Simple Gifts

The Sarasota Ballet is not only an impressive troupe in its own right, with a repertory that elevates it to the top rank of America’s regional ballet companies. It also has the enlightened policy of inviting outside companies to perform as part of its yearly seasons. Last weekend, the guests were the Mark Morris Dance Group, the repository of Morris’s imaginative, hyper-musical, often surprising works. This particular selection, mostly of early Mark Morris works, was a kind of gift; four dances whose beautiful construction reveals a wealth of musical, rhythmic, and emotional detail.

Performance

Sarasota Ballet Presents: Mark Morris Dance Group in “Pacific,” “Ten Suggestions,” “Candleflowerdance,” and “Going Away Party”

Place

FSU Center for the Performing Arts, Sarasota, FL, February 28, 2025

Words

Marina Harss

Mark Morris Dance Group in “Pacific.” Photograph by Christopher Duggan

There is something almost old fashioned—not a complaint—about the craft and quietness of these dances. No obvious athletic feats were performed. No ingratiating or highly-amplified music was played—in fact, most of the music was performed live, either on the piano (played by Chris McCarthy) or by a trio that included Gregory Valtchev on the violin and Ian Lum on the cello. The music included works by Lou Harrison, Alexander Tcherepnin and Igor Stravinsky. And as always with Morris, the musical values were extremely high, the playing lucid, direct, incisive, and devoid of indulgence.

Lack of sentimentality, plainness, craft—these are all essential elements in Morris’s work, which I tend to think of as “plainspoken.” Which is not to say that it is devoid of emotion. It is just that the emotion is woven in quietly, and often takes you by surprise. It bubbles up when you least expect it, as when a dancer (Dallas McMurray) hesitates again and again to rise from his chair, as if paralyzed by anxiety, in Morris’s “Ten Suggestions,” set to Tcherepnin’s quietly eloquent Bagatelles for piano. Or when another dancer, Billy Smith, is ignored by the rest of the cast of “Going Away Party,” set to awe-shucks country songs by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. Why is this person left out of his own party? At one point, the other dancers, paired up in self-satisfied couples, gleefully step over his prone body. It reminds me of something Morris once told me in an interview: “The odd thing about bodies in space is that in different contexts, their movements take on new meanings. The audience doesn’t know why that part is sad, it’s just that she’s facing away from you that time instead of toward you.” This body, lying there, as people step indifferently over and around him, becomes the embodiment of an almost unbearable loneliness.

Mark Morris Dance Group in “Ten Suggestions.” Photograph by Ani Collier

That feeling isn’t superimposed, but rather emerges from the structure of the work itself. (Morris can also be quite funny, even bawdy, as when the women in “Going Away Party” straddle the men, their legs split, and wiggle their toes with delight. Wink wink.) Morris is obsessed with structure. This obsession screams out as you watch these pieces. When the music repeats, so do the steps, so that no matter how witty or eccentric or simple those steps are, they look just right, indivisible from the score. They become embedded in the music. This is the thing that Morris’s critics most detest: the fact that the steps and the notes are indistinguishable makes some people uncomfortable. They wonder whether this is the very definition of obviousness, of mickey-mousing. But to those who admire his work, and this includes a lot of musicians, it goes a long way to explaining what is so particularly satisfying about Morris’s approach. He finds a path through the music that both illuminates and interprets it, while also creating a physical expression that is completely his own. No-one but Morris could have come up with these steps and gestures, in all their eccentricity, humor, and plainness.

This is especially true of “Ten Suggestions,” a 1981 solo originally performed by Morris himself (and later, by his good friend Baryshnikov). Here it was performed by Dallas McMurray, a frequent Morris stand-in. The man (the role is also sometimes played by a woman) dances a series of what look almost like improvisations. Each piece contains a single idea, developed in various ways. In one, the dancer holds a hoop, like an Art Deco figurine, squatting, posing, balancing it on his shoulders. In another, inspired by Isadora Duncan, he flings a yellow ribbon into the air where, after hanging for a moment, it descends, fluttering delicately just as we hear a descending dribble of notes on the piano. It’s so perfect, you can’t help but laugh. In yet another, he plays with a hat, like a vaudeville performer. All of this seems like almost nothing; at the same time, it is just right.

Mark Morris Dance Group in “Candleflowerdance.” Photograph by Stephanie Berger

In “Candleflowerdance,” set to Stravinsky’s Serenade in A—an almost Viennese-sounding work—this obsession with structure threatens to overwhelm the piece, as sometimes happens with Morris. Six dancers take turns occupying an illuminated square at the center of the stge. Their movements illustrate counterpoint, call and response, canon. Two women cover their faces, jump, hold out claw hands; dancers stand in poses, fall, run off; dancers emerge from the ensemble, show a phrase or two. You can see the ideas ricocheting in Morris’s head, but it’s a bit like watching a chess match.

“Pacific,” instead, invites the viewer in, with its expansive movement vocabulary—big arms, wide squats, sweeping turns. This expansiveness turns the dancers into statuesque, archaic-looking figures, like caryatids; they open their arms to take in the whole world. (The piece was originally made for ballet dancers, at San Francisco Ballet, which partly explains its lyricism.) Lou Harrison’s Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano has gamelan-like qualities, and the dancers’ movements, which fall right in the center of each beat, become an illustration of the sound of bells. Certain elements—an arm position out of classical sculpture, two hands held together in front of the chest— return again and again, combined in different ways, passed from dancer to dancer like gifts. An irregular rhythmic pattern is very clearly reflected in a series of small jumps (jetés) 1-2-3 that both help to hear the music and give the piece a wonderful lilt.

It’s exhilarating to see movement and sound come together in this way. Mark Morris has made grander, more sophisticated, more complex works than these. But it is in these chamber pieces that we can really see the building blocks of his style. Plainly, without fuss, they show why his dances continue to be so uniquely compelling.

Marina Harss

Marina Harss is a dance writer in New York, a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the New Yorker Magazine, as well as to Dance Magazine and Fjord Review. She is the author of a book about the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, The Boy from Kyiv, published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in 2023.

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Simple Gifts

Marina Harss

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