I t was never likely that Mark Morris would slot comfortably into Belgium’s art establishment, nor even into the country itself. Though they are epithets the choreographer vehemently rejects, the adjectives most commonly applied to the New Yorker — flamboyant and outspoken — suggested his company’s tenure as Belgium’s national dance company would be nothing if not eventful. So it proved, with Morris feuding with critics, attacking Belgium’s two dance icons and eventually the country itself.
He called the work of choreographer Maurice Bejart “vulgar and terrible”. He dismissed Belgium’s other celebrated choreographer, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, as a “tear-jerker”. He described the nation as “very racist, sexist, homophobic, conservative, with some fascist tendencies”. Morris, it became apparent, was born without the diplomacy gene.
When dancers performed a striptease in a new work by Morris called Mythologies, public outrage was echoed by the media, with the Brussels newspaper Le Soir beseeching in large headline type: “Mark Morris, Go Home”. Eventually, after a further year of aggravation, he went home in 1991, returning to Europe only on touring sorties. He now keeps his company based in the more felicitous environment of Brooklyn.
When Morris opens the second international dance festival in Dublin — in which alleged tear-jerker De Keersmaeker also appears — he will do so as the greatest American choreographer since Merce Cunningham, who opened the first festival two years ago. The pair have much in common — both are postmodernists, both eschew narrative — but in some ways they could not be more different.
Since he emerged in the 1950s Cunningham has used chance as a key element of his art. Morris, by contrast, regards himself as a classicist of sorts, valuing order, proportion and resolution in his work. Whereas in Cunningham’s work there has always been a disjunction between movement and music, Morris’s work is locked to the music that inspires it. His dancers work mostly to live music (they will be accompanied in Dublin by the chamber orchestra that works with Morris).
“If I can’t bear listening to a piece of music thousands of times then there’s no way that I could make up a dance to it,” says Morris in his Brooklyn headquarters. “I don’t have any one approach except to know as deeply as I can the music that I’m working with. So I spend a lot of time listening and studying a score before I do anything to it.”
Typically, he says, choreographing a 20-minute piece would involve between six and eight weeks of listening to the piece in question, five or six days a week, three to five hours a day. As a result, when he gets into the dance studio the choreography tends to be accomplished quickly. The creative process, says Morris, is needlessly mystified. For him it’s a matter of solving problems, mostly of his own making.
“People are so obsessed with the creative process,” he says. “That romantic idea of the suffering artist is nonsense. That’s a 19th-century idea: ‘No one feels as deeply as I do, that’s why I have to become an artist. No one understands’. Oh, come on. Everybody has similar feelings. Everybody on earth. Maybe for different reasons. It’s not that special.
“I don’t want the process to seem mystical. There’s never an epiphany. I might have three weeks to finish a piece: it’s one problem solved after another until the end is reached. Knowing when to stop is the difficult part.
“It has to be logical in a classical sense, the way Haydn makes sense. Haydn is a great example of a perfect arch that doesn’t collapse under its own weight. That ratio, that golden mean, is key to just about every satisfying work of art that I can think of.”
Born in 1956 in Seattle, Washington, Morris grew up in an ethnically diverse community — his school had an African drumming ensemble and a Samoan music group as well as more conventional outfits. “It was a wonderful place then,” he says. “I had a big variety of friends from all different backgrounds, before it was called multicultural, which is a term I don’t like very much. I prefer just cultural. I had friends from all over the place and it was great. It wasn ’t exotic: it was regular.”
A key early influence was Jose Greco. After Morris attended a workshop with the dancer at the age of 11 he pursued flamenco, eventually moving to Spain when he was 17 to study dance in Madrid. “Franco was still alive, so it was pretty f***** up, and flamenco was in the sorry state from which it has since very beautifully recovered. I was just coming out as a queer, and Spain at that time was not the place to be a fag. So I came back to the States.”
He worked with several leading companies, notably Lar Lubovitch and Hannah Kahn’s, before he formed his own in 1980. Although he emerged from what is usually regarded as a golden age of modern dance in New York, he is resolutely unsentimental about it. “People are always nostalgic for these nonexistent good old days. I was there and I don’t remember a big boom. Dancing was more popular, but it doesn’t mean it was better. It was just more.”
For his own company he recruited friends, most of whom were working in restaurants rather than dancing for a living. They quickly earned a reputation for dancing strictly to the beat of the chosen music, thereby going against the grain of dance to the extent that Morris was regarded as something of a counter-revolutionary.
Though his dances have sometimes included unorthodox elements such as choreographed remote-control toy trucks, Morris has never regarded himself as avant-garde, much less zany — a term sometimes applied to his work for which he has unadulterated contempt. Apart from Cunningham, he cites George Balanchine as his main influence from the realm of dance, but insists that his influences come from all parts of his life, from his dislikes as much as his likes.
Riverdance, unsurprisingly, numbers among the things for which he has little time. The best thing about the Riverdancers, he reckons, is that they line up straight on the stage, making them easier to shoot if it came to it.
He has always refused to analyse his dances, insisting that audiences take them as they find them. All he acknowledges is that they contain no intended message or subtext: no politics, not even of the sexual variety. “I used to be more loud-mouthed about being queer,” he says, “but I don’t do that any more.” As for politics, he says, the more overtly political a work of art, the worse it usually is.
Of his original troupe, Morris is the only one still dancing professionally: impressive not only because he is now 47 but also because he is big for a dancer, — 6ft 2in — with the build of a gracefully ageing quarterback.
“I'll do it a little bit longer, probably not a whole lot longer,” he says. “Nobody’s my exact peer in the company any more. There are people in their late thirties, but it gets harder to get back up off the floor after a while, it takes longer for things to heal and you don’t have the same kick you once had.
“A lot of my dancers are in their thirties and they’re great. I don’t like to work with too young people because I have to go on the road with them and they would irritate me. If I was travelling for weeks at a time with a 17-year-old, one of us wouldn’t come back.”
International Dance Festival of Ireland, May 4-23
www.dancefestivalireland.ie
