Mark Morris Dance Group / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, NY / June 8-12, 2004
The problem with the two new-to-New-York dances Mark Morris paired for his company’s recent run at BAM lies mainly in their juxtaposition. Violet Cavern (being given its world premiere) and All Fours (in its first local performances) are both dry, brainy, essentially abstract works in which structure dominates. Both bring you to your knees in admiration of Morris’s craftsmanship; neither provides much meaningful emotional experience or a lush good time. Neither comes as a surprise or holds any of the surprises—small astonishments at what can be done with a simple step or the placement of bodies in space—that Morris (Mr. Wit, Mr. Invention) is usually so deft at supplying.
All Fours, set to Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4, provides an almost diagrammatic response to the score’s five movements. In the first and final sections, eight dancers in severe black tailoring dominate, moving, often in unison, with the fierce, dedicated energy of a group whose force lies in its very anonymity. It is a mass, with no leaders, no individual temperaments. The three movements at the center feature two pairs of figures in white or light gray ramshackle exercise togs. First we have a pair of men (Craig Biesecker and Bradon McDonald), then the same men plus a pair of women (Marjorie Folkman and Julie Worden), last the two women alone. Though they project no decided personalities, we see them intimately—because of their small number? because of their vulnerable look in their pale clothes? because, while the dark figures moved with an almost compulsive ferocity, their actions seem more passive?
The spectator’s mind inevitably makes stories, if only fugitive ones, out of non-narrative dances—partly from hints planted by the choreographer, partly from a need to “interpret” so as to “understand.” Granted, this is a failure on the spectator’s part, this desire to know, to define, to pin down in ways more appropriate to literature than to dancing, yet it goes on all the time. In this case, I saw the “dark” ensemble and the “light” individuals as the public and private aspects, respectively, of the same group. And I saw the group as a cult, in thrall to a demonic possession, like the societies created by Paul Taylor in Speaking in Tongues and The Word. Out in the lobby at intermission I met colleagues and dance fans who had other stories entirely.
Here’s what led me to my interpretation: The dark figures’ unison aspect; the abrupt, angular, driven nature of their actions; the seemingly compulsive repetition of their gestures, some of them without emotional freight, like a hand thrust forward with the thumb up in hitchhiking mode, others laden with significance such as arms flung heavenward, hands clasped, toward a cast-back head, in the manner of passionately prayerful congregants in a Pentecostal church. (Martha Graham made much of this last in her choreography for the Preacher and his acolytes in Appalachian Spring.) Further: The light figures’ brain-washed demeanor, or at least their look of being subject to influences beyond their control or even full comprehension; their being carried away at intervals like helpless puppets by members of the dark tribe; their repeatedly facing each other and putting a hand to their partner’s lips, the signal serving as a reminder that some terrible secret must not be revealed. (The fact that both the dark and the light groups use many of the key gestures in the piece made me understand them as part of the same community.) And then: Nicole Pearce’s lighting, which keeps the stage ominously dark only to have it flare suddenly, at unpredictable intervals, into hellfire red or a bleak dawn. Others, looking at All Fours, may interpret this evidence differently or, still more likely, see or remember different evidence.
Morris, a choreographer as serious about music as Balanchine was, doesn’t usually work with commissioned scores (which may turn out to be duds), but he made an exception with Violet Cavern. It’s accompanied by about three-quarters of an hour’s worth of partially improvisatory music from The Bad Plus and was played by the group (Ethan Iverson, piano; Reid Anderson, bass; David King, percussion) at the BAM showings. Iverson served as musical director for the Mark Morris Dance Group from 1998 to 2002, which may explain some of Morris’s trust, and The Bad Plus has swiftly made a name for itself in the contemporary music world for its smooth combination of jazz with other forms—rock, pop, heavy metal. I am not knowledgeable in this area, but to me the score seemed insufficiently complex, repetitive, and far too long. Not surprisingly, I felt the same way about the choreography.
The activity is placed in a floating world. The curtained panels that conventionally form the wings at either side of the stage (the place into which dancers ordinarily vanish from view) have been removed. The official dancing ground is delineated by shiny flooring. When the dancers leave it, they quit “dancing” and just walk or run through the remaining indeterminate space, reconstituted as pedestrians, ordinary folk. In modest black box theaters, which have no wings, this state of affairs always prevails, and it has become a popular ploy even on opera house stages. Still, it provides some fascinating sights and a useful prod to re-think what “dancing” means. If you ask me, it’s whatever the choreographer puts in front of your eyes.
Stephen Hendee, the set designer, has been less fortunate with his decoration of the central space. He’s created a crowd of small translucent rectangles crisscrossed with spiderwebbing that hang over the dancers’ heads like clouds that have gotten stuck in an aerial traffic jam. For variety’s sake, colored light is projected onto them at intervals. You guessed it; violet’s first.
Actually the violet cavern idea suits the first half of the piece, which evokes down-and-outers—denizens, perhaps, of today’s or yesteryear’s clubs—who’ve succumbed to drugs, hopelessness, and unfeeling states in which they can see a companion disintegrating, stare at him or her, and drift off or away. There may also be a reference here to the demoralized state of the populace induced by the events of September 11 and their never-ending repercussions.
Ever the master of formal devices, Morris doesn’t slack off here. Many a design or phrase is repeated in exquisitely calibrated variations. The suggestion of life’s being merely a passing parade comes from the pervasive use of bodies facing front while traveling horizontally cross-stage, and in the use of motifs that at their first occurrence look like dramatic events and then, with repetition, prove to be something that can occur again and again, to anyone and everyone. Only one image is striking, but it is unforgettable: Two bodies lie supine, parallel to each other, pushing themselves along the floor, legs bent, with the soles of their feet, progressing with some difficulty, head first. Each extends an arm to a standing figure who grasps it and walks slowly along facing the sliding bodies as if they were dogs and s/he their walker. The connection with photos from Abu Ghraib may be coincidental, but it gives the image a horrifying resonance.
I found the dark sections of Violet Cavern, which account for at least two-thirds of the piece, monotonous. Inventories of the incapacitated, depicting the apathy of the damned, they’re unrelieved by sufficient choreographic or musical inspiration. But it’s the last segment I really object to. In it, the mood inexplicably lightens and, before you know it, everyone is launched into hallelujah activities—leaps with a ravenous appetite, arms flung skyward, dervish whirling at high speed, and so on. This ecstasy without evident cause, which gave me grave reservations about V, the Schumann piece that was Morris’s big 2001 hit, surfaces again and has the audience, excitement built to fever pitch, cheering. In L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, widely considered Morris’s finest work, the exultation of the finale is clearly earned; in V, I would have to agree with Morris if he claimed “The music made me”; here, in Violet Cavern, the resurrection of joy seems arbitrary. On opening night I gauged the audience’s response to the piece as a “maybe”; two nights later the crowd was on its feet, pelting the stage with accolades.
Much was made in the press about Morris’s use of live music in these performances. Much, indeed, should be made in these economically stricken times when dancing has been forced to pretend it is expendable. The truth is that live music is nearly as essential to theatrical dancing as live bodies.
Photo credit: Stephanie Berger: Michelle Yard, Craig Biesecker, Julie Worden, and Amber Darragh in Mark Morris’s Violet Cavern
© 2004 Tobi Tobias