, as I have attached myself to Mark Morris, you cede to that artist a certain portion of your own intellectual development. You are not just the learned critic, commenting on the work; you are also the novice, being molded by that work. In
such cases you sometimes have to trust the artist more than you trust yourself. He (or she—but for me such artists are almost always “he”) may be working a few steps ahead of you, and you may not be ready to absorb what he has made. Sometimes the new piece itself will teach you things you need to know to respond to it, but that process can take years, and your first impulse may be to resist the new direction because it is not exactly what your beloved artist has done before.

  I think it is useful for critics, especially extremely opinionated critics, to have a few touchstone artists of this sort. I have several myself; in addition to Mark Morris my list includes the filmmaker Errol Morris (no relation), the novelist Ian McEwan, and the poet Thom Gunn. The point is not that I respond with equal enthusiasm to everything they do. I don’t turn into brainless, appreciative mush; I must still keep my wits about me, and my own tastes. But I do give them the benefit of the doubt in a way that I am rarely able to do with other artists. If I don’t like something in a Mark Morris dance, I will ask myself whether I am wrong to feel that way. I will see the dance over and over, if I can, and I will keep asking myself this question. Sometimes I come out on my side; less often I come out on his. But either way, the process of thinking about what he has done and why he has done it alters me as a critic.

  An artist with a strong personality, like a critic with a strong personality, is always at risk of seeing things too much his own way. He needs to rely on his own judgments, but he must also temper those judgments by recognizing the needs and capacities of the people around him. If he is a choreographer, he will necessarily shape the dancers who work with him; and if he is a good choreographer, he will also be shaped by them. One of the things I appreciated the very first time I saw the Mark Morris company was the individuality of the dancers’ styles. Varying as they do in shape, age, sex, weight, height, race, nationality, and background, they could hardly convey a chorus-line rigidity of style. But their variety goes beyond superficial appearance. What Morris’s choreography does is to allow his dancers to express their own distinct personalities even as they are dancing his steps.

  And yet, there is a kind of unity to their effort. This is not just the unity of their impressive musicality (though here they triumph over any other company of dancers I have ever seen: no one misses the beat), but a stronger and deeper sense of coherence. When I saw L’Allegro I had not yet seen Mark Morris dance, but I knew what he must be like as a dancer. I saw it in the precise delicacy of Keith Sabado’s movements, and in the way he used his face as a beacon from the stage to the audience. I saw it in the relaxed looseness of Guillermo Resto’s shoulders and arms, the strength of his torso and legs, the way dancing seemed for him both casual and intense. I saw it in the sprightly enthusiasm of June Omura, the gentle melancholy of Ruth Davidson, the quivering wit of Kraig Patterson, the elegant ease of Penny Hutchinson. I saw bits and pieces of Mark Morris in all his dancers’ styles, individual and singular though they were—so that the next day, when I saw Morris himself perform, he was utterly recognizable, almost familiar. And something in his choreography was also recognizable to me, as if I had seen it before in dreams, or had been waiting a lifetime, expectantly, to see it.

  I am roughly the same age as Mark Morris—to be exact, I am four years older—and, like Morris, I was obsessed by Balkan folk dancing in my teens. (I took longer to outgrow it than Morris did: I was still performing with a Balkan dance group during college. But then he had other kinds of dance to move on to.) When I hear people talk about the influence of Balkan dance on Morris’s work, I want to say, “Yes, but…” Yes, it was a search for roots and community in the Sixties and early Seventies. Yes, it was a way of bringing together song and dance, audience and participant, couple and group, tradition and novelty. But it was darker, more divisive, more interesting things as well. It was getting out of the house when you were a teenager, escaping from your own family into some other, less personal simulacrum of a family. It was excitement, and late nights, and parties after the parties. It was the lure of sex and the safety of displacement. It was getting to dance without being asked, evading the teenage hell of sock hops and cheerleaders, exerting a more adult kind of attraction on people older than yourself. It was a realm of dance in which skill still mattered, in which you couldn’t just get up and wiggle (as any fool could do during Sixties happenings and rock concerts) but had to master the steps, acquire a style, become a dancer. It was precision in a world of sloppiness, and “heightened awareness” of a predictable, self-induced, un-drug-related variety. It was a place in which everyone was accepted, but in which discriminations (of grace, skill, knowledge) nonetheless mattered. It was a kind of community that was ideal for someone who was essentially, secretly solitary.

