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For 1,800 years the Silk Road was a major trade
route, connecting China with Central Asia, running through Kashgar, Tashkent, Herat,
Baghdad, Damascus--names that to this day resonate of the exotic. Silk and spices, gold
and glass, ivory and jade and countless other commodities traveled in both directions.
Inevitably, the more profound movement of ideas--religion, political philosophy, science,
technology, and the arts--accompanied the movement of goods, cross-pollinating the
cultures of all the peoples along the way.
Cellist Yo Yo Ma has used his enormous influence as one of the great
performing artists of our time to create The Silk Road Project, seeking through music and
performance to explore the varying ethnic roots and interconnections between East and West
and the relationship between tradition and innovation in music, significantly including
the undertaking of new works.
The Project commissioned a new work by the Mark Morris Dance Group to
newly composed music by Zakir Hussain and Ethan Iverson which has had its world premiere
in Berkeley, CA. Called Kolam, for the Indian folk art form in which powders are
used to draw intricate geometric designs according to strict rules, both the music and the
dance are characterized by repeated patterns and variations.
Opening to the soft strains of Ma's cello, a dancer begins in a
handstand, a yoga position. In the most extended solo of the piece, Matthew Rose sinuously
dances in moody movements from yoga with repeated variations on the fetal position. After
the quiet opening section, the beat and the volume pick up (Iverson on piano, Hussain on
tabla and percussion) as the dance assumes the well-known vocabulary of Morris'
choreography, drawn particularly from folk dance forms (reels, squares, circles, lines)
with the addition of Morris' quirky movements--flutterings, twitches, heads atilt from
side to side. Here a repeating pattern of two men carrying in a woman is introduced; later
movements suggest the dominance of men over passive women and a protective and possessive
stance by men over women.
A spotlight creates a large circle center stage. Together with changing
pairs of dancers who stand at the perimeter of the circle and bend to the side from the
waist with impressive elasticity, an area is defined in which the other dancers
create a variety of intricate patterns--it is a Kolam in movement. A slow section of the
music is danced with suggestions of birds flying and a reaching upward for the sun.
In the final, faster section with a syncopated, jazzy beat, the troupe
wears ankle bells which, along with stomping feet, become a part of the aural as well as
the visual experience, as dancers' sounds do in tap. The backdrop is an abstraction
of swaths of bright color splashed across horizontally; in the layering of the color there
is a faint sense of painted silk on a massive scale.
The music is repetitive, rhythmic, and hypnotic, with occasional
fleeting strains of melody floating above the underlying percussion and bass. The
interplay between music and movement makes both seem a seamless unity; the complexity of
the whole demands repeated viewing.
The program opened with a 1995 dance, World Power, to music
for a gamelan orchestra by Lou Harrison. The theme, stated literally in the choral
accompaniment, is one of colonialist oppression, but there is little in the dance that is
that explicit. Morris uses groups of three, patterns of four. He superimposes here Asian
sorts of movement--shorter running steps, hands arched above the head, the foot turned out
at the ankle. Two of the men are notably featured, Joe Bowie and David Leventhal.
The closing work made a fine contrast to the first two. V, a
work premiered last fall and dedicated to the City of New York, is danced to Schumann's
exquisite E flat piano quintet. Where the Asian pieces had shorter steps and a more
angular line, V uses longer steps, a smoother, more flowing movement in a much
more classical and Western style.
A joyous first movement puts the emphasis on diagonals. To a slower,
minor key second movement, the dancers are often crawling on all fours; a sense of
mourning and despair pervades. There's a pas de deux during which secondary couples appear
briefly, echoing the steps of the central couple, only to slip back into the wings. In a
cross-shaped formation, the line of crawling dancers passes through the upright
perpendicular line of dancers to emerge themselves upright again. The scherzo
returns to brightness and lively upbeat movement--jumps, arms pinwheeling about. The final
allegro movement is a brightly lit love fest with repeated embraces.
In a period when dance companies appear to be flourishing and
wonderfuly trained and talented dancers are seen with frequency, The Mark Morris Dance
Group remains special. Its multi-body-type individuals give the appearance of a casual
ease on stage which can only be the product of superbly controlled dancing. Each is an
identifiable individual personality, while the sense of ensemble is impeccable. They are
the brilliantly tuned instrument upon which Morris makes his unique, music-grounded
dances.
- Arthur Lazere
