One dance writer hailed Mark Morris as "our Mozart of Modern dance," and the comparison is not unfounded. Like Mozart, Morris has proven to be both an incredibly prolific artist and an outspoken rabble-rouser. But it is his musicality that truly...
[more]One dance writer hailed Mark Morris as "our Mozart of Modern dance," and the comparison is not unfounded. Like Mozart, Morris has proven to be both an incredibly prolific artist and an outspoken rabble-rouser. But it is his musicality that truly cinches the comparison. Mark Morris began making dances based shamelessly on music at a time when choreographers of his generation disdained it. His dancers play the role of the orchestra, mimicking the groupings of voices and instruments -- solo for solo, group for group. This intense relationship with music has spawned easy and fruitful comparisons to George Balanchine. But he does not abstract the body into musical notation as Balanchine did -- rather, Morris makes music the center of a very human universe.
Morris' combined preferences for Baroque music and vocal music represent a systematized humanity onstage. The formality of baroque music stands for the ever-present order of things, while the vocalizations stand for the "things" themselves -- blood, guts, and viscera transcendent through song. Song becomes dance and vice versa, one revealing the other. He beautifully lumps together the pop, the baroque, the formal, and the folk to enact the stuff of life and the arduous effort that stuff requires.
Indeed, Morris' love for the "stuff of life" makes his music-based choreography especially accessible. "I love to see their butts," says Morris of his dancers. Morris' dances, for all their intelligent musical knowledge, are also about the butt; Joan Acocella describes it as "an innocent, hardworking part of the body -- soft and round the seat of humility, the place that gets kicked." His movements come from the butt, from the center, from the earth, not from some Platonic ideal of line. His group dances somehow evoke Breughel's peasants or Picasso's gallumphing, pre-Cubist women. His dancers show weight, even heft, and most importantly, effort. He often creates dance phrases with the intention of revealing the human effort they take. Mark Morris loves the heavy thud of flesh on the floor, the struggle of the kinetic attempt.
Morris' sense of the joyously earthbound presumably comes from his early dance training in Balkan and Flamenco dance; both are traditionally concerned with the assertive rhythm of the foot pounding the floor and both are performed by communities of ordinary people. True to his roots, Morris maintains a company of "folks." They come in many shapes, sizes, and colors, and most are older than 30. His dancers are beautiful and decidedly not balletic. Although he has gone on to commission several classical ballets, he once referred to ballerinas as "dead virgins."
Morris openly takes credit for such comments. Openness, the joyous openness of his dances and the outward-facing openness of his personality, pervades his life. Morris is a natural public figure, but not necessarily an easy one. He is outspoken and completely passionate about artistic issues. He yelled out loud at a performance of Twyla Tharp's "Nine Sinatra Songs," bemoaning the treatment of women on the stage. He also called Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker "Anne Teresa de Tearjerker" to the press. And the public loved him for it. These outcries reveal his intolerance for dance that he feels doesn't think. His raucous persona also somehow echoes the familial, community feeling of his dances. He acts locally, drinking to the cause of his art and imposing his wild-haired, corpulent figure on the willowy fence-sitters that populate the dance world.
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