Mark Morris troupe brings the music to life
LENOX -- The program the Mark Morris Dance Group presented at Tanglewood Thursday night (and repeated Friday night) is one it probably couldn't have put on anywhere else. The company performs only to live music, and it is hard to think of another host that could have supplied such a first-rate string quartet, chorus, orchestra, and group of instrumental and vocal soloists for a single program of dance.
Mark Morris Dance Group
With Fellows of the Tanglewood
Music Center
At: Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood, in
Lenox, Thursday night
And what a program it was, ranging from the first of Morris's greatest hits, the 1981 "Gloria" (set to Vivaldi's "Gloria"), to one of his recent masterpieces, last year's "All Fours" (set to Bartok's Fourth Quartet). It also brought a brief duo dance, "Beautiful Day" (to a cantata attributed to Bach), and the company's first performance in more than a decade of "Marble Halls" (to Bach's Double Concerto for Violin and Oboe).
It is a truth not yet universally acknowledged that Morris is the most important choreographer since George Balanchine. Morris could not be more different from Balanchine, but he is great for the same reason: He makes music visible. His vocabulary is, to put it mildly, eclectic -- one sees in it ballet, folk dance, vernacular dance, line dancing, martial arts, the movements of animals, birds, plants, and insects, and athletic accomplishment. (At one moment in "Marble Halls," the dancers move, chests thrust forward, arms flung back: "This is all about a marathon runner breaking through the ribbon," Morris explained to the dancers at a rehearsal.)
But the vocabulary is all coherent and expressive, and always intimately responsive to gesture, harmony, rhythm, and counterpoint in the music -- if there is a fugue in the music there will be a fugue on the stage. But the dance is seldom a form of imitation; instead it is a form of illumination.
Canons and retrogrades appear in the dancing independent of such parts in the music. Often Morris invents fast dancing to slow music, sometimes slow dancing to fast music; big music may find a quiet response, and scurrying, almost imperceptible music in Bartok calls for big dancing. "All Fours," like the quartet, is built on a sturdy structural grid; constant surprise is only possible against a background of expectation.
Occasionally there is a bit of narrative scenario, but mostly the choreography, like music, lives in the moment while tracing a larger emotional arc. In a famous passage in "Gloria," most of the dancers are crawling on the floor, moving like caterpillars, earthbound; one dancer is above them in flight, like a butterfly or an angel who is speaking to them of peace on earth. By the last movement, the dancers are running and diving and sliding on their stomachs across the floor. This is a development of the same movement, now not about striving but about celebration, and the dancers look as playful as porpoises.
Most of the Morris company's signature dancers have retired. Joe Bowie, who joined in 1989, appears to be the senior member, and he is still formidable in energy, concentration, musicality, and presence. The younger crew is simply amazing. Some of the biggest responsibilities went to Bowie and to playful virtuoso Bradon McDonald, the centered Michelle Yard, the elegant Maile Nokamura, and the spunky soubrette Lauren Grant. All the Morris dancers are worth watching all the time -- and in Ozawa Hall you can do so because, due to a lack of wing space, they seldom leave the stage.
Violinists Marc Rovetti and Elizabeth Mahler, violist Mark Berger, and cellist Guy Fishman put together an astounding performance of the Bartok with less than a week's rehearsal. The prodigious young violinist Arnaud Sussmann and oboist Brent Ross were nimble and eloquent soloists in the Bach Double Concerto. The orchestra and chorus of Tanglewood fellows were first-rate; so were the vocal soloists, among them countertenors Jose Lemos and Jason Abrams and up-and-coming Boston mezzo Paula Murrihy. Conductor Craig Smith, a Morris collaborator since the late '80s and America's most experienced conductor of Bach, knows both what the dancers and the music require.
