More
- Classifieds
- Cars
- Deals
- Real Estate
- Rentals
- Photos
- Blogs

Style

Mark Morris’s “L’Allegro”: Imagination Unbound

By Sarah Kaufman,January 20, 2012

Company members of the Mark Morris Dance Group perform "L'Allegro,… (Courtesy of Mark Morris…)

Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee Jest and youthful Jollity.

— chorus, “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato”

When the young Mark Morris created the biggest production of his life — the “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato,” accompanied by the Handel oratorio of the same name — he had access to riches beyond any American choreographer’s reach.

At the time, the fall of 1988, he was just beginning a three-year stint as the dance director of Belgium’s national theater. Making full use of the state-funded resources there, Morris conceived a two-hour work for 24 dancers that included an orchestra, chorus and four solo singers. The dancers had two costumes changes each and the set design, a feat of timing and rhythm, involved 21 color-blocked scrims sliding into position every few minutes.

But there were no props. Not a single shrub, rock, rustic hut or bench to help anchor the dancing in a physical landscape.

Still, this work, which the Mark Morris Dance Group brings to the Kennedy Center Opera House this week for the first time in 13 years, brims with the living visual detail of a pastoral painting. At times you feel you’re looking at a winking Watteau come to life. The dancing creates it all — mood, action and scenery. Over the course of this evening-long meditation on varying emotional states (as the title suggests, they’re shades of cheerful, pensive and even-keeled), the performers may group themselves into a stand of trees, a hedgerow, a horse-drawn carriage and a brace of hunting dogs. Or an undulating sea, then a mountainous ridge, then again the sea.

No expense was spared in this work, and Morris could have had the set designers build him any kind of decor. Instead, he had the dancers dance it.

“You should be able to get that across through dancing, I think,” he said in a recent phone interview from his apartment in New York. “I’m old-fashioned that way. I’d rather pay dancers more than put in a bunch of TV screens. That’s not so interesting to me. I start with props and then I get rid of them, ’cause you don’t need them.”

You don’t need them, that is, if you have the fertile mind of Morris. That he relied on dancing, and dancing alone, to tell this sprawling story of human existence that he had in his head since first hearing the music several years earlier is telling. There is no other choreographer today with Morris’s unbound imagination and the skill to realize it onstage.

At the time of “L’Allegro’s” creation, he was only 32. With his musical and profoundly sensitive works, his approachable dancers and his cheeky personality, Morris had emerged in the 1980s as The One, a Cadillac artist to fill the vacuum left by George Balanchine, whose death in 1983 had raised fears that an era of dance sophistication was over. In truth, Balanchine, the balletmaker, and Morris, who followed no codified dance system, are not the least bit alike. But Morris’s powers of invention are every bit as great, if not greater, with his broader musical tastes and ability to make up fresh moves and veer into different styles with just about every work.

So hopes of a new leader in dance seemed to be fulfilled in Morris’s first work of his Brussels contract. In “L’Allegro,” he brought forth a complex range of characters, ideas, emotional states and metaphysical change expressed in three art forms spanning three centuries: Morris drew on John Milton’s 17th-century allegorical poems (“L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso”), which inspired Handel’s 18th-century music (and a third part, “Il Moderato,” written by his librettist), and were given form in the 19th century in a dozen watercolor portraits by William Blake.

That these should all be united in the 20th century as an evening of rapturous, at times terrifying and poignant dancing is what Mikhail Baryshnikov calls Morris’s “genius chutzpah.”

“I had seen his work before; I know Mark is an extraordinarily gifted choreographer — that was not a question in my mind,” Baryshnikov said recently, recalling his first time seeing “L’Allegro,” shortly after its premiere in Brussels.

At the time, the famed Russian ballet star had occasionally been a guest artist in Morris’s company. But in “L’Allegro,” Baryshnikov saw a new level of confidence in the Seattle-born choreographer, “to step next to Blake, Milton and Handel. It was a very bold and daring step for a young man of a different culture, different continent, different sensibility, to put himself as a chief coordinator of all of this, especially moving a couple of the Handel pieces, changing the ending, switching the order, and, you know — bringing it down to earth.”

Embodied by Morris’s barefoot dancers, the grandeur and baroque detachment of the Handel oratorio and its disembodied extremes of feeling become as clear and immediate as a native language.