“My skin crawls, practically, with pride for humankind,” said Baryshnikov. “The way they perform it — this kind of restraint and dignity and satisfaction and pride, all those elements, which is what this piece is about, and the divinity, definitely, of a human being. . . . But at same time there is the unspoken camaraderie, hands touching, running, and they suddenly become one and disappear like nothing has happened onstage.”
The power to move his dancers — in unusual ways. Morris invents a new movement language for just about every piece, and in “L’Allegro,” there are bits of ballet, mime, American Sign Language, grade-school play, abstract postmodern quirks, even a little Isadora Duncan.
“As a dancer, it’s very rare that you have the opportunity to do everything you’ve ever learned in one night, from the most virtuosic, florid dance moves to, you know, ‘I am a tree,’” says Dan Joyce, who teaches dance at George Mason University and was a member of Morris’s group from 1988 to 1998. “Every skill you ever learned in dancing gets called upon in two hours.”
Ability to tune out the static and work. For all the ecstasy “L’Allegro” inspires, it came about in an atmosphere of tumult laced with bitterness. In hiring Morris, the general director of Brussels’s Theatre de la Monnaie, Gerard Mortier, had thought it a fine idea to install an attention-getting American modern-dance troupe in the position recently vacated by Frenchman Maurice Bejart and his ballet company. But the Belgians thought otherwise. They preferred their serious, polite Bejart to the young man who was serious in the studio but outspoken and flippant in public, and who arrived very willing to work, and work hard (he made some of his biggest and most important pieces in Brussels, including his “Nutcracker”-inspired “The Hard Nut” and a production of the Henry Purcell opera “Dido and Aeneas”), but decidedly unwilling to curry favor with the European press. He made some off-the-cuff statements, they were circulated with unflattering photos, and the tensions spiraled up and up.
“I’m so [expletive] relieved to be out of Brussels,” says Morris. “I hated [expletive] Brussels.”
No wonder. Joyce recalls taking a curtain call at La Monnaie for a Morris work that had involved nudity. The dancers received polite applause. Then Morris strode on for his bow, and was showered in boos. (He kept smiling as if they were bravos.) “The fortitude he had, to deal with the mud that was flung his way,” Joyce says.
Their bodies, ourselves. In the nearly 25 years since “L’Allegro” premiered, Morris’s dancers have, not surprisingly, changed. Mizrahi fondly remembers women in the original cast “who had giant [rear ends], and these crazy giant calves and boobs, and men who had thick middles. . . . It’s idyllic; there’s no such thing as a beautiful body to him. Everybody’s body is beautiful.”
Nowadays, the dancers may be slimmer but they still come in different shapes and sizes. And ages. June Omura, an original cast member, is 47 and still dancing in “L’Allegro,” though she says the Kennedy Center performances will likely be her last in this work. (She also dances in “The Hard Nut.”)
Morris’s embrace of bodies in all their lumpy, curvy, varied glory is evident in his hearty, playful and sometimes raw choreography, and it spills over into costume design. Says Mizrahi, “The idea in Mark’s company is not to mask the body. Not to mask the flesh or the musculature. A tutu is a beautiful thing but it gives the leg a certain look that’s kind of like a disguise. In Mark’s work, even if they’re playing an animal or a bird, you’re still looking at a human body. And so it’s like you’re looking, almost, at yourself.”
Community. “L’Allegro” is not the first Morris work to include dancers moving in a circle holding hands; it’s a common motif. He is an avid collector of folk dances — he has studied many and often imports the mutual support and collective pleasure of folk dances into his works. You can’t help but feel uplifted when you see the spinning, whizzing chain of dancers. The dancers feel it, too. (They have to. Morris engineers it so it’s authentic communal warmth; he hates hokiness.)
“My experience with dancing has been replete with unbelievable moments of friendship and community onstage, while we’re performing,” says Omura, choking up on the phone.
Some see a value in this celebration of the ordinary-but-divine human going well beyond the world of the arts.
“I think it’s the perfect time now” for “L’Allegro” to be seen in Washington, said Baryshnikov. “All the people running for office should go to the Kennedy Center.” With the full spectrum of human experience it represents, “L’Allegro,” he said, will “remind them they are servants of these people, and not the masters.”
For his part, Morris has a simpler view of his masterpiece.
“It was exactly what I wanted to do and a delight and really, really hard work,” he says. “It didn’t freak me out much except I lost my mind and it was impossible to do.”
Mark Morris Dance Group
performs “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato” to music by Handel at the Kennedy Center Opera House. Jan. 26-28 at 7:30 p.m., accompanied by the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, the Washington Bach Consort and four vocalists. 202-467-4600. www.kennedy-center.org. $19.00 - $69.00.
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