Photo: The Nation.
Choreographer Mark Morris at the Ojai Music Festival.
Many people know Mark Morris as a great choreographer, but much of his success has depended on his devotion to teaching his dancers.
Alastair Macaulay wrote recently about this side of Morris at the New York Times. “New York City has often been called the world’s dance capital. One good reason is that a number of the world’s foremost choreographers not only lived and worked in New York, but also taught class here. Martha Graham, George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham and many others helped to lure dancers to the city.
“Fewer and fewer of today’s top dance-makers carry on that tradition. The foremost exception is Mark Morris. … While there have been seasons when his choreographic inspiration has dipped, his performers have almost invariably looked wonderful. This is a tribute to how he and his teaching colleagues prepare them each day.
“The dancers don’t present themselves as virtuosos. And they’re all such distinct individuals — each exuding what seems natural — that it’s easy to make the mistake of thinking they don’t share training. But it’s precisely their schooling with Morris, whose company, the Mark Morris Dance Group, was established in 1980, that makes them look so natural.
“ ‘I first taught when I was 13 — Spanish sevillanas — and first taught ballet in my later teens,’ Morris, 66, said in an interview at the Union Square Cafe. ‘As an adult, I used to teach modern or jazz or ballet. I would take class all over the city, which is how I met so many fabulous people: We were all dancing together. And when I gave workshops, I’d ask the most talented people to come back and be in my next piece.’ …
“ ‘It’s just the last year or two I’ve cut back,’ he said. He now shares teaching assignments with company alumni. Surprisingly, for a modern-dance master, he teaches a ballet class, with a live pianist. The dancers start by standing at the barre, bringing more and more parts of the body into play with each exercise. Then, after about 40 minutes, they work without support in the center of the room. Finally they move expansively across the room, in phrases involving turns and jumps.
“It’s ballet — though with a difference or two. Like other modern-dance choreographers (he particularly credits Hannah Kahn), Morris will sometimes ask his dancers to articulate and bend the spine in ways largely foreign to ballet — they alternate convex and concave shapes of the spine at the barre — and to phrase in irregular counts. And there’s no work on pointe: the dancers are barefoot or in socks or soft shoes. …
“The Morris class is ‘a very pure form of ballet that strives to be stripped of its affectations,’ Billy Smith, a dancer who joined the company in 2010, wrote in an email. ‘We do use our torsos in a more “modern” way than maybe a ballet company would in class. But at the core our classes are very much oriented toward the purity of ballet technique.’ …
“Morris, an invariably entertaining talker, speaks exuberantly to his dancers, between exercises — about what’s on television, about an unmissable Broadway show (and about the long lines for the ladies room in Broadway theaters), about New York traffic gridlock, about Olive Oyl. But this spiel isn’t just a one-way Morris event: He wants his dancers to be people with lives and interests, not just dance executants, and he enjoys their repartee. …
“Sam Black, who became a full-time Morris dancer in 2005 and is now the company director sharing the teaching assignments, will give his stage farewell during the Joyce season. In an interview at the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn in July, he recalled how he used to stretch his arms too straight upward in certain positions. Morris would say, ‘You only have three joints in your arm. You have to make a curve with only three joints. That takes imagination.’
“Many dancers have remained with the company more than 10 years, their longevity in part attributable to Morris’s growing concern with anatomical efficiency. …
“It was not until 1988, when the Morris dancers moved for three years to Brussels to become the resident company at the Théâtre Royale de la Monnaie, that he began to teach them a daily ballet class. That was when Megan Williams, now a ballet teacher, joined. She remembers that, in class, he enjoyed giving them one exercise for footwork and one for the upper body.
“ ‘He would show us the feet pattern, and then the port de bras pattern — separately!’ she said. ‘We had to put them together like a puzzle. It was almost impossible, like that exercise of rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time.’ “
More at the Times, here.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 