Dance
Mark Morris Dance Group (Sadler's Wells)
Celestial qualities
Giannandrea Poesio
Mark Morris's visits to London are always a panacea for the disillusioned dancegoer craving some true artistry. Last week's performance of the Mark Morris Dance Group at Sadler's Wells was no exception. The programme, which included the world premiere of a new creation. 1/, was an exhilarating phantasmagoria of movements, colours, lights, refined humour, witty lyricism and pure dance.
It took off with / Don't Want to Love, which I raved about immediately after its premiere in Edinburgh in 1996. Five years later the work is still captivatingly fresh. The interaction between the danced action and some of Monteverdi's most beautiful madrigals is arguably the winning element of this creation. Without ever slipping into a choreographic translation of the sung text, the dancing responds to the moods and feelings evoked by the music and singing — which were both first-rate thanks to the members of Artek.
The dancing stands out for its fluidity and for a celestial quality that matches beautifully the notion of pure love expounded by each madrigal. I am not sure whether the contrast between the angelic lyricism of the piece and the more earthly qualities of the following one, Peccadillos, was entirely intentional. Still, the juxtaposition worked miracles.
Clad in a white shirt, black trousers, white socks and black shoes, Morris danced a series of solos to a set of morceaux by Erik Satie, played live by a pianist elegantly crouching in front of a tinkling toy-piano. The high-pitched, metallic sounds produced by the small instrument enhanced and complemented the now funny, now satirical actions that Morris performed in each dance. The overall effect was, in my view, somehow similar to that of Frederick Ashton's Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan. In the same way that the latter celebrated the charismatic figure of Duncan, Peccadillos is a celebration of Morris's stunning charisma.
Not unlike Duncan — at least according to those who witnessed her dancing — Morris has the ability of oozing theatre magic regardless of what he is dancing or doing. Indeed, the movements of each solo look simple and often technically undemanding. Yet it is how they are performed by their interpreter/choreographer that makes them unique. Again not unlike Duncan, Morris displays an unparalleled way of listening to the music and dancing through and with it, not merely to it.
Unlike Duncan, however, Morris is able to transfer and bestow such qualities on to the rest of his company, as Grand Duo revealed. The 1993 work provides the dancers of the company with a more than ideal vehicle to display in full both their superb artistic talents and technical skills. Grand Duo is one of the most enticing creations of the American choreographer, as well as one of the most representative ones of his art. With its perfect blend of dance and music, its visually inebriating choreography, as well as its enticingly different forms of movement, from the balletic to the everyday, the work is a compendium of the signature elements and key features of Morris's creativity.
At the end of the dance, amid a welldeserved thunderous ovation, many in the audience were asking each other what on earth could follow such an explosive piece. They had obviously underestimated Morris's sense of theatre as well as his creative versatility. V was everything but anticlimactic, even though it relied on a less incandescent and fast-paced content than Grand Duo. Set to Robert Schumann's Quintet in E flat for piano and strings, played this time on real instruments and not on toy ones, the work encompassed the lyricism first seen in I Don't Want to Love and the mesmerising visual solutions of Grand Duo without being a series of quotations. Based on a clearly identifiable game of geometric patterns, the work stands out for the way the old formula of a theme and variations — that is, visual and choreographic ones — has been adapted to suit a modern/postmodern piece. As such, it provided a more than ideal conclusion to a memorable evening.
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