Seeing Things: August 2009 Archives

Mark Morris Dance Group in the Mostly Mozart Festival 2009 / Rose Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / August 19-22, 2009

Mark Morris, who shares top honors (with Paul Taylor) as America's greatest living choreographer, is at mid-career, but maybe no longer at the top of his game.

The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on August 25, 2009. To read it, click here.

Have you noticed that ballets that are inarguably choreographic disasters often improve after a few performances? This happens, I think, once the piece has been danced before a public audience and the performers have finally admitted to themselves that "there's no there there." Then they take the hapless creation into their own hands, recognizing that it's up to them to do what they can to rescue it.

It's not that they change the choreography noticeably, though they may intensify the phrasing and the shifts in emphasis between light and shade. It's more, rather, that they learn to "sell" the piece to the public by believing in it, much in the way a parent or other committed guide bolsters an ill-endowed or wayward child.

They give it extra and more intently focused physical energy, more psychic communication between dancer and dancer or among groups of them. They animate areas of the stage that before looked empty or dead with its lifeless figures standing lackadaisically where the choreographer has placed them, without awakening their consciousness, as if waiting for a bus. They attempt to discover what the choreographer intended this particular ballet to be "about" and make it their own vision. Not for a moment now are they content, as they appeared to be at the ballet's premiere, to be satisfied with simply going through the motions.

The feeble ballet may have the grace to vanish permanently from the repertory at the end of the season or after one last try in the following season, but meanwhile you've got to admire the dancers for their resourcefulness and generosity of spirit in the face of fiasco.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias