TERRY TEACHOUT
Dance Chronicle: Going a Lot
to the Mark Morris Dance Group
I
FIRST SAW
the Mark Morris Dance Group some eight years after its
I980
debut, by which time every important critic in America had
had his or her say about the Bad Boy of Modern Dance. The level of
disagreement was high enough to provoke the verbal equivalent of fist–
fights in print and in lobbies. Some thought Morris was God (or, as he
puts it in his programs, god), while others were no less sure he was an
overhyped fraud. Nobody appeared to think anything in between. The
New York dance scene suffers chronically from this sort of polarization–
it's called, appropriately enough, dance politics-but never in my then–
brief life as a balletomane had I seen so deep a fissure of opinion.
Determined to make up my own mind, I went to the Brooklyn Acad–
emy of Music, where the company was dancing, if memory serves,
"Sonata for Clarinet and Piano," "Fugue and Fantasy," and "Strict
Songs." I had my doubts about some of what I saw that night. The range
of body types on stage was diverse to the point of comedy-I'd never
seen a plumpish dancer before, or a balding one-and the company's
manner of moving struck me as puzzlingly loose-limbed. (Later that sea–
son, Mikhail Baryshnikov and American Ballet Theatre would premiere
"Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes," and I remember thinking how
nice it would be if Morris's dancers looked like
that.)
I thought, too, that
Morris was using camp as a way of concealing his emotions, and that
there was something unconvincingly ostentatious about the same-sex
partnering which at that time was something of a company trademark.
Yet for all my reservations, there was no question in my mind about
Morris's singular talent. Even then, it was plain to see that he had the
rare ability to fill a stage with eye-catching, music-driven movement. I
also liked the fact that his pieces were impersonal and unsentimental–
the opposite of everything I loathed about the lapel-grabbing school of
modern dance drama that Martha Graham had mothered. By that time,
I already suspected that Twyla Tharp would not fulfill her youthful
promise, and no new choreographer of equal interest had come along
since then, which explains why so many of Morris's early fans were
