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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.

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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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page last updated: October 8, 2003