Morris and Mozart, Together at Last

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The New York Sun

For Mark Morris, a choreographer fiercely loyal to his music, the choice of score is momentous. So Mr. Morris’s announcement that “Mozart Dances,” his first evening-length work for his own company in years, would be set to three back-to-back Mozart piano pieces (Piano Concerto No.11, the Sonata in D Major for Two Pianos, and Piano Concerto No. 27) aroused curiosity — and a little concern.

It was, as Mr. Morris himself admitted, “more Mozart piano music than you would normally hear in a concert.” How would he sustain interest over nearly two hours of delicate, even-tempered music?

His answer arrived Thursday night, as the Mark Morris Dance Group presented “Mozart Dances,” with Emanuel Ax at the piano and Louis Langrée conducting the Lincoln Center Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.

The titles of the dance’s three subsections — “Eleven,” “Double,” and “Twenty-Seven” — signaled Mr. Morris’s intent. He wasn’t going to fill the minutes with narrative or humor. This was a serious dance about music, and it would succeed or fail on those terms.

It succeeds. Like the expressive piano music to which it is set, “Mozart Dances” is gentle, yet probes tender feelings. Like its score, it has moments of virtuosity embedded in long stretches of routine brilliance. Like its music, it meanders a bit, and not all of its developments are equally radiant. But just as Mozart’s score creates a world, Mr. Morris’s dance creates a world — a bit muted, and sometimes melancholy, but for all that, a world redolent of the joy of creating.

The dance takes place on a bare stage before Howard Hodgkin’s large, abstract back-wall paintings. The choreographer’s methods are many, but all bear Mr. Morris’s distinctive stamp. As usual, music visualization is key. Notes are matched to steps or movements: A downward-drifting hand brushes the air — left, right, left, right, left — as a phrase dies out, or a dancer with arms spread wide spins to the pace of a whirl of notes. The dancers are often wonderfully nonchalant in these movements — as unfussy in their motion as the finger that strikes the piano key.

Making musical structure visible is not merely about matching movements to persons. It is also takes the form of arraying dancers in formations that mirror the musical ones — memorably, the lone dancer (the piano line) against the ensemble (the orchestra). Such a solo performance opens “Eleven,” the essentially all-female first section of “Mozart Dances.” Even among the many similar discrete treasures in Mr. Morris’s oeuvre, this one holds a special place.

It is danced by Lauren Grant, and that fact alone is meaningful.Ms. Grant is a short, fuzzy-haired blonde in a black dress who, when she strides off to the wings, looks a little like the girls’ basketball team point guard at the prom. Mr. Morris’s troupe no longer has the variety of bodies that it had in its scruffy early years, but Ms. Grant is something of a bridge between the eras. She may be offbeat-looking and shorter than the other women, but she is a consummate dancer.

Throughout “Eleven” she flies in and out, attended by seven taller ladies in filmier dresses, who play the orchestra to her tinkling melody. At times she turns to them, mysteriously holding up one finger, as if to call a halt. She presses her palms against the back of her head, one of the piece’s recurring motifs.

Ms. Grant traces the piano line with a remarkable combination of grace and punch.

One moment she turns, her swanlike neck ducking and sweeping through space; the next minute, she looks like she’s conducting.Abruptly, as if finished, she may head for the wings; just as abruptly, she may find herself twirling giddily back toward center stage. Her body is as articulate as the music.

In the second section, the mostlymale “Double,” Joe Bowie is the compulsively-watchable lone dancer, a confident man in a courtly (if tattered) long jacket, no shirt, and long shorts. But this is not to be a dance centered on one man, and his opening solo leads quickly into the fifth of the nine movements — the literal and figurative heart of “Mozart Dances.”

It begins with the utmost simplicity. Six men join hands in a circle, circling left, then right on a dark stage with one spotlight. The atmosphere is hushed, the music quiet — just two pianos playing an andante. It looks like a folk dance, or even a square dance.

Then the men start to fall down, two at a time.The others pick them up, then two men join hands and make a bridge, and the other men, hands still linked, duck under the bridge in single file — that old folk dance move, “threading the needle.” Again and again, they cycle through — threading the needle, falling and picking one another up, joining hands and circling. A seventh man comes onstage, and spins around in the center of the circle, alone — until the group encircles him and lifts him.

And here emerges the piece’s second theme, to be sustained through the rest of the dance: After the pleasure of dancing to music, comes the pleasure of dancing in a community. It is an ancient image, the mismatched dancers spinning in a circle, hand in hand. And it is an image from folk dancing groups like the one Mr. Morris belonged to as a teenager.

Throughout “Double” and “Twenty-Nine” (which finally brings the men and women together), the communal theme reappears — in the lively, folkbased movement, in the diversity of bodies and pairings, in the long lines of linked dancers, in the featured solos that show off each dancer’s character before returning him or her to the fold. These are potent images, performed simply, without affect. It’s just a fact: Whenever a dancer falls, two others pick him up.

“I cannot bring a world quite round/ Although I patch it as I can,” Wallace Stevens wrote. Mr. Morris is not trying to bring this world ’round in “Mozart Dances” — there are slouches and everyday gestures in his Mozart, unmatched bodies and unorthodox segues. Rather, he patches it as he can, setting his very human movements to the music’s visions of heaven.


The New York Sun

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