Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/041392/0413520.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 9KB | 187 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 66

Making The Right Moves


Outrageous, outspoken and outstandingly talented, choreographer
MARK MORRIS is back in the U.S. after three tempestuous years
abroad

By JANICE C. SIMPSON


     After more than 90 minutes of nonstop kicks, leaps and
turns, the 27 dancers, sweating through their leotards, are
beginning to drag. But Mark Morris, the precisionist putting
them through these paces, is unmoved by their exhaustion. "A
little dynamism would help," he drawls, drawing on the Dunhill
cigarette he has been using to tap out the beat.

     The dancers try again, but their taskmaster is notoriously
difficult to please. Cigarette dangling from his hand and his
Tiny Tim-style ringlets bouncing on his shoulders, he strides
to the middle of the floor to show them how the steps should be
done. Morris, 35, is tall and bulky. There is more than a hint
of flab around his waist, an authentic beer belly, the result
of a prodigious thirst that can cause him to put away as many
as four bottles within an hour. No one in the room looks less
like a dancer. But as he performs the individual steps, they
suddenly coalesce into a transcendent mix of movement, music and
soul-stirring emotion.

     Having accomplished this alchemy, Morris takes another
puff and nods for the dancers to start again. "Be expressive,"
he commands. "Milk it. When it's expressive, it's a lot more
interesting. When it's just steps, that's bad news. And when
you're embarrassed about doing the steps, that's really bad
news. You can't be a performing artist and be embarrassed."

     Richly expressive and almost never embarrassed,
choreographer Mark Morris has been one of the most interesting
and original artists in the modern-dance world for more than a
decade now. In recent years he has gained wider fame through his
association with Mikhail Baryshnikov, with whom he co-founded
the White Oak Dance Project. Their sold-out shows across the
country have introduced new audiences to the choreographer's
work. Now, after three years of voluntary -- and controversial
-- exile in Brussels, this wunderkind of American dance has
returned to the U.S.

     Morris' offstage performances have sometimes been as
outrageous as his onstage productions. He first caused tongues
to wag in 1984 when he jumped up in the middle of a performance
of Twyla Tharp's Nine Sinatra Songs and shouted his displeasure
at the stage before walking out. "I think she's a great
choreographer, but I hated that dance. It was horrible," he says
now. "You know, a lot of people go along with things. But if I
don't like something, I'm like `Yech, come on, everybody, let's
open our eyes.' " Morris provoked an eye-opener of a different
sort three years ago when he appeared in a series of photographs
in Vanity Fair wearing lipstick, eye shadow, earrings and not
much else.

     An open homosexual who customarily wears the pink triangle
of gay liberation on his lapel, Morris regularly criticizes
others in the dance community for failing to come out. "I'm
tired of choreographers who are gay pretending that they are
straight," he says. In his dances, duets are often performed by
dancers of the same sex and androgynous dress is pushed to the
point where men have worn tutus. Says Morris: "Passing is a way
of agreeing with the prevalent culture that gay is a bad thing.
I'm out partly because it's the way I am as a guy and partly
because it's my responsibility in the public eye to be gay."

     Behind all that public posturing, however, is a dedicated
artist who is widely acknowledged as the legitimate heir to the
tradition of distinctively visceral dancing that traces its
roots back to Martha Graham and Isadora Duncan. His musical
gifts are both instinctive and sophisticated; in this he is
linked to Balanchine.

     He may dream up what for some are odd pas de deux, but
this postmodern master maintains his allegiance to such
old-fashioned values as form and narrative. "I am very, very
strict structurally," he says. "You can break any rule you want,
but you have to have a clue about what the rules are." Morris
makes up full-bodied dances that celebrate the pure joy of
movement, usually spiked with an irreverent wit. "The knee-jerk
response is to assume that a lot of what I do is parody or
sarcastic when it actually isn't," he observes. "I'm interested
in the story and really good dancing. But you know, you can't
force people to get that."

