284
PARTISAN REVIEW
Since then, I have continued to look at Morris's dances as often as I can.
What has changed is that I have been able to see more of them, and to see
some of them more than once. Two years ago, his staging of Henry Pur–
cell's opera
Dido and Aeneas
was presented at the Brooklyn Academy of
Music, where I had last seen it in
I989,
and American Ballet Theatre finally
revived "Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes." Last winter, Morris's com–
pany premiered "The Argument," a powerful study of three splintered
relationships set to Robert Schumann's Five Studies in Folk Style; it was
repeated in the surnrner by Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Pro–
ject in a slightly different version for a man and three women.
In
January,
the company performed "The Argument" and four other pieces at the
499-
seat New Victory Theater, and prior to that I had the opportunity to spend
two weeks watching Morris and his dancers rehearsing in the studio.
Going a lot to the Mark Morris Dance Group has not inspired me to
join the ranks of Morris's uncritical admirers, but it has caused me to
suspect that when I found some of his earlier work unsatisfactory, the
fault was not in the dances or the dancers, but in me. What I once felt
to be a "loose, baggy quality" that sometimes came across as "sloppy
and unfocused" now looks impeccably right (though I happily stand by
my earlier comparison of his idiosyncratic movement vocabulary to "the
weird draftsmanship of a Thurber cartoon"). Similarly, greater famil–
iarity has bred keener appreciation of his uncanny musicality, not
merely in the large-scale architecture of his dances but also in their
point-to-point phrasing. And certain dances that I used to find nag–
gingly campy-especially the party scene from
The Hard Nut,
Morris's
comic-book version of
The Nutcracker-now
strike me as funny and
touching, just as he meant them to be.
The greatest revelation came from seeing a rehearsal and two perfor–
mances of "My Party," a fifteen-minute-Iong dance for four men and four
women set to Jean Franr;aix's agreeably lightweight C Major String Trio.
So far as I know, "My Party" is not generally thought to be a major work
(it is mentioned only in passing in Joan Acocella's excellent biography of
Morris), though the members of his company claim to love it. "That one
always makes people cry," a dancer who took part in the
I984
premiere
told me. I found it to be a miniature masterpiece, and one that also sheds
light on certain aspects of Morris's style that I once found elusive.
To begin with, "My Party" is a pure ensemble work: all eight dancers
are on stage throughout the piece, and they pair off without regard to gen–
der. This, Acocella says, is "the message: no rules, free choice." But accord–
ing to Morris, "My Party" is not a political statement, but a reminiscence
of the parties he used to give as a teenager in Seattle in the early
I970S
(the
