OPERA
April 20, 2007
Making Dance Sing: Mark Morris's Choreography for Opera
By: Martha Ullman West
Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle Review
Volume 53, Issue 33, Page B18
A little minuet in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, a hip-swinging processional in Verdi's Aida, a ballroom waltz in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin — until fairly recently, that, generally speaking, was what dance amounted to in opera. Singers sang and dancers danced; movement to music was seldom more than ancillary to the drama taking place on stage.
In the 17th century, dance frequently played a prominent role in opera, especially in France, where Jean-Baptiste Lully was a dancer as well as composer. In the 18th and 19th centuries, composers included music for dance interludes in their scores, but the dances were not intended to do much more than add to the spectacle and possibly give the singers a chance to catch their breaths.
Today that tradition of separate and unequal is changing, largely because of innovative directors like Peter Sellars, and choreographer-directors like Mark Morris and Trisha Brown. Morris is the director and choreographer of the Metropolitan Opera's first new production of Christoph Willibald Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice in 36 years. It will have its premiere on May 2.
Trisha Brown's 1998 direction of Monteverdi's Orfeo blended the dancers and the singers on stage so skillfully that at times the viewer couldn't tell which was which. Brown, as a maker of nonnarrative, highly physical, visually oriented abstract works, seems an unlikely candidate for such a project. Nevertheless, since Orfeo, she has directed two productions by Salvatore Sciarrino, working in close collaboration with the Italian composer.
For Morris, on the other hand, whose choreographic range is as broad as a star soprano's, opera is a natural. As celebrated for his intense musicality as George Balanchine, to whom he is frequently compared, Morris, who grew up in a musically oriented family, began making up dances for public performance when he was a teenager studying ballet in the early 70s with Seattle's Verla Flowers. Even those early works revealed his catholic, open-minded taste in music: Pieces for school recitals were accompanied by 16th-century French music, American pop songs, and traditional Spanish songs.
Morris's dance training in the multicultural atmosphere of Seattle, where he was born August 29, 1956, was as eclectic as his musical taste but, interestingly enough, contained little modern technique. In addition to ballet with Flowers, who early on spotted his phenomenal talent not only as a performer but also as a choreographer, Morris studied folk dance, performing with a Balkan folk-dance company, and flamenco, which was his first love. Traces of those forms can be spotted in a choreographic style that has the emotional generosity of the traditional modernists combined with the discipline of classical ballet. Expressive, expansive, frequently humorous, often wrenching, and sometimes raunchy, every piece is tightly crafted, taking its tone and structure from the music, and its content from whatever Morris has on his mind at any given moment, including the music itself.
In his more than 27 years as a professional choreographer, creating work for the Mark Morris Dance Group, which he founded in 1980, as well as for opera, ballet, and the White Oak Project (the contemporary dance group he established with Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1990), he has chosen many Baroque scores, and compositions by, among others, Bartók, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert, and Schumann. Modernists such as John Adams, Lou Harrison, and Virgil Thomson have also inspired his dances, as have country-and-western music and English music-hall songs. Morris has choreographed 120 works for his company and ballets for American Ballet Theatre and other companies, and choreographed and directed seven operas, including the upcoming Orfeo.
But, notably, half of that work has been choreographed to vocal music, which "seems to feed him in a way that nothing else does," critic Joan Acocella comments in her insightful 1993 book on Morris. "The sound of the voice thrills his brain, at the same time that the words the voice is singing conjure up a whole world — queens and witches, rain and wind and fire — for his imagination to run around in."
Nineteen eighty-eight brought Morris tremendous opportunities to work on a grand scale when he replaced Maurice Béjart as director of dance at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, the national opera house of Belgium. Béjart and his company, the Ballet of the Twentieth Century, had been in residence there since 1960. A disagreement with new management in the person of Gerard Mortier (who, it has just been announced, will become general manager and artistic director of the New York City Opera in 2009) led Béjart to depart, taking his company with him. Suddenly Morris, who in New York had no studio space of his own, had acquired four studios and a technical staff of 10 people that included a masseuse, and had expanded his company from 12 dancers to 27, who, moreover, were decently paid.
In his three years in Brussels, Morris created three major evening-length works, two of them incontrovertible masterpieces set to vocal music. (The jury is still out on The Hard Nut, his recasting of The Nutcracker into a 50s setting.) The first, in 1988, was L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, Handel's oratorio setting of John Milton's poetry. The second was Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas the "chaste libretto," as Joan Acocella calls it, written by the poet Nahum Tate. Morris's version premiered in 1989, precisely 300 years after the English composer's premiered at a school for girls. While needless to say there is no visual record of the earlier performance, it's a safe bet that Morris's direction, not to mention his performance in the dual role of Dido, the Queen of Carthage, and the Sorceress, who engineers her downfall, made his look quite different.
For one thing, the singers do not take center stage; they are either cast into the pit — the orchestra pit, that is — or placed at the side near the wings. More important, Morris, who doesn't hesitate to toss out a libretto if he thinks it has nothing to do with the music, sets aside Tate's restrained tone in retelling Virgil's tale of destructive passion, creating, in Acocella's words, a "profoundly sexual dance."
