The Mark Morris season at BAM, just concluded, was more than usually puzzling. Puzzling because of the uneven quality of the three works on view; puzzling because no matter what you make of these works, they are not enhanced by being seen together. Even though the first, intimidating piece, Behemoth, is performed without music, and the third, the elegiac Socrates, uses Erik Satie’s radiant score, they are too reminiscent of each other for the clever Morris to have book-ended his program with them by accident. But to what end? And the middle piece, Looky, the palette-cleanser, as it were, can only be there as a sop to an audience exhausted by what preceded it and anxious about what’s to come—the death of Socrates.
The famous thing about Behemoth is the absence of music in a work by the man who is inevitably labeled the most musical of choreographers—something which, as it happens, I do not believe him to be. He is, of course, highly musical, in terms of matching steps to sound, but to me it seems that his interest in music lies more in his connoisseur’s attraction to a given piece than in the discovery of a given dance within it. The vocabulary of Behemoth would not be very different if it had been set to a specific score.
So why the silence? Perhaps in 1990 this seemed more daring than it does now (although it wasn’t a new concept even then). Perhaps Morris was simply testing himself. Perhaps he was flexing his muscles by trying to prove that he could force his audience to his will. There’s an in-your-face attitude to this piece, with its sudden starts and stops, its blackouts, its repetitions and its challenge to you to guess when it’s over, which is not soon enough: Despite its many beautiful groupings and the fluency of many of its passages, Behemoth grows boring. As a friend remarked, “I kept hoping a cell phone would ring.” Or to put it another way, for all its high seriousness, the Emperor has no music.
About Looky there’s not much to say. It’s yet another sardonic take on The Way We Live Now—a clutch of cosmopolitans making pretentious fools of themselves at an art gallery opening. We’ve been here before at the ballet, and I’m afraid we’ll be here again (and most of the jokes aren’t very fresh or very funny). This is too easy a target for Mark Morris—it looks like a lazy grab for popularity.
ocrates is a far finer work than either of the above. It has, to begin with, the delectable Satie score, admirably performed by tenor Jean-Paul Fouchécourt and pianist Colin Fowler. It has ravishing Grecian costumes (short skirts for both men and women), in mostly pastel tones, by Martin Pakledinaz. And it has the beautiful words of Plato in a transparent, evocative translation by Roger Nichols.
Socrates: Let us turn off the road a little and, if you like, we’ll walk along the banks of the Illissus and find a quiet place where we can sit down.
Phaedrus: Really, I’m glad I came out today without my sandals. I know it’s the usual thing for you. Now we can go into the river itself and bathe our feet and walk along at the same time. That would be a real pleasure, especially in this weather and at this time of day.
Unfortunately, the words appear in supertitles so high above the action that your attention is endlessly distracted from the dancers.
The dominant impression is of a constant, fluid flow of dancers across the stage, like a frieze in motion. As in Behemoth, there are clearly defined groups of dancers working in unison—frequently, again as in Behemoth, in units of five, and frequently in opposition or contrast to other groups or a single performer. But however many solo dancers or groups of dancers are being deployed at any moment, everything is harmonious—a harmony that reflects the harmony in Socrates’ soul as he calmly makes his way to his death, a death that we’re convinced (by Plato, by Satie, by Morris) is simply another stage in his life. His friends are desolate, not he.
No single dancer represents Socrates—we can only glimpse him at various moments in the actions of various dancers: This is not a bio-ballet. Morris’ Socrates is, if you will, a state of mind, or soul. At the end, all the dancers are lying on the stage, their bodies and limbs immobile. The hemlock has undone all of them, and us, too. Yet this is a joyous work, a celebration, rather than a tragic one.
The 15 dancers give vivid yet restrained performances—indeed, a pleasing restraint characterizes the entire experience. Does it add up to a masterwork? Perhaps it is exactly that studied restraint—that consistently lovely, wistful, but ungalvanized quality—that keeps Socrates from being one. But if it isn’t the major revelation from Morris that we’ve been waiting for these last years, it’s certainly his most important piece in a long time.
rgottlieb@observer.com
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