Mark Morris Dance Company performing V
Some of the artists I love have achieved the state of being apotheosized. They have become, for me, untouchable and unconditionally cherished. The Indelibles.
I’m sure you have your elite corps too, the ones that have connected with you at such a deep place that they are immune to any objective appraisal or criticism. It isn’t about sentimentality or some fond remembrance from the past. It is a kind of crossing over into another dimension. A little like falling in love or having a child. It goes way beyond the rational or linear.
My list is embarrassingly long, but every once in a while you just have to give a shout out for one of your Indelibles. Thursday’s performance of the Mark Morris Dance Company in Boston was an evening of reliving over and over again my long love affair with that man’s choreographic genius. It just didn’t matter that the Boston Globe critic Thea Singer had something just slightly more than a yawn to report about the performance. For her the dancing just wasn’t popping the way, by her admission, it has for her in the past.
But for me and my pals, it was Morrisonianally magic and mesmerizingly beautiful. No one gets into the deep bones of a piece of music better than MM. In the course of one evening, the company danced to live performances of Schubert Lieder (beautifully sung by mezzo Katherine Growdon), Bartok’s String Quartet No. 4 and Schumann’s Quintet in E-flat Major for piano and strings. And as the case has been since I first saw him dance in 1980, Morris achieves transcendence by melding music and the movement in a way I cannot fully describe or comprehend.
But it goes deeper than that. As Singer writes in response to his dance sensibilities, “Many of Morris’s dances, despite the structural formalism at their core, have in the past brought a lump to my throat. It had something to do with their pristine architectural beauty juxtaposed against their utter humanness. They hit you smack in the heart.”
Still true for me after all these years.
