Mark Morris: Dido and Aeneas

Dido and Aeneas Mark Morris Dance Group written by Philip Szporer

Mark Morris is a standout among his peers, one of America’s foremost choreographers, with a masterful body of work imbued with musicality and pure-dance value. His company, the Mark Morris Dance Group (MMDG), is one the most esteemed in the country.

People can never accuse him of nurturing a distant style.

Part of what is so engaging about his dances is his real love of music.

Morris once commented to Vanity Fair magazine that one reason he makes dances “is to trick people into hearing music better.” Music is what drives him, inspires him. “It’s fundamentally why I make dance,” he admits. “ Dance is a good way to gain access into a piece of music.” Those already familiar with his programs know that live music to accompany his dance is an integral part of a Morris performance. “My chief joy, my chief love, is living dancers and living musicians,” he says.

As Joan Acocella writes in her very readable biography on Morris, simply called Mark Morris, his personality

Mark Morris

has a great deal to do with his dances. Morris was born in Seattle in 1956 into a family of amateur performers.

His grandfather tap-danced and imitated vaudeville artists. An uncle would corral the Morris clan into elaborate home movies. Morris’s father sang and played both the piano and the drums, and his mother apparently loved to take the family to dance halls/pavilions.

Watching a José Greco flamenco recital when he was eight made him want to take classes, and he went on to study Spanish dance for ten years.

He also spent three years performing with a Balkan folk dance group in his native Seattle. At the age of 11, he was an extra with the Bolshoi, when the company visited town. As he told Programme magazine, “I like national musics and ethnic musics.” He’s kind of like a cultural repository, with a demonstrable love for Western and Eastern music and dance. To this day, he listens to indigenous American music, like the 1930s Western swing of Bob Wells, and readily incorporates it into his stage work.

Morris says that he’s gotten a lot of information from different ethnic dance forms that have changed his work. He indicates that when choreographing something, the first thing he’ll know

about the dance, beside the music, is the geometry of it. He does line dances and circle dances, he says, because he loves them.

By eighteen he was in New York, dancing with the likes of Eliot Feld, Laura Dean, Hannah Kahn and Lar Lubovitch. Critical, ironic, homosexual, in the 1980’s, Mark Morris was one of the city’s most prominent, and arguably most controversial, young dancer-choreographers. The irony in his work came to the fore at a time of raging postmodernism. One of the great dividers between Morris and some of his contemporaries is that he is unafraid to not fit in. He never came across as hip or connected with the downtown New York arena. The Guardian contends that his dances from the 1980’s were “ferociously musical, splashily weltschmerz, funny and profane, they were provocations in a scene that was dominated by the austere, the abstract and the minimal.”

Morris rigorously sidesteps explanations – he is against program notes and pre-concert lectures. “I don’t describe dances. People expect to see things, they don’t, and then you’ve lied,” he’s said. He is a fascinating choreographer, of considerable clarity, ambition and intelligence. Since he formed the

A MOVEMENTUM PUBLICATION © Irvine Barclay Theatre and Philip Szporer

2014-2015

MMDG in 1980, when he was 24, he has created a steady output of ballet creations, commissions for operas, as well as being in demand as a conductor. By 1986, he was choreographing dances for major ballet companies. In 1987, Belgium’s national opera house, the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, parted ways with its longtime director of dance, Maurice Béjart and his Ballet of the 20th Century. La Monnaie, in a controversial move, invited Morris to replace him, with the MMDG becoming the resident dance company. With a theatre at his disposal – and all the perks that come with a state-funded

story in English opera, of the same title. Many have transposed Purcell’s masterwork to dance, but few have achieved the depth of understanding as Morris’s production. His Dido is a highpoint in his prolific oeuvre. Purcell’s story, based on mythical incidents from Virgil’s Aeneid, begins with the soldier Aeneas and his followers washing up on the shores of Carthage, having escaped from the nightmarish destruction of Troy. Aeneas and Dido, the noble Tyrian Queen, and founder of Carthage, fall in love, but it’s an illicit romance; they are separated by evil sorcerers and torn apart due to his

and very specific in detail. Acocella remarks that the work from the era in Brussels “shaded from the ‘vernacular’ style to the more formal, more designed and legible, with the body more ‘worked’, the steps more complicated, the rhythm more difficult and exact.” If Morris drives himself hard, he demands the same discipline from his dancers, many of whom have been with him for years. “I want people who dance great, get along, and do what’s required,” he has said quite emphatically. The order of the day is not, he says, “self-expression but… expressiveness.”

overriding mission in building Rome.

Purcell’s music, with libretto written by poet Nahum Tate, is concerned principally with the emotional states of the two main protagonists. Morris emphasis not only explores ideas about love and the story’s sexual meaning, but, as a number of critics have pointed out, its grounding in psychology and politics.

For the Barclay engagement, the MMDG, which today operates out of headquarters at the Mark Morris Dance Centre, a big, six-million-dollar building which was built and opened in Brooklyn in 2001, will perform with live accompaniment by the Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra. The Bob Cole Chamber Choir will sing the chorus roles. (When he debuted the piece in 1989, Morris danced the lead role of Dido, and her nemesis, the lethal Sorceress. He now takes the podium as a conductor.)

Morris’s dances are difficult, rhythmically and in terms of coordination,

An unusually attractive side to Morris’s quirky, provocative intelligence is his ability to surprise. But for the uninitiated, he serves up clear, naturalistic codes to appreciating a company performance: “No one is bullshitting.

It’s not show-offy. It’s virtuosic, but not ‘see what I can do’.” He wants people to watch dances, which just happen to be about human experience, with people who look like people when they’re dancing. In part, that’s why his enthusiastic, loyal audience walks away from the work happy and inspired.

And, as always, the music is absorbing. In this performance, enjoy how the dance seems to illuminate the music as much as vice versa.

Mark Morris Dance Group

“Dido and Aeneas” May 15-16, 2015 sponsored by the

William Gillespie Foundation Michael and Kari Kerr with support from the

National Endowment for the Arts

opera house – Morris signed on for a three-year contract. He also doubled the size of his company. It was a tumultuous time for the Belgian dance establishment, who never warmed to the idea that an outsider had taken over the mainstage. Morris himself wasn’t too generous to Belgian dance sensibilities, consistently slagging the ‘angst-ridden’ nouvelle danse scene.

At the time, his blunt, often mocking, comments cut to the quick. He noted, “All you have to do here is not wash your hair for a week and then sit on stage and act depressed and you’ve got it. ‘Magnifique!’ ‘Formidable!’”

But Morris has also acknowledged that Brussels provided him with the possibility to choreograph some significant and lasting achievements, including L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato and tonight’s acclaimed Dido and Aeneas (1989), a dance adaptation of Henry Purcell’s 1689 baroque musical drama, the oldest love IRVINE BARCLAY THEATRE

Philip Szporer is a Montreal-based lecturer, writer and filmmaker.

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