The Beat Goes On

"Acis and Galatea"
Mark Morris Dance Company
Cal Performances
Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley
April 25, 2014

by Rita Felciano
Rita Felciano © copyright 2014

Mark Morris Dance Group in "Acis and Galatea" photo: Ken Friedman

In his latest world premiere and, as a colleague pointed out, co-incidentally his company's 200th performance at Cal Performances, the Mark Morris Dance Group's official second home for the last twelve years, the prodigious choreographer -- in every sense of that term -- returned to one of the many loves in his life, Baroque music. In this case it is Georg Frideric Handel, the German-born, English acculturated composer with an Italianate ear for melody. In its luminous transparence, "Acis and Galatea" was a miracle to behold. It had everything you expect by now from Morris: the wit, the humor, the pop woven into a deeply woven formality and a profound sense of what is best in the human spirit, the ennobling power of love -- in whatever manifestation he can find it. 

The work is based on one of Ovid's most popular stories concerning the tragic, yet ultimately happy tale of the love between the nymph Galatea and her swain Acis who was killed by the one-eyed giant Polyphemus but then (happily) turned into a river god. Handel's score turned John Gray's libretto (with additions by Alexander Pope John Hughes) into a tender, lovely pastoral, more masque than oratorio or opera. To my eyes this urban ballad has just a whiff of wit about it. It took Morris to bring both Gray and Handel together in imaginative choreography that has a rich earthiness to it even though the dancers at times barely touch the ground. What looks pleasingly entertaining, becomes something much more. Who knows, it might even be an atheist's attempt to synthesize Agape, Eros and Caritas.

As he did 26 years ago in his masterful "L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato," in the more intimate "Acis," Morris indulged in literalisms. In "Hush, ye pretty warbling choir", the dancers suggest fluttering birds; "at thy feet the longing Acis lies," down he goes -- but he handles those without a touch of irony. They become an affectionate expansion of what he found, and by that very fact, he owns them. Morris, of course, is also a practical man; he knows that those often funny spots immediately communicate with an audience.

Handel's score speaks of its time -- London at the height of his career -- and Nicholas McGegan and his splendid Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Chorale, and the stylistically refined, but a few times weak-sounding singers Sherezade Panthaki (Galatea), Thomas Cooley (Acis), Zach Finkelstein (Damon) and Douglas Williams (Polyphemus) do, to use a Morris term, a "fabulous" job placing it there. But Morris, with his embracing perspective of Dance as Dance, makes "Acis" contemporary.

One of this evening's delights, in addition to the sheer richness of formal inventions, came from recognizing how full Morris' dance bag is, and how judiciously he creates perspectives from what he retrieves and re-shapes. His dancers celebrate the seasons with a polonaise; the couples entering from both sides of the stage could be at a royal court. They may finish a passage with arms in Ballet's en couronne, except half of them droop their wrists. When Acis calls on the goddess of love, in steps not Venus as a tangoera, but as an Irish step dancer -- torso stiff as a board, arms nailed to her side, but feet going a mile a minute. And, of course, this being Morris, you get a male version. And then male duets that duplicate themselves into an army to Handel's deliciously martial music. Pastoral reposes evolve into a series of seesaws with the men pulling the women up and the other way around. When Galatea needs help, you remember her "friends", the naiads, who here play hide and seek to protect her. And just when it is about time for Acis to become a jolly god, the dancers look as if they had stepped out of Greek vase painting. 

Morris nicely integrates the singers into the stage action and has the dancers provide their own comments.  At the end of act one, for instance, the two lovers declare themselves to each other, but it's the achingly languid stretches and reaches of Rita Donohue and Billy Smith's beautifully danced duet that embodies the depth of human love. It's a love that spills into a trio (with Benjamin Freedman) and finally a quintet (with Lauren Grant and Brandon Randolph).

The dancing flows with ease and grace from wondrous dancers who can do it all. They are superbly trained movers and listeners. Secure in what they are doing, they can be languid, goofy, downtrodden, furious  all within a few minutes. Shining individually, they do even more so as a ensemble. In Japan they might be appointed as national treasures. Here they already are.

Adrianne Lobel's vaguely expressionist, very flat design felt at odds with Isaac Mizrahi's verdant and sunny palette for everyone's diaphanous floor-length skirts. They enhance the flow of the dancing; they also recalled hippie fashions. The singers' contemporary, pedestrian garb, however, looked too much like buckets of paint had been thrown at them.

copyright Rita Felciano 2014