The lights never quite came up during the Mark Morris Dance Group’s December performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Toward the end of both programs--an array of dances that included two world premières and six New York premières—one felt deflated by the dusk, as if sitting there in sunglasses. Was the consistently low wattage simply a coincidence of repertory? Could it be that Michael Chybowski, who lit all but two of the dances, prefers gloom? Maybe the lighting was metaphorical, an atmospheric dimming that is its own aside or shadow or subtext.

Morris’s last engagement at BAM was a GE-light-bulb of an idea called The Hard Nut, a TV-age take on The Nutcracker that was nothing if not bright—the better to see the suburban subversion onstage. This winter’s engagement came to us in a different spirit. As usual, there was the flurry of press previews that always petal the path to a Morris performance in New York City. Interviewers still like to label the choreographer Baby Balanchine, while the gay press eagerly explicates his work in the same way new musicologists search for queer chords in Tchaikovsky and Schubert. But this time Morris’s tone was one of reflection, of hubris subdued, and of faint irritation with the fawning. He’s been making dances for fifteen years now, and the brilliant upstart has settled into middle-period stature.

A Morris program today, as various as its subjects and scores may be, is a mix of three basic compositional modes: the dance with sung libretto, the dance with instrumental accompaniment, the Morris solo. The dances with librettos dominate, and it is both Morris’s strength and his weakness. At BAM, five of the dances had sung texts throughout or in parts, and they are testament not just to Morris’s professed love of the human voice (he likens song to dance, organic arts that come from the body), but to self-knowledge: Morris has always had a gift for swift storytelling, for mime gesture given a metaphorical spin. We saw the gift born fully formed in the early Gloria (Vivaldi), and it found a particularly palpable expression in the evening-length work Dido and Aeneas. Indeed, this dance, set to that Baroque pearl of an opera Purcell wrote for a girls’ school performance, is an architectural marvel, with pantomime dovetailing into design, and Morris’s flatfooted, faux primitif style of movement corresponding with the kind of game and ungainly performance you’d expect from a student recital.

Dido showed how well Morris works when all his similes are in place—how the libretto supports a series of interlocking associations, and how historical fact lives inside a dance movement. Words bring an extra dimension to the stage, providing a key to meaning which deepens the “text” of the choreography. But beware. A libretto also puts over dances that don’t have enough going on otherwise. Morris’s large-scale dance to Handel, L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato, embraced by many as a masterpiece, has been overrated since its première in 1989. Despite moments of delight (pictorial moments—no surprise), the dance is repetitive, monotonously paced, and stretched shockingly thin at the end. The literalness that worked so well in Dido here looks plainly unsophisticated, an imposed innocence that says less about the poetics of Utopia than the politics (it’s a summer camp in which men and women go their separate ways—equals yes, partners no).

The text-based works on these December BAM programs fell in between Dido and L’Allegro, and were of all types and sizes. Somebody’s Coming to See Me Tonight, a suite of dances set to songs by Stephen Foster, was a world première and it fared better than another recent ballet to Foster, Twyla Tharp’s Americans We, premièred at ABT last spring. Where Tharp attempted to have it both ways, making grand sentimental statements in the key of irony, Morris played it straight, illustrating a suite of small-town scenes shaded Agnes de Mille, daguerreotype dusty. I couldn’t help feeling that here were the true Act One Nutcracker dances that Morris’s disco version had displaced. Then there was the pas de trois, A Spell, a randy Shakespearean romp between two lovers and Cupid (danced by Morris) to the music of John Wilson. Bedtime, set to three songs by Franz Schubert, has only one memorable section, the last, in which Goethe’s twilight tale of a child’s stolen soul is told in breathless dancing tableaux—a German-Romantic Perils of Pauline.

Jesu, Meine Freude (music by Bach) belongs to the cathedral wing of Morris’s repertory; it is a solemn affair that uses ceremonial symmetry and crosslike religious iconography as a kind of sacred spring to which it keeps returning. World Power, the engagement’s other world première, just squeaks into the category of dances with text. With only a short, satiric paragraph by Mark Twain sung twice toward the end— from his Homage to Pacifica—it was the most successful of these works, perhaps because Morris had to invent without words right from the start.

