Morris Masters Mainstream Dance
Mark Morris is to dance what David Bowie is to music: Both artists were out on the edge in their youth but found some common ground with mainstream tastes when they matured. And with several decades of performing behind them, they’re still striving to create something new, to have new thoughts, to provoke their audiences.
The difference, though, is that while Bowie’s a household name, Morris’ has hardly rolled off the tongues of many folks outside the dance center of the world, New York. And even there, it takes a modern dance fan to really be able to reel off Morris’ vitae.
His career includes the staging of modern dances so inflammatory that they drew vicious commentary in the New York press. He had a controversial three-year stint as director of the national dance company of Belgium, during which ballet fans tried to drum him out of the country. And he worked closely with ballet superstar Mikhail Baryshnikov to form the White Oak Project, which is known as the most successful incubator of modern dance in this country.
A Seattle native, Morris returns to his hometown almost every year to perform to sold-out audiences at the University of Washington as a nod to the college program that nurtured him on his road to dance fame.
This year, for the first time, Morris will bring his company to the Inland Northwest to dance before heading to Seattle for a weekend of performances. The Mark Morris Dance Company will stage an evening of mixed repertoire Tuesday at Beasley Coliseum in Pullman.
While Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey might be better known in modern dance circles, it’s not because Morris is less talented or innovative. Rather, it might be because Morris has always been an artist who has experimented with crossing disciplines. He sets modern dances to classical symphonic music. His dancers wear traditional tutus and dance on their toes instead of en pointe, and the dancers wearing the tutus are the men.
Perhaps that’s the aspect through which Morris has both provoked the most controversy and impacted other choreographers and dancers. For Morris is a master of androgyny. In most of his work, there are not roles for men and roles for women. It’s just as likely the women will be lifting male dancers as the opposite. The costumes may be uniform across gender lines, or they may simply not matter.
He’s also honed a sense of laughing at himself through dance, donning a hot pink cowboy outfit and prancing about the stage to parody Texas cowboys to Copland’s “Hoedown,” or in another dance, casting his dancers as trees and shrubs.
Morris created “L’Allegro” and “The Hard Nut,” a sort of parody of “The Nutcracker,” while in Brussels. They became two of his breakthrough dances.
“In ‘L’Allegro’ I was playing a shrub, and in another scene I was a sheep,” Ruth Davidson, one of two dancers who have been with the Mark Morris Dance Group since its inception two decades ago, said in a Dance Magazine interview. (The other longtime dancer is Tina Fehlandt.)
“I thought, ‘I’ve danced for 20 years and I move to Brussels to be a shrub?’ Well, I danced the best shrub I could. Then Mark created this really difficult solo for me in the opening of Act II, and I realized that being a shrub allowed me to pace myself for the solo,” Davidson says.
The dancers, though, aren’t alone in recognizing Morris as a genius in his own right. He’s choreographed Philip Glass operas, worked with famed Seattle glass artist Dale Chihuly, made “The Hard Nut” into a movie and collaborated with Baryshnikov on a number of projects. His dance group recently completed a film project with cellist Yo-Yo Ma titled “Falling Down Stairs.”
And the 41-year-old Morris, whom no one would describe as buff, still gets out on stage and dances. Well. For this is another of his convictions: His dancers don’t have to look anorexic.
“We’re big-boned; we have big muscles,” says Davidson. “We used to be known as the ‘big butt dance company,’ and that’s what people come to see. So we’ve got to keep the weight up,” she quips.
Morris has repeatedly described extreme thinness as “a crime against women that I won’t perpetuate.”
And in an artistic field where acceptable body type still falls within a narrow range, Morris gets away with it. And dance fans flock to see his work and his dancers.
Tuesday, the Mark Morris Dance Group - 24 dancers and 12 musicians (Morris insists on live music and brings his own musicians) - will stage a program of four dances, including “The Spell” in which Morris dances.
This sidebar appeared with the story: The Mark Morris Dance Group will perform Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at Beasley Coliseum in Pullman. Tickets are $25, $20 and $16 for adults; $25, $16 and $10 for students, $25, $12 and $8 for children younger than 12, available in Pullman at Beasley and The Depot; in Moscow, Idaho at the UI Ticket Office and the SUB; in Lewiston at Albertson’s; and at all G&B Select-a-Seat outlets or call (800) 325-SEAT.