Alexandra Posted June 14, 2004 Share Posted June 14, 2004 Nancy Dalva reviews the Mark Morris Dance Company at BAM for DanceView Times: Synthesis and Synthetic America, America. The Mark Morris Dance Group played the Brooklyn Academy of Music this week, up against the 24/7 television coverage of the state funeral of Ronald Wilson Reagan, the national optimist. Meanwhile, some of us were in a Georgia state of mind, and heart. “He’s called a genius because no one could confine him to one genre, ” Joe Levy, the music editor of Rolling Stone, said of Ray Charles in a front page obituary in the New York Times. He might have been talking about Mark Morris, a utopianist of pan-musical taste. It’s a commonplace now to speak of Morris as a musical choreographer or a music visualist, and not uncommon to compare him to George Balanchine. But this latter comparison begs the case of—or pleads the wrong case for—Morris, whose catholicity extends not only to music, but also to movement. (Balanchine was a classicist, albeit with balleticized reference to the occasional vernacular; for instance, to folk dances already common to the divertissements sections of classical ballet; to waltzing; and, once, to square dancing). Morris is a true polyglot, the dog’s dinner of choreographers, and often the dog dines enviably. Morris's taste in music runs through and outside the classical music canon, and his choreographic tent recalls the Rainbow Coalition days of the Democratic Party. Over here, sign language. Over there, yoga. Over by the barre, a perfect third position, straight from ballet class. Over by the bar, a polka. His is a dance politics of inclusion. What’s that if not optimistic? And what’s Morris if not a great communicator? Link to comment
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