Dance
Dancing to music
Sophie Constanti
Over the past decade, the American choreographer Mark Morris has emerged as the singular and brilliant force behind a contemporary revival of that lost art dancing to music. For Morris is one of the few dance-makers working today whose musicality, talent for movement, invention and breadth of vision are truly outstanding. Still only 37, he has created dances to Bach, Purcell, Handel and Brahms, to country-and-western songs and Tamil film sound-tracks. He is capable of making music as much a visual as an aural experi- ence, and of revealing the hidden subtleties and cryptic dissonances of scores which most other choreographers would not dare (and are not equipped) to approach.
Take, for instance, his dark and fastidi- ous two-parter Mosaic and United, to Henry Cowell's String Quartets 3 and 4, or Grand Duo, a work which stabs at the fierce heart of Lou Harrison's Grand Duo for Violin and Piano with urgently driven daggers of motion.
Although Morris draws on a variety of forms and styles — ballet, folk, social danc- ing, early American modern dance — he has never shown a jot of reliance on the fads and fashions now adopted wholesale by floundering avant-gardists. For Morris, dance is not an impoverished art; he has no need to collaborate with artists from other disciplines or to borrow ideas or techniques from other art forms in order to enrich his pure dance creations. Morris woos — and wins — his audience through an irresistible combination of music and movement. There are no clever, elaborate sets or dis- tractingly trendy costume designs. The per- formers do not recite texts, or interact with video projections, or do anything remotely post-modern. They just dance.
While Morris could be classified as a tra- ditionalist in the sense that he crafts dances to music and is concerned with rhythm and dynamics and with choreographic shape and structure, his dances have a fresh, con- temporary sensibility. Anyone who thinks that Morris's approach is old-fashioned should consider the fact that, at a time when multi-media cross-collaboration is a useful, even indispensable device for dis- guising bad choreography, the task of mak- ing dances to music has become an enormous and frightening challenge for lesser choreographers.
At this year's Edinburgh Festival, the Mark Morris Dance Group presented a total of seven works contained in two pro- grammes. A fire at the Playhouse Theatre meant that the performances were hastily relocated to the Meadowbank Sports Hall — not an ideal venue but one which accommodated with surprising dignity a succession of world-class singers and musi- cians. There was the illustrious quartet of Amanda Roocroft, Felicity Palmer, John Mark Ainsley and Thomas Allen singing the Brahms Liebesliederwalzer for Morris's New Love Song Waltzes and Love Song Waltzes; Christopher Robson, the coun- tertenor, for A Spell, set to John Wilson's songs from Shakespeare's verse; the 22 members of Edinburgh's Schola Cantorum, led by Eric Ibler, in Bach's Jesu, Meine Freude for Morris's work of the same name; and violinist James Clark together with pianist Linda Dowdell (the Group's own musical director) for the four-part, increasingly furious Grand Duo.
In Grand Duo, 14 dancers form a stomp- ing, shaking, flailing Greek chorus. Semi- bacchanalian, semi-herculean, they toil through a series of ritual dances, consis- tently breaking into new patterns of har- nessed abandon, while all the time managing to fit together like the parts of an Escher puzzle. Rather than choosing to echo the grand duo element of Harrison's composition through an extended duet, Morris splits his group of dancers so that the teams can repeatedly oppose and merge. The resultant designs and effects are at their most potent in the polka finale, a boisterous, frenzied chain dance for the full cast, the tormented participants' heads, torsos and limbs now appearing to operate involuntarily.
A Spell, given its world premiere at Edin- burgh, is a mischievous triangle for Ruth Davidson, Guillermo Resto (as the lovers) and Morris (playing Cupid). This is Morris at his most whimsical, indulging in the kind of camp characterisation which was put to more effective use in one of his earlier pieces, The Tamil Film Songs, but which here only highlights how much more rigor- ous, interesting and communicative his less jocular works are.
As a performer, however, Morris brings a supreme confidence to the step dance line-up in Home. This arresting, upbeat refrain not only separates the sorrowful songs of Michelle Shocked and bassist Rob Wasserman (both playing live at the Mead- owbank) but encapsulates the divine com- bination of intricacy and naturalness which is the hallmark of Morris's best work.
Ruth Davidson, Mark Mon-is and Guillermo Resto in A Spell'
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