The piece is choreographed with economy and a sustained pulse. In fact, in twenty minutes of dance Morris says at least as much as Ping Chong said in his hour-and-a-half multi-media piece Chinoiserie, which played at BAM in November. And Morris says it better. Lou Harrison’s gamelan music is mysterious and dark-toned, like wind chimes in the night, and Morris brings out dancers in Noh black, shadow dancers. He shows us cultural appropriation at work—the misreading, the misapplication, the miscegenation—not through slides and talks, but through a seasoning of Hindu postures and motifs, through the compositional devices of repetition and still centers and Kabuki-like face-offs.

Morris also gives an inside nod to a precursor in the Eastern-influenced minimalist genre of contemporary dance, Laura Dean. But where Dean explored the compulsions, the concentrations that reside in a decorative abstraction (her dances could look like unrolling Greek key borders), Morris makes the genre his own by layering in narrative. As the choir sings of burned and buried Filipinos, dancers fall onstage from the wings, only to be quickly dragged back into oblivion: falling bodies themselves become a decorative border, the line between two peoples.

The finale is a dissolve into masterly counterpoint, the kind you watch and can’t plot out, it just opens and doubles, enfolds and fourfolds, mutating before your eyes —an opium dream, a fantasia. And yet, as compressed and formally intelligent as World Power is, it isn’t stirring. Morris is speaking to the eye and mind—not to the heart. I admire these dances, but I rarely love them or feel driven to see them once more (and when a dance gets you, you want to see it again instantly, right then and there). What’s missing?

For one thing, it begins to dawn on you that there is very little sexuality on the Mark Morris stage. When it does appear, it is camped up (A Spell), cross-dressed (Dido), made diminutive (Somebody’s Coming to See Me Tonight), or deconstructed (Striptease). I do not mean this as a criticism, for these dances work as what they are. It’s just that what they are—the clever math, musicianship, wit—is not enough. It’s a simple fact of most dance that the display of godlike bodies is the first impact, the jaw-dropping double take that excites us and pulls us in. It is also a fact that Morris isn’t interested in making this kind of connection with the audience. Okay. Romantic situations are another draw (the Romeo-and-Juliet-Forever school of dance). A choreographer who chooses not to engage in conventional romantic intimacies, however, must come up with another sort of intimacy. Merce Cunningham’s choreography, for instance, never tells stories or makes dates, but to see his dancers slowly partner is to be present in Time’s bedroom, to feel the heat of the footlights and the intake of breath.

Morris doesn’t “do” intense partnering. In my memory the closest he’s come is in One Charming Night, a Victorian love duet that becomes a vampire seduction. This miniature is potent and unforgettable, largely because its two dancers are face to face, taking each other in and yearning, we soon learn, for something unnameable. It is also a dance in which Morris--beautifully --points his toes. And that brings us to the most important form of intimacy which Morris tends to forego: lower body articulation. His dances call for floppy thighs, loose knees, and relaxed toes, and there is little juice coursing from pelvis to foot. Perhaps that’s why, when Morris’s dancers fall to the floor, as they often do, it seems such a short drop—a plop. Morris would himself admit that conventionally stretched and lovely legs don’t interest him. He’s an upper body choreographer—a brain man—and all that upper body signing and gesturing connects back to words, to ears, to hearing. Jesu, Meine Freude, with its sense of God bodied forth in taut palms and wide-spread arms, the legs having hardly more effect than podiums or pedestals, comes to seem a sermon in another language, mystical but unmoving.

The region from the waist down is prime and primal terrain. Classical ballet shows it to be an expressive realm of awesome, intricate, and sophisticated power. Even Martha Graham—long-waisted, short-legged, dead set on an earthbound dance—worked primarily southward from the gut. The groin is the engine of virtuosity, and moderns from Graham to Taylor to Cunningham knew they needed it to give their dances might— and height, a dance property that’s less about raised arms than energized arches. Morris’s dances are extremely horizontal, riding about waist high; this is why they can look so flattened, especially when the stage is full of dancers.