     A precocious child, Morris and his two older sisters grew
up in Seattle in a family that encouraged creativity. A typical
party at the Morris home was a Bastille Day celebration in
which guests were invited to come dressed as their favorite
subject from the French Revolution. Morris' father William, a
high school English teacher and amateur musician, taught his son
to read music when he was just four. His mother Maxine, a dance
aficionado with a special fondness for flamenco, took him to see
the Jose Greco company when he was eight. It was love at first
jete. A local dance teacher gave him a scholarship, and by the
time he was 13, Morris was choreographing pieces. "I'd make up
these dances, and they were really cool," he recalls. "All the
steps and everything I do now was there in germ form."

     Moving to New York City in 1976, he whirled through a
quick succession of jobs with such big-name choreographers as
Eliot Feld, Lar Lubovitch, Laura Dean and Hannah Kahn. "I didn't
have a giant attention span," he says, explaining why he was so
peripatetic. But that was only part of the reason. "Modern
dancers are not trained to do anything but follow directions,"
says Erin Matthiessen, his former lover; Morris met him when
they both danced in the Dean company. "Mark thought for
himself." Too often, he thought aloud, arguing with the
choreographers, making unwanted suggestions on how he thought
they should develop their dances. Finally, in 1980, Morris
rented Merce Cunningham's studio for two nights and presented
a program of his own works, including O Rangasayee, a stunning
20-minute solo to an Indian raga that marked him as a talent to
watch.

     Eight years later, at the invitation of Gerard Mortier,
director of the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, the
young American replaced Maurice Bejart as resident choreographer
for Belgium's national opera house. The deal included doubling
the size of the company to 24, spacious rehearsal studios,
production budgets of up to $1 million for new works, and most
important, the opportunity to work with live musicians. The
Belgian capital's reputation for good food and great beer didn't
hurt either.

     Once there, his creative juices flowing, he produced 10
new dances that include three masterworks: L'Allegro, il
Penseroso ed il Moderato, an elegant composition set to the
Handel oratorio; Dido and Aeneas, a sensuous interpretation of
Purcell's opera; and The Hard Nut, a delightful high-camp
version of The Nutcracker. But Morris' personal style alienated
his Belgian patrons. While his American fans may have considered
him an enfant terrible, the Belgians thought it was just plain
terrible when he described Bejart's work as merde or referred
to Flemish choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker as Annie
Tearjerker. Accustomed to the extravagant productions that
Bejart mounted, they were also put off by Morris' deceptively
simple choreography.

     Never one to suffer criticism gracefully, Morris lashed
back. Belgians, he told a reporter, were "highly racist, highly
sexist, highly homophobic." The final showdown came when the
company performed Mythologies, a trilogy based on essays by
Roland Barthes that ended with all the dancers stripped naked.
The next day the French-language daily Le Soir carried the
English headline, MARK MORRIS GO HOME!

     He acknowledges that his Belgian sojourn did have some
advantages. "I like big shows," he explains. "There I could get
a giant set or expensive costumes that allowed me to use that
part of my imagination." Company members say the reception might
have been better had Morris been more diplomatic, but the
choreographer concedes few regrets. "Better means what? No
waves?" he asks. "Well, the company got better. I made up really
good work. So what could be better?"

     This month the Mark Morris Dance Group makes its
homecoming debut in New York City with two programs that include
two world premieres. The economic realities of running a dance
company in the U.S. are, if anything, worse now than when he
left, but Morris has been taken up by a chic set. Vogue magazine
editor in chief Anna Wintour and Bloomingdale chairman Marvin
Traub hosted a fund raiser for him last year at Manhattan's
hyper-trendy Paramount Hotel. Foundation support is coming in
too, as well as a MacArthur genius grant.

     The dance community, envious of all the fame and good
fortune that has come his way, is waiting to see if he will
stumble. But Morris confidently stands his ground. "People say,
`How do you top that?' " he says, referring to the work he
created in Brussels. "Well, you don't. You do something
different." And if that doesn't work out? Well, it's unlikely
that Mark Morris will be embarrassed about it.