Majestic
Harmony from a Different Time
Mark
Morris Dance Group
l'Allegro, il Penseroso, ed
il Moderato
Zellerbach Hall
September 4, 2003
reviewed
by Paul Parish
It's hard to believe there are readers of DanceviewWest
who aren't familiar with l'Allegro, il Penseroso,
ed il Moderato, but I ran into so many people I
knew outside Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley last Thursday
night, where the Mark Morris Dance Company opened the
Cal Performances season with a revival of this great
and famous work, who had never seen it before that I
suppose I'd better believe it. They had stars in their
eyes, as I did back in 1994 when we first saw it on
the West Coast.
It's
a big show: two hours worth of dancing, with a big cast
of dancers (24, which is a lot for modern dance), the
Philharmonia Baroque orchestra in the pit, the University
Chorus, and five virtuoso soloist-singers performing
Handel's great oratorio the ballet is named for, amidst
a phenomenal set of sliding scrims and drops in ravishing
jewel-toned colors, which descend and rise in a dance
of their own that makes a play of color which hurries
away the soul.
The
moving pictures Morris has set to Handel's music remind
me most of Disney's Fantasia. I mean that in
the nicest possible way: he respects all the talents
involved, as Handel has respected Milton's great pastoral
odes which he set to music, indeed very much in the
same spirit as Handel. L'Allegro is admiring,
even worshipful, without being at all fawning. From
beginning to end, what's going on in the music reflects
what's going on in the text, and what's going on in
the dance is a glad response to the score.
This
means the poems are at the heart of the experience—a
pair of odes that compare and contrast the pastimes
and points of view of the blithe spirit (who asks Mirth
to "haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee, Jest
and youthful jollity, Sport, that irksome care derides,
and Laughter holding both his sides") and the contemplative
soul (who bids Melancholy "come, and join with
thee calm Peace and Quiet").
The
poet imagines wandering among quiet woods or doing the
town, hearing a play by Ben Jonson or "sweetest
Shakespeare, Fancy's child, warble his native woodnotes
wild."
The poems are "about' the active and the contemplative
lives, but in form, each is an act of wizardry. Milton
conjures like a wizard; every few lines he's invoking
another spirit to come: Melancholy, or go: "Hence,
vain deluding Joys!" The artist that works most
like this nowadays is the cartoonist: think of the pink
elephants in Dumbo, or the wild visual fantasias that
accompanied Robin Williams's verbal cadenzas in The
Little Mermaid. And so "laughter holding both his
sides" makes an appearance like a demon taking
possession of dancers rolling round the floor holding
both their sides, and Fancy's child shows up as the
force driving a dance that's so funny people who've
never seen it before are laughing and crying and slapping
themselves.
What makes the show work is that all this imagery—which
can be shockingly literal, or graphic—rises like
rainbows, or mirages or sandstorms, imperceptibly out
of movement that is so rhythmically flexible and appropriate,
you can not question the validity of the apparitions
when they arise—or when they fade.
Indeed,
to the music accompanying the invocation to Peace and
Quiet, vistas of slow-pacing shades materialize—at
first just a few, but as the translucent scrims fall
into place, an almost infinite distance appears of Wedgewood
figures, Elysian shades, the whole antique world of
the dead in ranks that fade like the hills of Marin
into the fog: pacing slowly, gazing down on the backs
of their hands—which when I first saw it, ten
years ago, threw me into such convulsions of grief my
companion had to hold me down forcibly, and when I saw
it again last Thursday night I realized it appeared
and was gone within fifteen seconds at the most.
Setting
a whole oratorio sounds like a very odd thing to do,
and maybe a hundred years from now, or even thirty,
it will seem incredible that the intelligentsia really
responded to that. But consider this: all Baroque music
is built of out of dance music (Sarabandes, gigues,
courantes, minuets), and there is no Baroque music that
could not be danced to, just as the music that African-Americans
use in church rocks and rolls: no matter how serious,
every inch of it, has the boogey-woogey in it. And the
fact that Handel actually tried to create musical effects
that reinforce the words in the poem gives Morris a
thousand clues as to what pictures to create, what rhythms
to use, what steps to steal from his great predecessors.
