Mark Morris brings light and warmth to GMU

Dancing Honeymoon, Mark Morris Dance Company (photo by Christopher Duggan)
The annual visits of Mark Morris Dance Group to the area are always welcome. The group's latest appearance at the George Mason University Center for the Arts, however, was a much-needed shot in the arm after what has been a long, long winter. The selection of four choreographies, two a decade or more in age and two premiered just last year, offered a ray of sunlight, with none of the somber qualities of some previous programs.

Late Romantic ballet was one of the great fusions of all the arts, akin to Richard Wagner's music drama. In his long career Mark Morris has stripped away almost all of that trend toward unification of the arts, using no sets, few props, and in most cases no easily recognizable narrative, at least not in the traditional sense. A Morris choreography is abstract, concentrated on movement, music (always performed, as here, by live musicians), and mood conveyed through lighting and color.

The evening opened with A Forest, premiered last May. Costumed in unisex body suits of gray and white paisley (designed by Maile Okamura), the dancers incarnated the whimsical musical gestures from Haydn's piano trio no. 44 (Hob. XV:28), performed by violinist Georgy Valtchev, cellist Michael Haas, and pianist Colin Fowler. The theme of threes -- three instruments in three movements -- is the somewhat obvious main focus, as the nine dancers are grouped into a trio of trios. Most of the movements were playful: bending knees on strong downbeats, flashing the hands upward on pizzicato notes, standing still in extended poses at sudden silences. In the enigmatic second movement, the piano's meandering bass line inspired much striding around the stage, and loud bass notes knocked dancers down to the floor. It created a joyous atmosphere of bubbly exuberance but seemed to miss a more profound statement.

The other new work, Pure Dance Items, premiered last October, was the most active and exhausting. Selections from Terry Riley's two-hour marathon string quartet Salome Dances for Peace added up to about a half-hour of near-constant movement for a group of twelve dancers, often unbalanced by the exclusion of one dancer. This began in the striking opening sequence, where one dancer is seated apart from the rest of the group, eventually joining them in all of their movements, but only with his arms, as if his legs are paralyzed. In a thrilling moment of fantasy, this dancer stood and joined the ensemble for the rest of the dance, jostling the group's order. Colorful sports jerseys and shorts for both men and women (designed by Elizabeth Kurtzman) evoked an athletic joy in movement and physical exertion, recalling soccer players or, as Miss Ionarts saw it, 60s-style surfers.



Pure Dance Items, Mark Morris Dance Company (photo by Costas)
The solo dance Serenade, premiered in 2003 here at the GMU Center for the Arts, provided a moment of calm. Lesley Garrison, costumed in an Isaac Mizrahi black and white skirt with white bow, seemed at times to mimic traits of Spanish, Indian, or Japanese dance, using props (a copper pipe, a fan, and finger cymbals) in the middle dances. Morris made this choreography for himself, making the decision to add the sound of castanets to the final movement of the piece, Lou Harrison's hypnotic Serenade for Guitar and Percussion. He was unable to ask the permission of the composer, who had died as Morris was rehearsing the new dance. Garrison may have taken over the dance now, but in a surprise move Morris joined the musicians (guitarist Robert Belinić and percussionist Stefan Schatz) on stage to play his castanet part.

Morris's participation set up the final piece, Dancing Honeymoon, for which the choreographer himself sang Ethan Iverson's transcription and arrangement of jazz standards sung by Gertrude Lawrence and Jack Buchanan. A group of seven dancers, in sun-yellow costumes evoking the 1920s and 30s (designed by Elizabeth Kurtzman), mimed the mild innuendos of the songs in tableaux that might seem escapist in the style of La La Land (a "kitschfest," as Alex Ross put it) but whose innocence and elan won me over. The piece, premiered in 1998, is Morris's love letter to dance, heard in the opening words of the title song: "I hated dancing / 'til I met you: / It never found me / until I found your arms around me." Morris's singing was perhaps not great, but that was hardly the point; when he brought out the castanets again, for the song "Goodnight, Vienna," Morris seemed at one with the music, even if he was no longer dancing.

This program repeats tonight at 8 p.m. at George Mason University's Center for the Arts in Fairfax, Va.

Mark Morris and Lou Harrison

Words, Mark Morris Dance Group
The Mark Morris Dance Group has been coming to the George Mason University Center for the Arts every couple of years. We try not to miss any of their local appearances, especially not one that features two choreographies set to the music of American composer Lou Harrison (1917-2003), seen on Saturday evening in the first of two performances. The whole affair, including two fun dances set to Mendelssohn and a recording of Indian music, was whimsical and occasionally breath-taking, invigorated by Morris's reliance on the shape of the music to create his dancers' movements -- and, not unrelated, his insistence on live music.

Morris created Pacific for a different company, and this performance was the premiere of this choreography with his own troupe. Harrison and Morris collaborated on several works in the 1980s and 90s, and this work sets the third and fourth movements of the composer's piano trio, performed here by violinist Georgy Valtchev, cellist Robert Burkhart, and pianist Colin Fowler. Sections of music for solo violin and combinations of the instruments correspond to groupings of the nine dancers, with the men bare-chested in long skirts and the women in dresses (costumes by Martin Pakledinaz), combining bright colors with white. Stark lighting of glowing colors projected on a rear screen (lighting by James F. Ingalls) was matched to the costumes. The finale of this dance, bringing together all of the dancers, was vibrant and joy-filled, with shifts of steps that corresponded to the metric disorientation in the music, over a constant beating pulse.

Grand Duo, also from the 90s, opens to the somewhat mysterious prelude movement of Harrison's Grand Duo for Violin and Piano, on a stage shrouded in darkness, with the dancers reaching their hands into a beam of light shining across the stage. To the slightly folksy, active-sounding movements that follow, Morris gives a somewhat ritual or tribal feel of dances for his large group of 14 dancers, with the men in skirts or loincloths and the women in colored dresses. The second movement, Stampede, had multi-metric shifts in the movements that matched the music, echoed in the later Pacific, followed by A Round, featuring graceful but painstaking held poses. The finale, the antic Polka, was a wild rumpus of crazy movement, capturing beautifully the verve of Harrison's music, hammered clusters and all.

Other Reviews: Sarah Kaufman, Mark Morris Dance Group’s many surprises flow naturally at GMU (Washington Post, March 2)

The two dances in between provided the whimsy, especially the brief Tamil Film Songs in Stereo Pas de Deux, the only piece performed to a recording, featuring the sounds of Indian music. Brian Lawson's campy gay dance instructor harasses, belittles, but ultimately affirms the struggling dance student of Stacy Martorana, a welcome moment of levity with some resonance as commentary on how dance is taught.

The longer Words is set to selections from Mendelssohn's various Songs without Words. Here the costumes (pastel tank tops and shorts with belts) and a blanket, carried on and off to cover entrances and exits, suggested a picnic or beach party, as did the playful gestures of some of the dances, something like tennis or another type of game. Again, Morris found movements that were the ideal visual counterpart of the music they accompanied: twirling bodies for the chromatic "spinning wheel" motif of op. 67/4; heavy steps and lowered heads for the "funeral march" (op. 62/3), ending with two dancers finally seeing one another and looking into each other's faces; much of the choreography is a jeu de miroirs, with dancers in paired parallel movements. Most strikingly, in one piece dancers clenched their hands in front of their bodies, making them shudder up and down, when there was the distinctive sound of an authentic cadence over a tonic pedal. The sound, which is distinctive, will now forever be linked to that gesture in my mind.