2013 Billboard Music Awards

Mark Morris designs a dance after he picks his music

$(Stephanie Berger/ STEPHANIE BERGER PHOTOGRAPHY ) - A scene from the Mark Morris Dance Group performing \$

(Stephanie Berger/ STEPHANIE BERGER PHOTOGRAPHY ) - A scene from the Mark Morris Dance Group performing \"Festival Dance\" during the Mostly Mozart Festival presented by Lincoln Center at the Rose Theater, Jazz at Lincoln Center.

$(Stephanie Berger/ STEPHANIE BERGER PHOTOGRAPHY ) - A scene from the Mark Morris Dance Group performing \$

CAPTION

By Sarah Kaufman,
Sarah Kaufman
Feb 01, 2013 03:57 PM EST
The Washington Post
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When he is in the studio creating a dance, choreographer Mark Morris faces no end of decisions, questions, problems. How does he solve them? Honey, you have no idea.

Neither does he.

(Richard Termine/PHOTO BY RICHARD TERMINE) - The Mark Morris Dance Company performs.

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Let’s take “The Office.” No, not that “The Office.” I’m talking about a 1994 dance by Morris, which has nothing whatsoever to do with Scranton or that’s-what-she-said jokes. Morris has recently brought the work back into his repertory after an absence of more than a decade. Local audiences will see it for the first time when the Mark Morris Dance Group performs it and two other Washington premieres next Friday and Saturday at George Mason University’s Center for the Arts.

“The Office” stands out for a couple of reasons. Morris originally choreographed it not for his own troupe but for a Croatian folk dance group in Ohio. He started working on it at the height of the war in Bosnia, and by the time he was finished with it, he discovered he had made something rare and possibly a first for him: a political dance.

“It wasn’t my intention,” he says. “But when it was finished it seemed like that.”

Morris’s method is to find a piece of music he likes, then create a dance to it, rather than to think of an idea for a dance and then look for music that fits. In this case, he started with Dvorak’s Five Bagatelles for Two Violins, Cello and Harmonium. (As always, his music ensemble will perform it live.) Morris had never made a dance to Dvorak before, and he found the harmonium especially appealing. Used subtly, it lends an unexpected horror-movie thrill to the swaying folk-dance rhythms.

Responding to the music’s structure, Morris decided to have the number of dancers diminish as the piece progresses, so the first section is a sextet, the second a quintet, and so on until there is only one dancer left.

But that’s not the only part of the work’s design that suggests the gradual, chilling sweep of death through this little community of dancers. There is also a character in a business suit, carrying a clipboard, who enters at the end of each section and, with crisp, wordless authority, escorts one of the dancers off the stage.

“It’s very, very — what’s the word — ambiguous,” Morris says, speaking by phone from his company’s headquarters in Brooklyn. “You take from it what you will. It has strange, sad overtones, and there’s the element of people going away as it happens. But that was purely pragmatic when I was choreographing it: who was at rehearsal, who could do what.”

Late in the process, a glimmer of a narrative began to take shape, and Morris added the dancer with the clipboard “in order to make it make sense,” he says.

And there it was: a work that in its austerity and structure suggested the ruthless, bureaucratic pursuit of annihilation, especially given its bits of folk dancing, Dvorak's melancholy and the Slavic heritage of its performers. Morris ended up in a different place from where he began, with a work that led the imagination to the atrocities taking place at the time in the former Yugoslavia.