Because its phrases were girded in the pelvis and tempered in the heels, toes, and soles; because it created its own complex text in the tactile sighs and sounds of deft shoes; and because a world seemed to open around it; The Office was the best piece on these BAM programs. The music is Antonin Dvorak’s “Five Bagatelles for String Trio and Harmonium” (op. 47), and the curtain lifts on a view of chairs upstage as six people begin a group dance. Folk motifs echo both in the music and in Morris’s floor and foot patterns, where his rhythms mimic the casual, anecdotal conversation of people waiting together. When an austere, grey-suited women enters with a clipboard and takes one dancer away, the group is suddenly a community and a chill sets in. Each of the five bagatelles ends with another dancer led offstage, and with each diminishment there is a growing sensation of shared dialect and shared apprehension. Morris’s dances are Gepetto-ish woodcuts, redolent of Eastern European workshops. The bagatelles are autumnal, intoning the end of the Old World (old world/new world—the Dvorak dichotomy). There are unmistakable global overtones to Morris’s ominous view of office, or perhaps, hospital politics. But The Office is both smaller and larger than politics. It’s a portrait of the Fate created by humans—a fable as old as the hills and still pure suspense.

Power as an idea—political, tribal, spiritual power—is more interesting to Morris than power as expression, which is probably why his work for ballet companies has lately been so weak. Star power has never had a place in this company (when Baryshnikov dances with Morris, he’s Misha Doe, indistinguishable from the rest), nor is there much room for, or pleasure taken in virtuosity for its own sake. Morris’s Lucky Charms spells out the difference, wearing a thesis on its sequined sleeve. Choreographed to the incessantly arch Divertissement of Jacques Ibert, it sends up those smiling cheerleaders of power: marching bands, drill teams, pompom people. The dance is leeringly upbeat (except for when it’s nosing around in the dark), a play of crude over-emphasis and dank undertone. It’s a sneer, and the dancers look awful in it. Morris makes his point—organized force is ugly—but he doesn’t win it. Given a choice, I’d rather watch halftime.

No doubt there are fans who can explain the new nature of a dancer’s virtuosity in Morris’s work, can describe in detail the unseen difficulty of doing this or that step. Certainly his choreography requires stamina. But to me the company is jolie-laide at best, an earnest, dowdy bunch carrying on the good work of Mark Morris. Never dazzling in their own right, the dancers are never very interesting. In the murk, one can hardly see their faces. With Morris it’s another story. The Morris solo is a law unto itself and when he takes the stage, the problems disappear. Even appearing with the group, he’s special. In A Spell, his Cupid wears the wings of sublime comic timing-- he tilts his head with perfect Mannerist blandness; holds a pose two silly seconds too long; runs lumpily, a prematurely tall Isadorable. It’s Trocadero humor in the idiom of the Rococo, utterly direct. In The Office, Morris loses himself in the group with endearing concentration—he moves like a regular guy working in the mail room.

Morris’s solo on the BAM bill was Rondo. The music is one of Mozart’s piano soliloquies (Rondo in A minor, K. 511), a voice we know best from the adagios of his concertos—so reasonable, so seeing, and yet so small in the face of something larger. Morris makes it a round of private dialogue, full of momentary resolves and rumbling undercurrents. It is a long, flowing solo, with few movements that outrank the others. What you remember is Morris: his rumpled leaps, like cumulus clouds; his deeper breathing as the dance repeats, deepening its movement grooves; his unguarded face. The solo is not an essay on a subject, as Morris’s dances for others frequently seem to be, but a public prayer, a confession phrased with classical restraint. With his heavenly hair and loose-cloth costumes, Morris has often given himself angelic airs, but here he’s uncertain of the fit. When he moves downstage like a saint coming down a path, hands lifted chest high as if to impart some word, he ends the gesture in a shrug—and the phrase becomes a refrain of absence, a dropped stitch in the dance’s weave: no word, no knowing. In Rondo Morris offers illumination instead of ideas, breakthrough to the lift and dip of his heart.

Notes
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Mark Morris Dance Group performed two programs comprising nine dances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from December 9, 1995 to December 17. Go back to the text.