The Mark Morris Dance Group performed Morris' latest ballet Mozart Dances last weekend in Berkeley in Zellerbach Hall. It was the West Coast premiere of a show that arrived on reports from London and New York that it is a masterpiece. The show is certainly a hit; the crowds responded rapturously. The 20-odd dancers were splendid, the musicians likewise — and yet there was something missing, I can't say what.
It's like with Beethoven's even-numbered symphonies — you can tell the author is a master, but is this one a masterpiece? There are flashes of brilliance, long passages that communicate something tremendous — but there are fragments that seem arbitrary, images that stick in the mind but don't seem to belong together. There is, however, a pervading sense of loss that hangs over the central movement which is poignant in the extreme, and everybody felt it.
The evening has an elegant plan to it, like that of Balanchine's Jewels — there are three "acts," separated by intermissions. Each act has its own color scheme (black, black and celadon, white); each one is made up of pure dancing to pure music; and each has its own personnel, all combined at the end. The first is danced (mostly) by the women, the second (mostly) by the men, and the finale by everyone.
It's a Mostly Mozart-ish event composed of three piano works by Mozart, all of which were played with wonderful grace, clarity, and feeling by the virtuoso pianist Garrick Olson, himself a major star of this repertory; the first two are concerti, and they're sensitively accompanied by the Berkeley Symphony, playing at the top of their form, conducted intelligently by Jane Glover.
The only section that made big-masterpiece magic happen for me came in the middle, when a group of men took hands and began to dance in a ring. They moved like a net that has been thrown into the sea, as if pulled by a wave and drawn downstage, then drawn back on the diagonal upstage. When this was repeated a little later, the downstage men actually fell down, rolling back up to standing and retreating back upstage where the same wave-like action pulled them back down, then buoyed them up again. Seen from upstage, this surge carried a great deal of emotional weight, and when a delicate youth — Noah Vinson, the slightest male dancer in the company — entered this circle later on, you felt, ah the protagonist, and he's surrounded by dangers he's too young to perceive, but we feel them on his behalf. He functions like the waltz girl in Serenade, gives a suggestion of a story amidst a surge of forces and people, and even at one point, like her, seems to have thrown himself upon the mercy of a stronger older person (Charlton Boyd) who can't, alas, help. Unlike the waltz girl, though, he does not have to die.
There are two other very significant creatures: the girl whom the first movement is built around (Lauren Grant, who dances with god-like intent, always on her mark, with never a misplaced step); and an older man (Joe Bowie), bald and bare-chested under an 18th-century coat, who dances a brilliant solo that sets out much of the material of the Double Piano Sonata. Bowie functions like a dancing-master or perhaps an evocation of Mozart, and at a high point he circles round the human-stockade of dancers enclosing the lad, as if trying to influence the boy's fate, and perhaps helping (though also, maybe not).
There are many resonances in this ballet to other dances: to Ashton's Symphonic Variations, especially; to Paul Taylor's Esplanade; and to Balanchine's Mozartiana. Brilliant touches were added by David Leventhal, who dances like the young King David; by Amber Darragh, Brandon McDonald, Craig Biesecker, by veterans Charlton Boyd and Julie Worden, and by two Bay Area dancers new to the company, Dallas McMurray and Sam Black.