One of the benefits of longevity is the chance to mix and match the past and near present. Mark Morris and his superb company brought dances from the early ‘90s and late ‘00s to the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center in Brookfield Saturday night, and you could trace a sort of trajectory from then to almost now.
In Going Away Party, from 1990, Morris relishes his bad-boy reputation, turning the coy sexuality of a Texas hoedown inside out. Set to music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, the suite starts out demure and four-square, except for the fact that this group is one person short of a traditional square-dance octet, a mysterious outsider (Samuel Black) adding a further element of sexual tension to the proceedings. The gingham innocence is soon transformed into ever flirtier and baudier roundelay, where the men regularly turn their backs to zip up their flies, and the lyrics “feel your lips on mine” are matched with the men carrying the woman with their legs wrapped around the men’s necks. By the final number, the sashaying innocence of the country moves are punctuated with footstomping tantrums of raw, knock-kneed desire, and the couples depart to leave the stranger in darkness.
Grand Duo (1993) has been called Morris’s Rite of Spring, and it certainly showcases his talent for rich, large-scale compositions (the title refers not to the 14-strong ensemble, but to the music, Lou Harrison’s high-voltage suite for violin and piano Jesse Mills and Colin Fowler played it magnificently). It starts in the mode of high-modern expressionism, with dancers posing as if for the sculptor of a Greek frieze, then taking the stage with a vocabulary of neo-Classical gestures that evoke Martha Graham, the stage becoming a sea of hard-angled limbs and taut poses. Civilization itself seems to drop away as the piece goes on, giving way eventually to a primal stomp that is just as much Busby Berkeley as Nijinsky. The company serpentines into spiraling circles (this is a dance to see from the balcony), and faces forward, in a demi-plie, slapping their pelvises in syncopated time to the music. But it’s a piece of great delicacy as well, with the movement of one section driven by variations on the movement of two extended index fingers.
That kind of quiet, human subtlety is what distinguished the two later pieces on the program. Excursions (2008) puts six dancers in a box, so to speak, a marked area of the stage that is both border and enclosure. In one section, it’s like a secret room of childhood fascination, with dancers entering it one-by-one with wild-eyed curiosity. But in another, it’s an cold urban grid; the group marches around it like gray-flanneled drones, an irregular stride that’s interrupted with pauses of indecision and even total collapses.
But it was the opening piece, Italian Concerto (2007), that seemed to evoke Morris’s quintessential spirit. For all joys that the flexed precision of Grand Duo offered, the seductive wit and easy humanity of this modest dance was Morris at his best. The vocabulary here is commonplace but elegant – a joyful fist pump that seems to cheer for a particular Bach cadence in the music, playful hip shimmies, an expansive step-in-place that seems like the stride of a speedskater, and even a simple, isolated tilt of the head. Sometimes it’s just a matter of posture, as when John Heginbotham mirrors a musical resolution with a gentle puff of relaxation, his heels drop back to the floor and his carriage slackens as if he forgot the question he was about to ask. In Heginbotham’s touching solo (which Morris has danced himself), he returns again and again to the back of the stage, facing us, placing his hand over his heart. As a musical phrase ends, his hand rises and falls gently on his chest, reminding us of what seems to be Morris’ most cherished idea – that dance, art, beauty, and certainly life itself begins simply with the drawing of a breath and a beating of a heart.
