Mark Morris Dance Group: Mozart Dances
August 24, 2006
By
MINDY ALOFF
mindy@voiceofdance.com
VoiceofDance.com 2006
Mark Morris Dance Group in Mozart Dances. Photo by Stephanie Berger.
In the new, evening-length program Mozart Dances'given its world premiere this month at the New York State Theater as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival's celebration of Mozart's 250th birth'Mark Morris has devised some of the finest choreography of his life, and his company dances it with surgical exactitude and tenderness. Each of the three sections addresses a musical work that is played in full. "Eleven" is set to the Piano Concerto No. 11 in F major, K. 413, from 1782-3, composed when Mozart was in his mid twenties. "Double" is set to the Sonata in D major for Two Pianos, K. 448, from 1781. "Twenty-seven" is set to the Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat major, K. 595, from 1791, the year of Mozart's death at the age of 35. The music was chosen collaboratively by Morris, the pianist Emmanuel Ax (who performed in all three compositions; his wife, the pianist Yoko Nozaki, joined him for the sonata), and Louis Langr'e, the conductor of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.
They were taking a gamble. Although Mozart is universally revered, entire evenings of choreography to his concert-hall works aren't often programmed for general audiences: when accompanied by dancing, his compositions can sound lullingly alike, and few choreographers manage to find something of visual interest to add to what Mozart already provides. Balanchine, who loved Mozart's music, noted how hard it is to choreograph. (He only did so a handful of times, including his several versions of Mozartiana, where Mozart is filtered by Tchaikovsky.) Although Mozart and his wife, Constanze, frequently attended balls, and there is a tremendous kinetic element to everything he wrote, not much of his oeuvre, comparatively, was music to accommodate the restrictions of actual dancing'the breath, gravity, and stamina of the dancing body. As Balanchine also noted, the finger action of an instrumentalist can effect change faster, and ride it out it for a longer time, than is possible for a dancer's body to match. Choreographers address the music of Mozart at their peril: indeed, a number of dancegoers I know didn't try to attend Mozart Dances. They suspected that, this time, Morris had overreached himself, and they didn't want to be witnesses to it. Members of the downtown-dance world'whence Morris, himself, sprang'were also dubious about the Mostly Mozart venture: they consider Morris to have sold out to commercial concerns long ago, and this seemed to be a juicy example.
In fact, some people who did attend the show's three performances were outraged: the music of Mozart, with that of J. S. Bach, is about as close as classical music gets to the sacred. The sight of Howard Hodgkin's abstract set, with its magnified painterly gestures, lovely yet unexpectedly raw, intimate, and of Morris's dancers bluntly striding offstage, heel first, when their dancing passages were concluded or making geometric semaphore patterns with their arms like kindergartners did not go down well with everyone. Mozart's music sets a standard of elegance and perfection'and Ax played it as if he were stringing seed pearls on flame: the contrast between what we heard and what we saw was simply too much for them to bear. Some dissidents couldn't get past the unshod feet, and some couldn't get past Morris's modern-dance idealism. By nature, too, Morris has a utopian vision of community that is much closer to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony than to Mozart's pure-music enchantments, and if one isn't susceptible to the literal way Morris sometimes chooses to realize his vision (regardless of whether the composer shares that vision as well) his dances can seem to be little more than exercises in ego. That is, they can seem so if one ignores their wonderfully sustained momentum, their humor (the dance jokes in Mozart Dances are Meissen light), their apparently inexhaustible invention of pose and ensemble sculpture, their formal and behavioral surprises, their attentive showcasing of each dancer onstage, their suggestions of stories that we ought to know or make up for ourselves, and their humanistic perspective. (For an exquisite description of the dance action, read Tobi Tobias's review for Bloomberg News.
On the other hand, the process of formation, maturity, and dissolution of the artist's ego seems to be one of the subjects that Mozart Dances juggles. "Eleven" playfully opens with eight men and eight women interlocked in lines, like chromosomes. The men, half naked, step forward and embrace Mozart's allegro; their time is brief, however. "Eleven" turns out to be a dance for the women, seven of them in Martin Pakledinaz's ingeniously designed sheer gray dresses over black bikinis and one'tiny virtuoso Lauren Grant'in a beautifully cut, opaque, inky-black evening dress. Grant turns out to be the focus of the section, and her interactions with the stately and unforthcoming female figures around her (in her review, Tobias compares them to goddesses) is both authoritative and childlike: Fraulein Apollo. Or is she the young Mozart (Morris does not quibble about gender in his casting elsewhere in his repertory)? Or is she the piano vis-'-vis the orchestra? How we answer isn't as important as much as the fact that a question of identity is clearly being posed.
Mark Morris Dance Group in Mozart Dances. Photo by Stephanie Berger.
In the magnificent "Double," the question is posed again, with Joe Bowie, a dancer with deeply coffee-colored skin, wearing a contemporary take on 18th-century black breeches and an open black frock coat'unquestionably an authority figure. Introduced in the opening Allegro con spirito movement, he returns in the ravishing Andante to mentor a young man (Noah Vinson), who has been the center of attention for a corps of men who bond into circle dances (Mozart's Masonic lodge?) or reconfigure themselves into contradanse needle-and-thread formations. Sometimes the young man or the other men floatingly fall. The circle breaks and is reconfigured; however, the second time we see it, the men do not join hands or touch: the figure is established as a virtual image, rather than as a literal one. Is Bowie to be understood as Mozart in his prime, looking back on Vinson, as Mozart in early youth? Is Bowie to be taken as Mozart's father, Leopold, and the young man being mentored as Mozart? Is Bowie possibly Beethoven, and the young man, Mozart? Is the elder man the leader of the two pianists and the young man the second pianist? Is Bowie a conductor (he "conducts" the men in a line at one point), i.e., is he the orchestra? Again, the specific answers are not as important as the relationship that inaugurates the questions.
Mirroring the opening of "Eleven," the end of "Double" brings on the women, now in long gowns'the stage is an ecstasy of halftones and platinum, with the anchor of Bowie's inky presence'and they sequester Vinson from his buddies then waft him away. A new young man assumes the central place in the men's circle. Eventually, Bowie and the men advance in a line to the lip of the stage and, on the last note in the sonata, clap their straightened arms to their sides. This action is pristinely, amazingly, coordinated with the pianists.
In the final movement, a kind of heavenly ballabile that brings the entire cast on for a bravura effort at choreography that builds into eyepopping dance architecture'walls, roof, sculptural elements sequentially brought to life, now thickening into massed elements, now thinning into duets for men and women with lifts of astounding formal invention'no one is singled out. It's all Mozart'and everything and everyone that contributed to what we mean by "Mozart." And yet, this section takes the most getting used to, if one is paying attention to the music, itself. For Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 27 sustains a long, unbroken, singing line, which threads through its musical events, and one is not conscious of them being revealed in sequence. The effect is of time and eternity happening at once. On just one viewing of Mozart Dances, I can't say for certain that Morris doesn't match this effect. However, while in the theater I felt keenly that he didn't, despite his honorable efforts to do so and despite the singular beauty of the dance he did, in fact, produce. Nevertheless, for this dancegoer, his evening of Mozart is one of the greatest dance events of the new century, and I hope it will be presented again.
