Mark Morris Comes to Town
By: Arlene Croce
The New Yorker

Curly –Haired androgynously handsome young dancer-choreographers who look like Michelangelo’s David have been a feature of the dance scene for some time. Unlike the shaggy hippies whom they replaced, they can be found in ballet as well as in modern dance, in Europe as well as in New York and other American cities. They seem to have come in on the wave of seventies glamour- unisex, it was called then-that is now at flood tide among the young. It’s a look I can do without, and I wouldn’t be bringing it up except for the fact that Mark Morris, who closed the fall season at Dance Theatre Workshop, has that look without the aureole that puts me off. Morris is a serious choreographer. He has talent, and also, along with his self-awareness, the self-possession that makes the androgynous-youth look stand for something besides dime-store narcissism. Actually, he does sometimes make it stand for that, but it’s a precisely identified attitude-one can smell the popcorn in the air.

Morris, whose ringlets are brown-not blond, like the other michelangelini-has some of Sylvester Stallone’s droopy-lidded sultriness, but he’s saved from absurdity by toughness of mind. He doesn’t use his soft, pretty-boy looks on the audience. He doesn’t flash camp messages with his eyes or messages of any kind-not even when he does turn in drag. The meanings are all in the movement. From up close, which is how you see him in D.T.W.’s loft theatre, his eyes while he dances are blind with fatigue; they have the permanently bruised look of insomnia. And he dances with insomniacal energy. His large, wide-hipped body, his big legs and feet are all over the place, lunging, clomping, skittering. Every movement is clear and precise, yet bluntly delivered; strong, yet with a feminine softness. Even the big Lil Abner feet are never rough. Prepared to laugh at the drag act, the audience is silenced by the lack of imposture in it. It isn’t an act; it’s Morris declaring an aspect of his nature as matter-of-factly as the Japanese onnagata-female impersonator. It’s impersonal impersonation. He defuses dangerously gaudy material by shaping it into a dance the presents itself-presents dance-as the true subject. In the second of two concerts, he performed a companion piece in a business suit, discarding jacket and vest as he entered. The differences in the quality in the movement were in structural, technical, and musical details, not in sexual ones. Morris turns the transsexual chic and the frivolous passions of his generation into pretexts for dances. He’s committed to his time and place, he seizes on the theatricality of it, but he doesn’t try to be anything more than a good choreographer and a completely sincere theatre artist.

Morris works in the time-honored traditions of the modern –dance choreographer who breed a company and a repertory entirely out of his own dance style. His performing background includes ballet, modern and postmodern groups, and folk dance. His dances, among which solos number far less than pieces forge and small ensembles, blend all these influences into an indefinable Mark Morrisian brew. His own physical versatility is the model for the group (seven women, six men), but he doesn’t set up any unfair terms of competition. Much of his choreography is plainly set out, and all of it is musical. The sharp musical timing gives the dancers another standard to aim at; they aren’t lost if they can’t move just like their leader. But they have to be able to handle radical dynamic changes (Morris shows more variety here than any five other choreographers his age) rung on a restricted range of steps. Not easy to make so little count for so much. Morris’s inflections of a single phrase are a real test of virtuosity. He sometimes loads a phrase beyond his dancers’ capacities-requiring them, for example, to fall splat and spring erect on one count. But Morris is a witty taskmaster who can make a virtue of sloppy recoveries. His invention is at its richest in the exigencies that come about through having to create choreography for other people. “Bijoux,” his solo for the small, light, and agile Teri Weksler, filters her style sympathetically through his own.

