"...childlike insouciance, playful eroticism..."

8/10/04 performanc reviewed by Jocelyn McGrath

An evening with Mark Morris is like time spent with an old friend, a very good friend from out of town. He is immediately intimate, knowledgeable of who we are, and yet possesses a clarity of perspective we might not experience with our day to day comrades. No wonder we look forward to his visits! He is an undisputed and celebrated master of contemporary dance, and has the power to lay bare the relationships between music and bodies-in-motion in a way that can feel like revelation. Despite his stature as one of contemporary dance’s most contemporary, not one of the four works he is presenting at Jacob’s Pillow—My Party (1984), A Lake (1991), A Spell (1993) or V (2001)—is written on modern music. Instead, the dances are set to works from the Renaissance to Romanticism.

The first piece, My Party, contains many characteristic Mark Morris traits, childlike insouciance, playful eroticism, living gesture and daily motion. The event comes across as a mixture of fun for young and old, including multicolored Chinese lanterns and tutus, follow the leader, and making out on the lawn. At one point it seems like the party will never end, that we are going to stay up all night and party some more.

In contrast to that raucous scene, the dancers in A Lake, a group piece with music by Haydn, are serene and noble. The gestures are as simple as a classically arched arm, extended downward as a statue might indicate space. Despite this feeling of simple classicism, there is nothing trite or cliché about the choreography. In one measured adagio passage, the gentle lifting and lowering of the slow moving of bodies in space, gyrated at times from a single point, feel like the movement of the planets and those instruments used in their measurement.

A Spell is a trio, a lad and a lass and a winsome Eros replete with a smallish set of bobbing wings—irresistible and a definite crowd pleaser. Set to several songs of John Wilson, each section has a different flavor, though the general theme is love and lust with many clever enactments of the poetical double entendres couched in the lyrics.

The last piece, V, is clearly a masterwork. More is revealed to us of the intention of the piece as it unfolds. In the repetition and variation of theme, the patterns are handled freshly, from another angle, or overlapping time and space, or with another grouping of the contrasting tribes of dancers. The musical motifs are answered directly in the motion, and each new passage contain equal amounts of clarity and complexity. Juxtaposed to the prevalent uprightness and lift in the piece, the strongest image is of the dancers crawling across the stage in a line, moving jerkily in time with a particular string rhythm. One crawler coming from the other side reaches and crosses the line and is transformed, immediately gaining footing, rises, and walks on. It is so simple and yet so powerful. At another point in the final movement there is what appears to be a cascade of dancers leaping from the wings, a joyous torrent of flight and arrival.

The Mark Morris Dance Group is a community of dancers and musicians each contributing his or her original essence to the whole. It is part of Morris’s gift that he is able to channel these individual energies into a collective, powerful experience. And it is in this attractive and meaningful experience of gathering forces that we as the audience are so eager to join.