Dancers in ‘Bedtime’

Mark Morris and music are inseparable and, rather like Siamese twins, joined at the hip. Morris hears music, is saturated with it, and what results is dance that has a symbiotic life with its score. That life is sometimes difficult, cussed, but Morris, as well as being a conduit through which the notes turn to dance, is also a witty creator who casts a sometimes sideways look at a composition, sees its merits and faults, and reveals both in his choreography.

Installed this week at Sadler’s Wells, he brings two programmes of his creations; we see Morris as the man who reveres his music (in his response to Schubert and Schumann) and also understands a composer’s historic stance and identity (when dealing with Charles Ives).

At the heart of the first of two triple bills on Tuesday night is Bedtime. I think it a masterpiece. Morris uses Schubert vocal music: a cradle song for soprano; the posthumous Ständchen for soprano and male quartet, and (sheerest madness!) the Erlkönig . Be it said that the opening Wiegenlied is utterly charming, that the Ständchen (very well done by its soprano and male quartet) is a delight in its fluent dance shapes and its unfailing originality of movement ideas. But the Erlkönig is staggering.

Morris makes the terrors of the score terrifyingly real, his central trio of father and son and demonic Erl-King attended by a chorus that is by turns reflection and horrified commentator. With an eloquent account of the text from the soprano Margaret Bragle and the pianist Colin Fowler, the drama seems new, heart-tearing, and Schubert honoured in this masterly realisation.

This first programme also brings Morris in alliance with Charles Ives and his piano trio in Empire Garden. I find Ives’ folksiness, his omnium-gatherum view of American life a century ago, wholly tiresome, though I know Ives is central to American musical life, tremendously significant, and I am probably insulting the Statue of Liberty. The trio is a wild sequence of incidents and sentiments, ranging from Dvorak to Liberty Bell, and Morris, with his cast dressed in every sort of manic circus outfit, offers a collage of dance ideas as determinedly national and determinedly clichéd as his score. The dance lives absolutely with its music, the cast are given a collage of mimetic gesture and dance ideas that are brilliantly evocative of American life, and the piece has an energy and a verve that reflect that of the music. It is a jolly and vastly nationalistic piece.

About V, which Morris created at the Wells nearly a decade ago, I record that it is set to Schumann’s piano quintet, that it responds to its score with entire devotion, and that you see the music before your eyes. In its seeming simplicities, in its sweep and daring (how can Morris make his cast crawl over the stage as the second movement begins?), it is a tremendous display of its choreographer’s gifts.

Beethoven. The Texas Playboys. George Gershwin. Lou Harrison. Who but Mark Morris would dare present an evening of dance set to such unlikely bedfellows? And bring it off with such grace of means? His second programme offered choreography using each of these musical styles, living splendidly on stage, touching our emotions, speaking in entirely natural fashion. The pillars of the evening were Morris’s view of a late Beethoven cello sonata (op 102; no 1) in Visitation and Grand Duo, his tribal rite set to Lou Harrison’s granitic score for violin and piano. (The musicians, Wolfram Koessel, cello; Georgy Valtchev, violin; Colin Fowler, piano, were fine indeed.)

What unites these works, and the perky Going Away Party (from the Texas Playboys) and the jazz-age charm of Gershwin’s Three Preludes, is Morris’s honesty with music, where nothing is over-done, albeit Grand Duo has a frenzy that tears at its dancers, and Going Away Party is in danger of overstaying its artless time. Visitation is a triumph in its use of music, realising it in movement of deliberate simplicity, even unto stamping out its rhythms. We watch a community of dancers, unafraid of its majesty, rejoicing in its riches.

Grand Duo we know from earlier Morris seasons. The score pounds and beats, pauses to sing, and Morris’s dancers (a tribe repeating an ancient ritual) are possessed by it, as have been their ancestors. The sheer motor force of the movement, its ferocious repetitions, give Harrison’s music flesh, expose its dramas.

At the end, we feel as drained of emotion as the dancers are of physical resource. Staggering. The Texan whinings of the songs in Going Away Party do not know when enough is enough, and if the dance is unrelentingly home-spun it is also saucy and quite aware of what is going on. In Three Preludes, solos for Bradon McDonald live in a symbiotic relationship with Gershwin’s jazz-age charms, and he (black suited, white gloved and socked and shirt-fronted) shows them with impeccable timing and wit. As they used to say: the bee’s knees.

The Mark Morris Dance Group continues its UK tour until November 21, then performs ‘The Hard Nut’ at Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, California, December 11-20. www.markmorrisdancegroup.org