"Since Dido is a queen," she writes, "Morris's choreography for her and her court is very stylized — angular, hieratic, as if it were taken from some ancient court tradition — yet even those emphatically noble dances are forthright about sex. When Purcell's Dido, in her first aria, sings of being 'press'd with torment,' Morris's Dido places one hand on her breast and one on her abdomen, both pointing downward, and slowly opens her legs. She tells us where it hurts — not just in the heart. Later ... when she accepts Aeneas' love suit, she again opens her legs. We know what is coming."
Is this a corruption of Purcell's chaste opera or simply a modern response to Purcell's music? Seated on a bench, employing his torso and pelvis to convey grief as well as sexuality, Morris looks to this viewer a lot like a dancer performing Martha Graham's "Lamentation." It's different because Graham's solo is in no way sexual (the costume is a tube of jersey fabric covering her from head to toe), but similar in that both certainly convey profound loss.
The other heroine of the opera, Acocella points out, is the Sorceress, an anti-Dido, her coven of witches an anti-court. "The parallel is clear enough in Purcell's opera," she says, "but in the dance, Morris makes it clearer by having the same dancer, in the same costume, play both Dido and the Sorceress, and by using the same ensemble (again in the same costumes) for both the courtiers and the witches."
While one of the reasons Morris moved his company from New York to Belgium was to produce L'Allegro and Dido in an opera house with live music, neither was a success there, and the latter was a disaster on its premiere. With no tradition of modern dance in Belgium, Acocella points out, critics saw Morris as a "sort of noble savage." Dido, not to put too fine a point on it, bombed; critics and audiences did not like what Acocella calls "the juxtaposition of grave tragedy with obscenity and hilarity," and neither did some American audiences, although in Boston and New York, where it was performed in 1989 and 1990, respectively, audiences rose cheering to their feet.
When Morris made Dido, he was neither a stranger to opera houses as an audience member nor inexperienced at choreographing opera dances. His passion for opera began in grade school, he said in a recent interview, when he saw Donizetti's lighthearted Elisir d'Amore. At 16, he saw Wagner's Ring cycle (the Seattle Opera is well known for its summer marathon performances in which all four operas are seen back to back), and in 1986 he created his first dance for opera, working with soprano Josephine Barstow to make a "Dance of the Seven Veils" for a Seattle Opera production of Richard Strauss's Salome, and persuading her to strip all seven veils down to a G-string. Since then Morris has choreographed for three productions directed by Peter Sellars: John Adams's Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, and a 1988 Marriage of Figaro for which he created a rock dance to the fandango in the wedding scene. He has made his own version of the Gertrude Stein-Virgil Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts, recently reprised for his company's 25th anniversary season, and in 1991 both choreographed and directed a Figaro. In 1997 he did likewise for Jean Philippe Rameau's Platée, working with set designer Adrianne Lobel and costume designer Isaac Mizrahi. Like Dido, it is a highly contemporary take on a Baroque score, the title character making a waddling entrance onto a stage set with what appears to be a bathtub. The work's not tragic or particularly sexual, just joyous. Singers, as in Dido, are not onstage.*
They will be, however, for Orfeo at the Met. The countertenor David Daniels will replace the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as Orfeo, Maija Kovalevska is Euridice, and Heidi Grant Murphy is Amor. The conductor James Levine has requested a chorus of close to 100, placed on risers. Morris is working with the set designer Allen Moyer, who created the setting for the San Francisco Ballet's production of Morris's Sylvia, and, again, Mizrahi is designing the costumes.
This is Morris's third "whack," as he put it in a February interview, at Gluck's opera. For the first, in Seattle, in 1988, he choreographed a ballet, gavotte, chaconne, and minuet the composer had inserted in the 1774 version for the Paris Opera, as well as a solo for himself inserted in the "Dance of the Furies" that was an homage to Isadora Duncan. "I did that," he said, "because I knew she had choreographed to that music."
Morris returns to the 1762 version of Orfeo for his first commission for the Met. He has both choreographed and directed the work in the past for his company and, more recently, for the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston. Twenty-eight dancers will perform — the 18 from the MMDG augmented by dancers from the Metropolitan's resident ballet company and elsewhere.
"The principals will move around," Morris said, "and will probably have guidelines about how to comport. In Boston, I made gesture language for them." I asked him how well he gets along with singers, who are notorious among some choreographers for being extremely uncooperative. (Balanchine, for his 1936 Orpheus at the Met, put singers and chorus into the orchestra pit to get them out of the way of the dancers and some unwieldy scenery by Russian designer Pavel Tchelitchew.) Morris said he "loves working with singers, works with them all the time," but adds, "how well I get along with them other than as a choreographer, you would have to ask them."
Morris and Levine have pared down the score to 90 minutes, so it can be presented without an intermission, which Morris feels is appropriate for this opera. Balanchine's was two hours long and shocked the audience profoundly with its modernistic themes, which Lincoln Kirstein later commented were a commentary on concentration camps and political oppression.
Morris laughed when asked if his production would shock the Metropolitan's audience, as his Dido had scandalized the people of Brussels.
"It will be gorgeous and exciting," he said, "which might, I suppose, be shocking to the traditionalists."
Martha Ullman West is a dance writer in Portland, Ore., and a senior advisory editor at Dance magazine.
*CORRECTION: The article is incorrect in its stating that the singers in Morris's Platée are in the pit as they appear in Dido. They are actually on stage.
