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The
moment
the
curtain
is
down,
you
blink:
could
I
see
this
again,
please?
What
exactly
have
I
just
seen?
Every
now
and
then
it
happens
that
a
dance
piece
astonishes
because
it
brings
home
that
dance
can
express
abstract
thoughts
and
spiritual
revelations
that
are
hard
to
put
into
words.
Via Dolorosa, the new world première by Mark Morris and his Mark Morris Dance Group has this quality, and so does his earlier Socrates
(2010)
that
opened
at
Berkeley’s
Zellerbach
Hall.
Choreographer
Morris,
who
is
also
an
accomplished
musician
and
conductor,
has
a
long-standing
connection
with
Cal
Performances.
I
vividly
remember
some
of
his
masterpieces
shown
there:
Händel’sL’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (from 1988) and his yearly rousing, dysfunctional Nutcracker version, The
Hard
Nut (from 1991). Both can be savored on DVD.
Via Dolorosa
As the title indicates, the theme is the last journey of the man Jesus of
Nazareth from his arrest to his crucifixion and burial. This journey is set to
Nico Muhli’s composition The Street (14 Meditations on the Stations of the
Cross) and is based on a text by librettist Alice Goodman (Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, by John Adams). Muhli created a score for
solo harp, extending the instrument to an unusual, partly percussionist
scope that sounds as ancient as King Solomon’s harp and as modernist as
Paul Hindemith (whom he quotes at one point). The original performance
included readings of Goodman’s text and plainchant song. Morris used the
harp score alone, performed live by harpist Parker Ramsay. The text is
included in the program.
Each of the fourteen “meditations” is a scene—one could call it a street
scene—on this final road of a human being marked for death. This human
being is initially personified by a woman, then a man, a woman again, and
at times by everyone. The stage is empty against a backdrop (by Howard
Hodgkin) of bold abstract brushstrokes that change their intensity of colors
with the changing light.
The piece starts with a bang when a street group suddenly shoots arms and
fists forward at a woman in their midst. Nothing marks her out; they all
wear the same sack-like caftan-robes one sees in depictions of biblical
times. The aggressive gesture of the group comes out of nowhere, setting
the signal for the persecution. It is instantly clear that Morris extends the
biblical story of Jesus to a calvary of humankind, where every dancer in
turn takes the role of victim, bystander, helper, companion, or follower on
the journey to the cross.
Socrates
Interestingly, this extension of one man’s fate to everyone’s is already
prefigured in Socrates (2010), set to Eric Satie’s piano song cycle Socrates,
which opens the program as a perfect lead-in and preparation for the
world première. The libretto, taken from Plato’s Symposium, is printed in
the program. Both choreographies share some impressive stylistic
elements: both shine with the remarkable musicality that is Morris’s
trademark, and both are painterly to an extraordinary degree. In moments
they cast the spell of tableaux vivants, as if you were looking at a historical
frieze that mysteriously sets into motion. Both works pull one irresistibly
into a time-travel to a historical place, and the dancers’s bodies and
movements seem to be molded into a language of that ancient place.
In Socrates, it is the fluid allusion to the origins of the classical world:
ancient Greece and Egypt, with somewhat flattened, forward-turned bodies
and angled arms. Hands are open and seem raised as an offer of ideas.
Circling movements bring alive the urns and plates we admire in museums.
Forward-rushing steps and leaps seem to emerge from Cretan temples.
There is a delicate echo from another work about the classical world:
Nijinsky’s choreography of Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune.
The dancers wear beautifully faded Grecian-style tunics (reflecting the
painting by Jaques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates, from 1787,
reproduced in the program). They appear one moment as mythological
beings, naiads or zephyrs, and in the next, as pure forms of
thought—Socratic principles, perhaps, or teachings of aesthetic harmonies.
Here, too, the topic of death—the state-ordered suicide of the
philosopher–is not personalized in one particular dancer. Dying seems
gracefully submerged in the embrace of life of the whole group.
Via Dolorosa
In Via Dolorosa, the painterly choreography recalls medieval mosaics,
Giotto, and well-known paintings of the Renaissance. A distinct movement
language highlights acceptance of pain and death with the rounded arms
and open palms of ritual worship.
And there is every imaginable body position that evokes the geometry of
the cross and its associations—trees, birds in flight, open-armed effusion of
tenderness and acquiescence. Particularly moving is the repeated shift
from arms stretched out as if for crucifixion to letting go—softening and
bending into an embrace of the persons standing near-by in support. The
entire piece is built on falling and being held, falling and being carried—the
dialogue between love and death.
Morris had heard about The Street by Muhli through an article in The
Guardian, in 2022. Many years ago, he had supplied choreography for
composer John Adams’s operas set to libretti by Alice Goodman. The
libretto for The Street, written from the point of view of ordinary and
extraordinary bystanders, moved him to tears, Morris told SF Classical
Voice in an interview.
Very quickly after the Covid lock-down was over, Via Dolorosa was born.
The compelling unity of style and beauty in the conception of Morris’s
work and the execution by his marvelous dancers do justice to the founding
story of Christianity. This is one reason for the powerful effect of the piece.
Another is that an openly gay choreographer shapes the story as the
transparent journey of any man or woman marked as the other, the
outsider, the accused—whether she or he is the simple street person, the
prophet, or the savior.
Photos: Chris Hardy
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Writings
