from the lewd to the sacred

July 2, 2003 performance reviewed by Connell McGrath

Mark Morris Dance Group returned for the fourth consecutive season with a great set of performances for sold-out audiences at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival.

Morris' Group transitions from crotch-grabbing lewdness to a dance that most closely resembles the rituals of Egyptian priests. The work they are presenting this year spans 21 years of choreography, beginning with a 1982 piece called New Love Song Waltzes and ending with his latest piece, Serenade, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the spring of 2003.

New Love Song Waltzes opens this season's show. It is set to Brahms' piece by the same name, performed this year to live music by four singers and two pianists. It revolves around the familiar early Morris theme of the mechanics of love stripped of its sentimentality. We don't see the suffering of loss, abandonment, and betrayal, nor do we see the ecstasy and passion of new love.

What we do see are the motions of all these without their melodrama, and the results are a comic pantomime of what we do in love. The devices and movements of dance - Morris uses more of the standard lexicon in this piece than in his later pieces - serve to express these detached actions of love.

By using the traditional dance vocabulary to express only the mechanics of love - the coming together and spurning, the changing of partners, the controlling of a loved one - Morris is contradicting one of dance's oldest traditions of expressing the sentiment and sublimity of love.

An example of this is in a section that involves two couples, basically two "puppet" people being lifted and two "puppet masters" doing the lifting. The couple being carried float in awkward poses across the stage. The dancers seem tired and controlled, and it is both humorous and unsettling.

The Going Away Party (1990) is a piece from the group's three-year tenure in Brussels as the resident company of the Theatre Royal. These dances are set to recorded cowboy music by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys (including the scratchy record sound). Here's where Morris and Group outdid themselves in lewdness and silliness.

Dressed in their best Friday night hoedown outfits, they dance the actions of the songs, and take them to the extremes of what the lyrics suggest. The most outrageous and obvious of these actions is when the men lifted the women so that their crotches were at the men's face level while the Texas Playboys sing "it would sure go good to feel my lips against yours again." They leave very little to the imagination.

The joy of this piece is that the dancers were obviously having a lot of fun up there, and their fun was infectious. They use all the classic, cliché cowboy/cowgirl gestures of flirting, gun slinging, strutting, slutting, and leavin' you again.

This year saw the death of composer Lou Harrison whose music Mark Morris has used in many of his pieces. In homage to Mr. Harrison, the second half of the evening is comprised of two Morris works set to his music.

Serenade is a solo danced by Mark Morris, created and first performed this spring. The music has overtones of East Indian music set on a base of the Spanish guitar tradition. The dance is concentrated, exotic, and sensual, and was accompanied by live guitar and percussion by Oren Fader and Stefan Schatz. The piece, especially with live music, has an atmosphere of intimacy and eroticism. Armed with props (fan, finger bells, mystical rod, castanets), Morris plays his role with precision and gravity. In his mid-forties, and carrying an extra fifty pounds, Morris is no longer in his prime as a dancer, but in his sheer stage presence, exquisite timing and nuance, he is formidable.

There were a few interesting contrasts in this piece. First, he was dancing the role of a woman, using the traditional props of a woman flamenco dancer. Second, his body has none of the shape or the litheness that this piece would seem to demand. He could do none of the leaps or twists that such a piece may require of a young woman dancer, yet he dances it fully. Set in this way, this piece seems to say, "This, too, is possible." Or "why not?"

Grand Duo, set to Lou Harrison's Grand Duo for Violin and Piano, was first performed in 1993. The group also performed it in their 2001 visit to the Jacob's Pillow in much the same staging as was seen this year. This piece is an odd pairing of two separate dances, choreographed years apart and of very different style and flavor. The first section is by far the more powerful of the two, with motifs of prophecy, ancient group worship, shamanic power. The second part has some beautiful group dance shapes and circular, spiraling motions, but it does have the charge of the first section. Overall, the style of the second section is more "modern" in feel, and sheds the ancient tone of the first section.