In the world premiere of Mark Morris’s Italian Concerto, JS Bach’s score is played with great élan on piano by Colin Fowler, and only Morris could have conceived so powerfully original a response. Choreographers since George Balanchine have all tended to set a concerto’s slow movement as some poetic male-female drama for the leading dancers also featured in the fast outer movements. But Morris – who gives the first movement to one male-female couple, and starts the third with a second male-female couple – makes the slow movement a solo for himself, now 50 years old. Just to watch his weirdly heavy, semi-galumphing walk, making us hear anew the music’s tread, is to feel the spell that is unique to him. Unforgettable is the way he mimes a single, fast, beat of the heart, or the way he stretches a slow, elongated lunging gesture.
The concerto’s andante becomes with him a sustained, ritualistic assembly of recognisable human actions and feelings, but so reordered that we can’t analyse the light/dark simple/complex emotion in our hearts. The whole concerto is choreographed with the same amazing naivety. The woman in the first movement even does a hip-slapping echo of the Black Bottom jazz dance, and the third movement develops into a quintet of mastery as five different solos (Morris now joining the other four dancers) emerge at the same time, all together reflecting the brilliance of Bach’s music.
All four works of this quadruple bill give us images that heart-catchingly combine artlessness and artfulness, spontaneity and design. The other three works were to 19th-century music: The Argument (1999, Schumann); Sang-Froid (2000, to a selection of Chopin piano pieces played continuously and with marvellous clarity by Steven Beck); and Love Song Waltzes (1989, to the Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzer). Morris gives us a different poetic drama in each of these, and in each his response to the music is so fresh and insidious that it seems to bubble straight out of his nervous system into ours. The Mark Morris Dance Group has long been ahead of all other dance companies in the flow and detail of its dancers’ response to music. And their qualities of focus, stillness, ease are ones that most actors would envy.
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The Morris season continues until January 27