  Morris’s adulatory critics, Morris’s dancers, and even, in some interviews, Morris himself repeatedly emphasize the role of “community” in his artworks and his artistic life. It is true that Mark Morris favors the ensemble dance and even the trio over the duet in his choreography. It is true that some of his dancers have been with him for nearly twenty years, and that many of them go out drinking and partying with him after rehearsals, night after night. There is, indeed, a sense of the group in his life and in his art. But there is also, just as strongly, a sense of the solitary, individual artist leaving his own personal signature on the world. To view Mark Morris as a product of the Sixties, complete with commune-like dance group, is utterly to misread what he is doing. At the core of Morris’s work is allegiance to something other than the group—something I can only characterize with the inadequate words “artistic truth.”

  Such a sensibility is both omnivorous and highly discriminating. When he uses Indian ragas or Texas country music as the settings for his dances, Morris is not just being cute or fashionable: he is selecting the piece of music that, of all the music in the world, best suits his needs at the moment. People praise (or, less frequently, condemn) Mark Morris for fluttering between high art and low, for crossing boundaries between Western and Eastern music and dance, for being “multicultural” and “populist.” But none of these distinctions has any meaning for Morris. He takes what he needs, wherever it comes from. He may be broad-minded, but he is also a snob. He wants only the best: the best dancers, the best music, the best performance of that music, the best literary texts, the best visual inspirations (for L’Allegro he used Blake’s illustrations of Milton to shape several significant gestures), the best lighting and set design. He deeply believes in the concept of “the good,” “the best”—he would not be able to work without it—and this very belief distinguishes him from the vast majority of iconoclastic artists who are wrongly grouped with him.

  If I have made him sound arrogant, so be it—it is an arrogance that serves us well. If it were not for Mark Morris’s arrogance (one might as easily call it “strength of mind” or “refusal to compromise”), he would not be able to function so resolutely as the conduit between his artistic vision and his audience. His dancers may continually have to submit themselves to his direction, but that is only a more tangible version of the submission he himself endures, to his own artistic imperatives. Morris the artist, not Morris the person, is the controlling force. And yet (with Morris there is always an “and yet”) the idea of a controlling force, true as it is to Morris’s strength, is false to the freedom and individuality we can see in his work—not only in the dances but in the dancers themselves, with their unique and engaging styles. If he is a controlling force, it is in the same sense that gravity is: enormously powerful, but leaving one free to move, and in fact enabling one to dance. And, like gravity, Morris is there even when we don’t see him, in every lift and fall of L’Allegro.

  The gift Mark Morris gives us cannot be a permanent one. No choreographer’s can. Without Morris to supervise every rehearsal, train every dancer, adjust every gesture, his dances would soon fade away, be travestied, cease to be themselves. The sense of completion they give us is an illusion. The sense of fulfillment, however, is not
. Dance disappears, but the feeling it creates is left in the mind of the audience. We are its beneficiaries and its repositories. Years ago, witnessing for the first time this marvelous company and its marvelous work, I was grateful to be alive at the moment in history when Mark Morris was making his dances. And that feeling is with me still.

  PORTRAIT OF A BALLERINA

  t a certain period, probably as the result of writing about Degas, I became interested in the connections between photography and dance—the meeting point, you might say, between stillness and movement. And sometime during that period I was sent a picture of a ballerina taken by George Platt Lynes. “George Lynes’ pictures will contain, as far as I am concerned, all that will be remembered of my own repertory in a hundred years,” George Balanchine had said in 1956. I took this as an exaggeration, an excessively dire prediction. But I could see, even in the single Lynes photograph I now had in my possession, exactly what it was that made Balanchine say this.

  In this mesmerizing photo, the dancer leans in an unnaturally theatrical way on what is clearly a stage set, as if to depict with ironic mockery the idea of a “casual” pose. Her gaze, reinforcing the double message, is both cool and seductive. The beautiful young ballerina is severely off-center, her right foot far forward in an angled fourth position, her left invisible, so that she seems to have no source of support. Or rather, she seems supported only by the single point—the meeting point of her back and arm, the balletically crucial shoulderblade—at which she delicately leans against the sharp edge of the geometrically precise set. As in so much of Balanchine’s choreography, she appears to be balanced in a way that taunts gravity.