His
greatest secret resource is ethnic dance. As a teenager,
Morris joined a Balkan folk-dance troupe that lived
almost communally, slept with each other like hippies,
and which gave him the experience he has said he's always
trying to get back to, the satisfaction of "dancing
together." What holds l'Allegro together
is its rhythmic truth. For all his love of modern dance
(and ballet, which he teaches every day as his company
class), he has always been able to fall back on the
deep wisdom embodied in folk dance rhythms, which give
his dances, to my mind, that idiomatic rightness you
recognize in someone who speaks a language well which
lets them play with it. "Laughter holding both
his sides" falls to the floor and begins to roll
around after hopping about giddily in a hilarious mixture
of Scottish and Balkan folk steps, brushes and kicks
and zany batterie that resemble Giselle's ballottés
crossed with the bluebird's brisées, to music
of Handel's based on—guess what?—Scottish
dance rhythms.
……………………………………………………
That said, last week's performance did not slay me in
the spirit as it has done in the past. For some reason
this time—perhaps because it was no longer new
to me, perhaps because I sat so close it was impossible
to get that perspective on the action which can make
the progress of the dance look like a fantastic garment
being woven before your eyes, or the planets lining
up in a harmonic—convergence. Many sections do
not require a literal bird's- eye view—the magical
forest scenes, with dancers piled up in groups to look
like trees or clouds, or the mirroring dances can be
seen flat on and lose nothing. But there are some—where
"many a youth and many a maid dancing in the chequered
shade" —that mark out patterns on the floor
which create their greatest satisfaction by letting
you see a satisfying design come to fruition. The ballet
was created for a theater with a raked stage, which
displays more of the action than the usual American
theater does to those on the orchestra floor—I
missed the effect of seeing into the depths of the dance.
The
most satisfying, the largest, clearest, and most mysterious
image of completeness comes just before the end of the
ballet, when the entire company perform a Balkan line-dance
to a grand march in praise of moderation. There is ancient
wisdom, perhaps magic, in this folk dance: it seems
like one of the great discoveries, like the Aztec calendar,
or the golden triangle, which old as they are, still
embody that moment of insight when some fundamental
relationship was understood for the first time.
It's
a dance about measuring space. There is enormous pleasure
in seeing the exactness with which people pace off the
diagonal, turn the corners, mark off the shapes of this
dance, like living fence-posts marching off a boundary
line. It is uncanny how aptly this dance fits the music:
to see how it works makes me feel I see how things work,
and fills me with hope that things will work.
I
did see details I'd never noticed before, throughout
the show, and registered elements of deprivation and
frustration that are built into l'Allegro that
I'd just waited through before and promptly forgotten
were there at all: the quiet, rather sour sound of the
overture, the long period of dark empty stage as the
baritone declaims the opening recitative: "Hence
loathed Melancholy!"
But
I could not get the big picture, and after all, those
dark and puzzling things are like the shadows in a sunny
landscape, they're there to make it seem real. I missed
the over-joyed feeling this ballet has given me before,
the rush of faith: "Things are going to work out!"
Most people leaving the theater last week seemed blissed
out, as I have been but not this time.
Which
brings me back to a sense that this ballet comes from
a time when the world and I were younger and no longer
reflects the world we're living in. l'Allegro
once reflected my hopes about life, and in particular
about the big institutions of civilization. The way
it's organized is so majestic, the co-operation of Milton,
Blake, Handel, the philharmonia Baroque, the singers
and choreography and the unseen crew handling all those
scrims, and the dancers made a naive but enormously
convincing model of the interaction of all the great
social systems—government, universities, medicine,
agriculture, industry, militaries, press—to run
the world in a healthy way that was good in the long
run for everybody.
Which
is why so many people have said, and I basically agree
with them, that it's probably the gesammtkunstwerk
of the end of the twentieth century.... Like a Beethoven
Symphony, it affirms life. And I want to believe that,
but right now life doesn't seem to warrant it.... The
heads of all the institutions are disquietingly off
their courses—the utilities, the corporations,
the bankers, military, Congress and President, the churches
(not to mention the state of California, which looks
like a chicken with its head chopped off) all of them
seem to be steering into courses that will not orbit.....
The
deep satisfactions of l'Allegro have to do
with the way it all works out; the concerted efforts
can be seen to have a harmony that feels almost like
a sacrament, "the outward sign of an inherent grace."
That's
what I missed this time.
Individual performances stood out this time, especially
David Leventhal as the lark, whom the audience nearly
encored, and the hilarious John Heginbotham as a slavering
dog; Lauren Grant and Julie Worden whenever they appeared,
Amber Merkens; Maile Okamura in the great solo at hte
beginning of Act II; the soprano soloist, Christine
Brandes, of glorious voice, who made you thrill to the
words of the poems; and the voluptuous Joe Bowie throughout.
copyright
Paul Parish 2003
The
photos from l'Allegro are all by Marc Royce.
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