Feathers and milk

Mark Morris lite at the Shubert

by Marcia B. Siegel

The Mark Morris Dance Group returned to the Shubert Theatre last weekend with a lightweight program that began with a ramble through Chopin piano music and ended in a tribute to English musical comedy. Morris cherishes the ephemera of popular culture with a 10-year-old's morbid, galumphing eagerness. His near-fatal attraction for whimsy usually comes with a sense that it's not very far to go from laughter to absurdity to the edge of darkness.

Although I've seen a large portion of Morris's repertory over the years, I can't retrieve strong images that distinguish one dance from a similar one, and I often don't recognize dances I've seen when they come around again. Morris keeps your interest through the course of a dance with short episodes and surefire compositional devices, with a certain waywardness discreetly reined in by form. But the formal material -- the movement vocabulary, the role playing, the placid performing demeanor -- doesn't change much from one dance to another.

Morris, who authors all the dances, is one of the few contemporary choreographers who attempts to maintain anything in the repertory that isn't brand new. Multiple casting is one strategy for keeping us and the company interested in old works; dancing to live music is another. Gender roles can be reversed, which allows new interpretations.

Deck of Cards, from 1983, demonstrates Morris's early quirkiness. Each of its three sections spins a perverse take on a C&W song. Jimmy Logsdon's "Gear Jammer," the lament of a long-distance truck driver, accompanies a toy semi high-rolling around the stage. In George Jones's "Say It's Not You," Morris sashays around in a red dress, pearls, and long wavy back hair. Continuing the drag motif, Michelle Yard wears an Army jacket and cap with white boxer shorts. To T. Texas Tyler's "Deck of Cards," she mimes the lawbreaking card player's argument that every card in the deck is a reference to Scripture. The gestures accumulate with each verse, growing like "Green Grow the Rushes" or "The Twelve Days of Christmas."

Morris has always used gesture, particularly gesture that indicates meaning, as a source of dance movement, and his dance sometimes seems overbearingly literal. It's as if he didn't think the audience will understand a song unless it receives a visual translation. I didn't get most of the German in the Franz Schubert songs for Bedtime (1992), "Wiegenlied," Ständchen," and "Erlkönig," but without any verbal prompting I could still see how the dance captures the charm and the forebodings of romanticism. The eight female chorus members curled up like well-loved children dreaming of a good fairy. They skittered like elves, stomped like trolls. Four solo dancers stalked and threatened one another like giants or mountain goblins.

In Dancing Honeymoon (1998), the show tunes associated with Gertrude Lawrence and Jack Buchanan sparked good-humored flapper vignettes and clichés, plus a few vaudeville tidbits like last-minute gymnastic tableaux and a rhythmic game of catch with folding chairs. Musical chairs, get it?

Subtlety is not Mark Morris's forte, but his access to the history of Euro-American music and dance is encyclopedic and refined. Music director Ethan Iverson played the piano and led the varied instrumental and vocal ensembles for this program.

Silhouettes (1999) captured the music-hall gaiety of Richard Cumming's commissioned piano score. Lauren Grant, a small bouncy woman in tiny black bra and sweat pants, and tall Julie Worden, in black T-shirt and briefs, complemented each other in a variety of styles (fast faux ballet, blues, jazz, cakewalk), sharing the stage amiably but without particular personal involvement.

In the newest work, Sang-Froid, an ensemble of nine dancers took off on Chopin mazurkas, waltzes, and other small pieces. There were scraps of drama and hints of other dancers who have adopted Chopin -- Isadora Duncan, Jerome Robbins.

Morris seems to be transcending his star status and settling into institutional security. His attentiveness to the preservation and presentation of his repertory is just one component of this attitude. He's a gifted choreographer who can capture the feeling of music and who puts rhythm at the center of dancing. I could watch him dance anything, and the company is in fine form. But no artist in America today can command the cultural arena without developing tremendous marketing and gamesmanship skills. In New York last week I visited the impressive new $6 million company headquarters under construction near Brooklyn Academy of Music. The capital campaign is still going on. For only $10,000 you can sponsor a dancer's locker, but I think naming rights to the building are already taken.