Mozart Dances Lifts You Up All Night Long
Mark Morris's Mozart Dances are performed at the Paramount Theatre tonight at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $35-$75 plus fees.
By the time you get to "Double" (set to the two-piano D major concerto, K. 448), familiarity with Mark Morris's gestural motifs is setting in--two hands behind the head, elbows out; a toy-soldier walk; hands up to the heavens in alarm or appeasement; fingers cupping, beckoning; the fall to the floor--and you stop trying to interpret, and let them be a string of new words you're learning.
Joe Bowie and Noah Vinson and the Mark Morris Dance Group in Mozart Dances, photo by Stephanie Berger
Where in "Eleven," the elfin but steely Lauren Grant threads her way through the throng of dancers like a supernatural apparition, in "Double" she is mirrored by Joe Bowie in an open frock coat, exhibiting an action-figure physique, but dancing like a caress. He seems to have something to say to a perturbed Noah Vinson, and they both end up encircled by the women dancers--but are they containing Vinson's pain or creating it? The women's appearance disrupts the playful, brotherly, frat-house of dance we saw earlier.
Again and again, Morris finds in the elegant innovations of Mozart not simply an irrepressible joy, but an agony. Morris is a little like Lie to Me's Dr. Lightman, pausing the smile to show the flicker of fear beneath. And true to the music, the personal solos are in the context of a firefly-swarm of notes. There is no rest, and when the dancers collapse to the floor at the end of a phrase, it begins to feel more and more genuine as the night wears on.
For "Twenty-seven," costume designer Martin Pakledinaz dresses the women in chic jogging bras and gauzy skirts in white (in contrast to the black version in "Eleven"), and the men retire their dockworker blouses and pants for white clam-diggers. The musical tone is "perky peasant dance," and there are ceremonial formations--one ending with one of the men leaping from a run into the joyful arms of another. All the white and pairing up reminded us that Morris had said something about Così fan tutte and irresolution.
One of the real delights of the evening is Morris's dance troupe--they are amazingly responsive as an ensemble to Morris's choreography, and yet all worthy of separate attention. Julie Worden could be the tragic dancer in an Ingmar Bergman film, or Laurel Lynch from a Miranda July vehicle--they retain personality while moving in split-second coordination.
Two other moments remain with us, as evidence of Morris's ability to confront you with your expectations. At one point Vinson runs directly at a trio of men, who lift the man in the middle so that Vinson can duck beneath as if he's pushing through a loose, swinging board in a fence. And the women are given a static, touching-down-from-a-leap pose, one leg extended in back, one toe pointing forward, and supported unobtrusively by a male dancer, they lightly bounce like a slow-motion, stotting gazelle in a demonstration not of springy muscularity but of grace.
