“Cargo,” “A Forest,” “Foursome,” “The”
Mark Morris Dance Group and Music Ensemble
James and Martha Duffy Performance Space
Mark Morris Dance Center
Brooklyn, NY
May 18, 2016
by Martha Sherman
copyright © 2016 by Martha Sherman
After more than 35 years, Mark Morris still seems to have plenty to say. In a series of four works including a World Premiere, shown in the casual Duffy Performance Space of his own Mark Morris Dance Center, Morris offered his idiosyncratic and familiar dance worldview through relentlessly musical choreography. The Mark Morris Music Ensemble, including several string instrumentalists and the omnipresent excellent piano of Colin Fowler, added – as they always have – the essential underpinning to each work, rich, textured, and beautifully aligned with the dancers.
Photo: Brian Lawson, Nicole Sabella, Dallas McMurray, Stacy Martorana in “The.” Photo © Mat Hayward.
“A Forest,” in its world premiere, is classic Morris. Built around the Haydn Piano Trio No. 44 in E major, the choreographer’s devotion to the rhythm and dynamic of the music played out in every phrase and scene. At its best, the music rolled over and through these willing bodies, as they enacted the dynamics of the sound – rests and silences were clean-edged breaks in motion, and the ripples of piano trills were directly correlated to shifting, floating, melting bodies. Even simple walking across the stage – getting from one place to another matched the pace and feel of the sound.
Morris used different planes of space, bodies lying on the floor and in low, elegant squats, to his familiar sky-reaching and pinwheeling arms, to represent changes of emotion in the music. In the closing visual, the stage was filled with dancers in several postures and levels, and Domingo Estrada, Jr., fluidly shifted to stand on his hands with his legs slightly awry, welcoming the ending textured piano line. As definitive as the final silence and blackout, it felt like the dance might have just kept on going.
The dancers, many long-time acolytes of Morris's, all danced with beautiful, comfortable fluidity. They offered works from 2002 to the present, so there were few surprises. In “Cargo,” Morris used a simple prop – a long bamboo pole (and in the later scenes, three poles) – to transform the dancers relationships with each other, and with the floor. (In an explanatory note in the program, the inspiration was South Pacific “Cargo Cults” who believed that anything manufactured was sent to them by their ancestral spirits.)
Like natives, the dancers slunk onto the stage hunching or squatting as they suspiciously eyed the pole, which was lying on the ground. As they lifted and transferred it among them, the light pole seemed heavy, at least spiritually, as the receiver dipped low under its “weight”. It became the frame to bear a human, too, including Lauren Grant who looked like she was an unwilling slave or sacrifice. Later, she and others, were also borne like royalty. Dancers reached their arms as if to climb, and created designs using their bodies to wrap around or contrast with the straight pole lines; the anthropomorphic and transformative power of simple pieces of wood encased both the clever and the sinister of the tribe.
“Foursome,” the oldest piece of the program (2002) was fun and straightforward. The all-male quartet started with simple, parallel hops and steps to high energy rotations, then morphed into gentle square dance with easy forward and backward sashays. They pointed their fingers in a gesture that spilled from the edges of their hands like a small reiterated offering. The four men From the opening parallel diamond, the quartet broke into duets. They crossed the stage in diagonal patterns, their partners rotating. The music rotated, too, between piano works by Satie and Hummel; the dance was better served by the dreamy free-floating Satie Gnossiennes.
The closing piece, “The,” was danced to a wonderful four-handed piano version of Bach’s first Brandenburg Concerto (George Shevtsov joined Fowler at the piano.) Both the music and the dance were crowd-pleasers, with the rich score fully inhabited by a large cast of dancers, a uni-sex multitude who danced in flowing pajamas and bare feet, like a single large organism. The gathering also split into shifting groups -- three parallel trios in the first movement yearned and angled toward the sky, and groups of four each lifted a fifth dancer to float steadily above them. The dance was filled with flourishes, and the movement's denseness – echoing Bach’s – was very satisfying.
The second movement of “The” was the one that stood out most. On a dark stage, the dancers were arrayed like a large pool with a long tail, all lying crookedly on the ground. Their arms reached up and out like floating seaweed, as a slash of light illuminated them. A lone dancer stood in the center of the pool, soon joined by a few others; they tried to lift themselves with intertwined outstretched arms like a human maypole twisting skyward, but then collapsed.
The Duffy space is stark, and the works were set only with lights and costumes, making those elements pop with importance. In “A Forest,” the dancers were costumed in bodysuits that looked like elegant patterned wallpaper; they were a forest of limbs dressing a fancy dining room. “Cargo” clothed its primitive, sniffing dancers in their underwear, white panties, bras, and tank undershirts. And “Fourscore” just clothed its everyman quartet like four guys – one was in shorts and orange shirt, another in cowboy boots and jeans. Their intersections as four and in duets mixed their variously colored costumes with hints of backgrounds and characters just barely glimpsed.
Morris offers himself as an everyman, too (though no one is fooled.) Taking his bow, he was characteristically casual – and clearly at home. Although each piece was worth seeing (and hearing,) the evening, even with its premiere, seemed more comfortable than challenging. Without much of a stretch, the MacArthur-selected, oft-honored, and much praised choreographic star continues his exploration of music and movement, just as he's done for decades.
Top: Mark Morris Dance Group in "A Forest." Photo © Ani Collier.
Bottom: Sam Black and Mark Morris Dance Group in “The.” Photo © Mat Hayward.
copyright © 2016 by Martha Sherman