Main page >> Dance >> Essay: Mark Morris
Danceimpressions
- I love the way in which I make up dances!
(Mark Morris)
The Mark Morris Dance Group brought three different pieces to the London premiere of their UK tour. His company danced "Gloria", to Vivaldi's "Gloria in D", "The argument" to Schumann's "Fünf Stücke im Volkston", and "Rhymes with silver" to a commissioned score by Lou Harrison.
Gloria starts with two dancers slowly progressing towards the audience, one on the floor, one walking. Such contrasts of energy are typical in this piece, often with some dancers passively lying or being dragged while others are moving. A more extreme contrast follows, when in a sudden burst of energy, the crawling man rises to a turn, then a sudden blackout gives the audience time to "digest" the movement during a period where nothing happens on stage. Does this mirror the music's alternation between reflection and ecstatic praise?
The dance is filled with travelling across the stage, and dynamic contrasts between passivity and activity, percussive movement and flow. The apparently constant travel in and out of the stage, means that the dance is perceived as divided into numerous small sections, while the dancers on stage changes. Canon structures underline a sense of travel and development, when we see movements "travel" from one dancer to another.
The movement is clearly inspired by the score, sometimes also seems set to the text. Simple movements may be co-ordinated with words - for instance when a soloist arcs on "celestis". Some parts of the dance seem even more connected to the text. In the 'Agnus Dei'-section, a man is doing a grieving solo in front, while people are walking across the stage by the back wall. Two women and one man dance the following section, "searching" till they see the previous soloist walk by. Thus, this part of the dance seems to be a dramatic version of the biblical narrative. It is interesting to consider to what extent Christian thoughts and tales, rendered in the Catholic mass which structures Vivaldi's music, influence the dance.
The Argument for six dancers to the music of Schumann is equally character- and music-driven. It is structured as series of duos and small solos, depicting three couples and their relationship. The movements are always passionate and strong, but the three couples have different styles, from the large gestures and aggressive leg lifts of the first couple, to the restricted "shadow boxing" of the third, who display frustration through rapid, small attacks, never towards the other person. The choreography sometimes reminds one of ballroom dancing, which may in turn have inspired the "cocktail-party" costumes. Since these are more related to everyday life than for instance the blue dresses of Gloria, they also signal that the dance describes characters from "real life".
Morris appears himself, his character seems to be struggling to get his point through to his partner, and the performance is instantly and effortlessly believable.
This dance relies on the sense of dramatic epic, and has a very marked ending, where the choreography seems to reveal the futures of the couples: the "restricted" couple breaks up, and she leaves the stage, while the couple that appeared more aggressive now seems to have gained a greater stability in their relationship. The dance attempts to be psychologically correct, but its main emotional strength might lie in the audience's identification of the moments where the dancers through, during or in spite of their conflicts recognise that they are working to the same rhythm. When these moments come clearly across, they demonstrate the choreographer's skill in handling complicated rhythms, and the effect is equally simple and powerful, when on the emotional level they show how the relationship gives a deeper resonance to the passions of the conflict.
Our first impression of Rhymes with silver is the powerful backdrop - painted with strong limegreen and red colours in horizontal, wavy and slightly overlapping lines. The only word one can think of is "colourful", and this word could also identify the theme of the piece. Morris dives into the diversity of dance traditions - they set of with delicate Indian hand movements, and a spectrum of styles unfold, from martial arts to dervish whirling, via old European court and Balkan folk dance. The choreographer acts as a kind of presenter, a bit more aware of having an audience than the rest of the dancers. This unusual way of directly addressing his public, but also that many of his movements are funny, makes him seem clownish. He's hustling around, busy with gestures. Personally, I could not help thinking that he was in the piece more because he enjoyed being there, than because he had an actual function, and that he was funny as an excuse to be there. In the Guardian review, Judith Mackrell sees him as a "tourist"-figure, skipping through the styles and traditions of the world, although she does not conclude that his exploration is as superficial as the average tourist's.
There are two possible interpretations of Rhymes with silver. One is that Morris simply intends to display the variety of dance and movement expressions. But within or besides this, he may also have a message about human similarity across cultures, and the co-existence of these cultures. Then, this dance becomes Morris's Utopia, where the world's traditions harmoniously unfold together.
Dance is a good medium for such Utopias, because all movement traditions are based on the human physique, and the similarities and the differences of the approaches to our possibilities of movement clearly appear. But this may backfire - cross-cultural communications is not always easy. If Morris tried harder to emphasise the problems in combining different culture's movement material, he might actually find it easier to convince the audience about the possibility of his dream. The dance is complicated, but the structure might look too simple to be convincing.
Sources:
Acocella, Joan: Mark Morris, Noonday Press 1995; ISBN: 0374524181
Mackrell, Judith: "Mark Morris", The Guardian, Thursday October 7th, 1999