This article titled “Mark Morris Dance Group – review” was written by Luke Jennings, for The Observer on Sunday 1st December 2013 00.05 UTCGreat choreographers offer us visions of paradise. Sometimes these are celestial, as in Frederick Ashton‘s luminous Symphonic Variations, or Kenneth MacMillan‘s Requiem; sometimes they are not so much images of heaven as counter-images of our troubled time on earth. Into this category one might place the vision scenes in the 19th-century works of Petipa, and the flawless realm summoned by Balanchine. “That’s where I want to go when I die,” a friend whispered to me recently as the curtain rose on Symphonie Concertante, and a corps de ballet glittering in pink and white against an arctic blue cyclorama.
In our resolutely humanistic age, we still see flashes of this domain in lyrical ballets such as Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour, but today’s paradise is an earthly one, and its principal artificer is Mark Morris. In the 20th century, modernist ballet always seemed to be asking the same question. The moonlit dancers of Balanchine’s Serenade, suspended between divinity and sad fallibility. The haunted sirens of Ashton’s Scènes de Ballet. The cast of Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering, gazing bemusedly skyward. “Where do we go from here?” they seem to be asking.
Morris provides an answer, and a postmodern sensibility unconstrained by the tensions and ambiguities that so often haunted the work of his predecessors. The men of his company have a civilian look about them, the women are sturdy and unethereal. Morris’s inspiration is music and his subject, more often than not, is joy. We see this, par excellence, in his Festival Dance. To the silvery crosscurrents of a Hummel piano trio the dancers pair up, and are whirled into centrifugal circles and intersecting lines. The choreography is loose-limbed but precisely phrased; the footwork folksy and elaborately cross-stitched. Individuals emerge, but are quickly subsumed into the whole.
Individuals rarely alter the flow of a Morris work. Rather than conflict, there’s choreographic counterpoint; the surface remains untroubled. Socrates, set to Erik Satie’s composition for voice and piano, is in this sense an archetypal Morris work: the subject is the philosopher’s death by poison, but the stately current of the choreography, with its formal lines and friezes, is consolatory. Morris’s spirit guide here is not Socrates but Satie. It’s as if, in the quintessentially human form of music, the choreographer is offering us a blueprint for the future. Follow music’s (and by extension, humanity’s) ineluctable progress towards resolution, he seems to be saying, and all will be well.
This is what people love about Morris’s work. He offers a sense of Arcadian possibility: a return to an age of gold. In The Muir, set to Irish and Scottish folk songs arranged by Beethoven, he presents life as a picnic, touched by moments of regret but essentially sunlit. Crosswalk is a jaunty rush of communitarian fun set to Weber’s Grand Duo Concertant. Everything in the garden (with the possible exception of Socrates’s hemlock) is lovely, and assembled with extraordinary skill. So it almost certainly reflects poorly on me when I write that there are elements of Morris’s work that I can’t quite digest. The fey, skipping men, the relentlessly upbeat smiles, and the hey-nonny-no of it all. I’d love to buy into his consoling, musically impelled universe but I’m afraid I can’t, quite. It’s just not my idea of heaven.
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