The music, a suite of nine brief songs by Satie, was on tape. Live, it might have exerted less harrowing pressure, So musical a performance-such musical choreography-needs accompaniment that breathes. The occasional impression of steppiness I get from this and other Morris pieces is an effect of density created from limited means. He really doesn’t have a lot of step, and, though he may not think so, he doesn’t need them-neither does Paul Taylor. (Morris’s combination of musicality, sprawling energy, and sparse vocabulary may remind you of Taylor; to sharpen the resemblance, Morris also has a flair for comedy. But his originality defeats comparisons.) In another Satie piece, he reversed the proportions of “Bijoux”: instead of many brief packed solos for one dancer, a woman, he created, to the music of “Socrate,” an extended slow-moving frieze of discontinuities for six soloist, all men. Draining his line of the high-contrast dynamics that give it shape, color, and texture, Morris offered us the nothingness of steps. “The Death of Socrates” was a parched and static vista peopled by boys in Greek tunics. As a picture, it had life and thought; its intentions were clearly stated. But as a dance it was inert.

What does Morris do that’s funny? Well, he always includes one or two mime pieces to pop music on his programs. I like tem less than his dances, particularly when they’re accompanied by country songs with long spoken inspirational texts. Audiences find these semi-captioned displays of Morris’s hilarious. I prefer the Thai or Indian numbers, where the expostulatory gestures chatter alongside incomprehensible ditties and aren’t upstaged by a corniness already familiar and complete in itself. Best of all are the pieces that blend mime and dance, and the best of these, like Morris’s “masculine” solo, or like “Dogtown,” are both funny and unfunny. In “Dogtown,” done to the quizzical songs of Yoko Ono, Morris actually makes dogs. He contracts his palette to a few crouching, crawling, prostrate forms interspersed with frisky leaps, usually by one dancer upon the unsuspecting rump of another. But the amazing thing about “Dogtown” is that it doesn’t operate literally. The dogginess of it all is a continual shadowy implication in movement as finely drawn and cunningly interlocked as the pattern on an ancient Greek jar. In the title number, the rhythm of forms is so beautifully controlled that it wins laughs from the sheer electricity of its timing. It’s the design, not the subject. that becomes funny.

The mastery of mimetic implication in the logic of forms is a mark of wisdom as rare in choreography as musical mastery. No other choreographer under thirty has it; the few of those over thirty who have it have been great. Like musicality, it is a gift, and it appears right away. (No use waiting for those other bright young choreographers to get the idea through observation or experience. If the things that root their art in life are not instinctively understood, they are not understood at all.) Morris comes from Seattle, where he will return later this year to teach the University of Washington. His first New York concert was held in 1980. I encountered his work two years later, and the wonderful effrontery of it still hasn’t left me. Nothing in his biography, training, or performing history explained how he could have come by such technical sophistication.

This year’s concerts show him using and flexing his technique with even greater assurance. “Canonic ¾ Studies,” a parody of human beings in ballet class, is one evolutionary step ahead of “Dogtown.” In its investigation of three-quarter time and in nearly every other way, it is an improvement on 1982’s “New Love Song Waltzes,” the piece that most of Morris’s admirers love best and the one that stunned me with its precocity. Seen again this year, much of it seemed to big and splashy for the Brahms liebeslieder-walzer it was set to. It remains Morris’s purple ballet, his moment of excess before the reining in that signifies the start of true growth. Next to New Love Song Waltzes,” Canonic ¾ studies, to an arrangement of ballet-class tunes, appears cautious, but it is the more secure piece by far-less in need of contrapuntal commotion and shock effects to keep the audience in a state of excitement. (During an adagio in the Brahms, a body is dragged backward across the floor, right over another body, which is lying there prone.) One of the “studies” has two women being alternately lifted by one man in minimal arcs that zip back and forth and forth and back. Like “Dogtown,” it is the kind of number that, once seen, is never forgotten.

There is a kind of cautiousness in Morris’s current work; he tends to make each piece a batch of exercises or lampoons that don’t quite add up to a complete entity with a point of view (though the suite “Dogtown” comes close). Instead of a conclusion, he reaches an arbitrary cutoff point. It is obvious that he is still learning, but it is also obvious that no one is teaching him. His “technique” is something he was born with. The raw gift of choreography may be the most individualizing of all gifts to experience. Those who possess it are enclosed in a kind of sanctuary. No word or sound contaminates the freshness of their language, and dance language as we have known it-old academic or anti-academic usage-falls from their bodies like rags. In its place are new sights, which we perceive with a thrill of recognition.