by Leigh Witchel
You barely need to see Mark Morris’ choreography to know what’s going to happen. For some people that’s the satisfaction of it. For others, that’s what makes them grind their teeth.
Morris’ world premiere for the Mostly Mozart Festival, “Sport,” was a coloring-book version of athletics to Satie’s “Sports et Divertissements.” Sure enough, there was sport. And divertissements.
The antic, but deadpan, comedy was hinted at by the color-blocked costumes that had echoes of athletic wear. Dancers trudged or were carried across the stage. Some rocked or swung others, or formed a moving gallery of animal targets, with three in front, shooting. At another point, the dancers grabbed their asses as a gag. The humor was insistent, and less funny because of it.
The games continued. Blind man’s buff and tennis, complete with grunting noises, and finally golf, with the ball going into the bushes as the lights went out.
Not everything was that predictable. The work started with an enigmatic image in silhouette: a hint of drapery that turned out to be a woman standing on a fabric sledge as a man dragged her. During blind man’s buff, when a woman failed to catch anyone, she removed her blindfold and left, disappointed. The others bowed to her as if in recognition for the effort. Another woman was tossed up on to shoulders of some men, and covered with a black cloth. But even these things felt as if they were deployed like clockwork. “Sport,” like many of Morris’ satirical pieces, felt negligible.
“The Empire Garden,” made a decade ago to Ives for the Boston Symphony, wasn’t any less predictable. A quartet of dancers in bright uniforms gestured, pointed and crept. Another quartet replaced them, and started marching and jumping. The references weren’t just military; the flattened, frieze-like poses recalled Paul Taylor’s version of “The Rite of Spring.”
The Ives tumbled into a combination of popular songs as the cast continued marching, jumping and turning. The action neatly paralleled the Ives, and as Arlene Croce complained about Doris Humphrey and Bach, it turned Ives’ music into a nest of mixing bowls.
A quartet started shooting. Ives came to a crescendo, the cast marched in pairs until one dancer was carried aloft, and everyone knocked themselves face down. At the end of the jazzy final movement, the work ended with most of the cast on the ground again, though a few still remained up. Both “Sport” and “Empire Garden” looked at aggression, but Morris’ comic-book vision reduced that to cutouts. It felt as if Morris hadn’t just made Ives, but Kurt Jooss’ “The Green Table” into a set of mixing bowls. In bright, kitschy colors.
The finale, “V,” was more pleasant, if no less apparent. First danced in late 2001, the dance is notable for what Morris does best – spatial arrangements.
Things started out predictably enough, with seven dancers in blue in an inverted V (what else?), moving their arms note for movement. They jumped and jumped again; you could sing the melody to their movement. The dancers in blue were replaced by seven dancers in matching pale costumes who did the same motif of least resistance. The movement ended with a woman draped over a man’s shoulder (and like Taylor’s “Promethean Fire,” linked by time as much as content to the tragedy of September 11).
The adagio was more somber, with groups crawling across the stage on the beat – another Taylor echo, this time “Esplanade.” The procession was neatly geometrical and metrical; dancers crawled, got up and crawled again. But the space in which it happened wasn’t as predictable. The action didn’t happen dead center. Couples wrapped and unwrapped at the sides; later on, Morris pitted an X axis against a Y axis.
But a duet unsurprisingly turned back into a mass crawl right as the theme returned. Women were brought in aloft by two men to land and crawl, and one dancer got up on the final note of the movement.
Men rushed out in a diagonal for a scherzo, jumping and rotating, galloping and zig-zagging. Everything purled along agreeably, and finally Lauren Grant did a balletic petit allegro that was probably the first combination of academic dance steps, all evening.
The Schumann quintet was lovely, the dance was lyrical, and the whole evening was obvious.
There’s an innate pleasure in consonance and resolution; and composers and choreographers make use of it all the time. An example, Balanchine and Tchaikovsky arrived at the same point right near the end of “Diamonds”: the music ramped up to the final theme and the full cast of dancers assembled on stage and moved in unison doing the most basic steps. Both composer and choreographer warned you what was about to happen from miles away, and when it finally did, it was thrilling. But as often as not, Balanchine created an architecture that ran parallel to the music rather than on the same track.
Morris aimed for a simpler, nursery-school pleasure of being able to patty-cake to the tune. It was enjoyable and reassuring, but you were being stroked by choreography.
Copyright © 2019 by Leigh Witchel
“Sport,” “Empire Garden,” “V” – Mark Morris Dance Group
Mostly Mozart Festival
Rose Theater, New York, NY
July 11, 2019
Cover: Mark Morris Dance Group in “Empire Garden.” Photo © Stephanie Berger.
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