It is very tempting to write with reverence about the Opening Night of Cal Performances' new season, since the death of Socrates, a dance-ritual-enactment on which the evening ended, looms so large in Western Civilization. But earnestness would be the wrong key. The music is by Eric Satie, the Marcel Duchamp of music, and though the music is sublime, it is in no way earnest nor heavy. Indeed, the ease and lightness of Socrates' own handling of the situation, in which he thanked his jailer and asked politely what he should do after drinking the hemlock, was a model for Satie's setting, which abounds in sparkling notes and tender phrases that have the mysterious property of begging to be repeated �" you can't hear them enough, there is no too much. Mark Morris' choreography for them, which featured many exquisite repetitions of simple phrases, had the same mysterious property of being over too soon, before we'd seen enough of it.
The whole evening was sublime. From the moment the curtain went up, in darkness and silence, spangles of light flashed like stars in a velvet night all over the stage and all round the theater, reflected off hidden spotlights from little mirrors sewn on the dancers' costumes, over their hearts. From the first moves they made, which come from Merce Cunningham's daily classroom exercises, and a little Louis XIV-style bow �" what in ballet is called a reverence �" it was intuitively obvious that the evening formed a ritual homage to the love of Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Morris is writing their names in the stars. If a poet can do it, so can a choreographer. That opening piece, called (who knows why?) "Behemoth," lasts 45 minutes and held my attention at all times, but is danced in complete silence, except for the stamping noises the dancers sometimes make, and is unmistakably a piece in the manner of Merce Cunningham, with many learned allusions to the oeuvre.
If you've read this far, you probably know that Merce lived to nearly 90 and lived to see his last work, Nearly 90, performed in New York �" though by the time we saw it here in Berkeley last year, he had died and had been publicly preparing for his death for at least a year, publicizing his plans to disband the company after one last year, amidst testimonials and tributes to "the greatest living choreographer." "Heut oder morgen kommt der Tag," as the Marschallin says to Octavian in Rosenkavalier: the day is coming, today or tomorrow. And the whole point, as she says, is to handle the whole thing with light hands. The highest tribute I could pay to Morris' tact and admiration for Cunningham is that he did it in this spirit: neither he nor his people have made any hay at all out of this tribute to Merce. There is no mention of it in the publicity, nor in the program notes, they make no claims to the mantle, they just dance it, with wonderful spirit, lightness of touch, acuteness of observation for the virtues Merce admired; it is almost impossible not to see Socrates as a stand-in for Merce.
Second-hand rose
Morris has set Satie's "Death of Socrates" before, nearly 30 years ago; and indeed, Cunningham himself choreographed to it way back when, but was denied the rights to use the music in performance, whereupon Cage wrote a new score for him called "Cheap Imitation." Merce called it "Second Hand." Well, it happened something like that, the company performed it here last year in their retrospective. Most of Merce's first ballets were danced to Satie. Cage's debt to Satie is colossal: Satie invented the found object, the musical hoax, the droll name for the haunting piece.
The evening had three parts. "Behemoth" is a big-ass modern dance, "Looky" is a hilarious suite of cocktail-party tableaux and dances set to music for a player-piano (Kyle Gann's "Studies for Disklavier") and echoes Cage's many adorable scores for toy piano and "prepared Piano." The posturing mimics museum-opening behavior, and the dancers wear costumes one recognizes from the Mark Morris rep. There's a dance to a waltz that keeps speeding up and suddenly slowing down; the group divides in half, some dancing twice as fast as the others by the end. The finale has a vaudeville-ish kick to it.
"Socrates" was commissioned from Satie in 1916 by the lesbian Princess de Polignac, who specified "female voices." But Satie made another version later for piano and tenor, which Morris uses, setting three scenes by Plato: Alcibiades' paean to the music of Socrates' speech, which intoxicates him more than the flute; the scene where our hero and Phaedrus are walking on a hot day by the river Ilyssus and stick their feet in the cold water; and the death scene, where Socrates strokes Phaedo's hair and notes that "tomorrow they'll cut your curls off." It was exquisitely sung by tenor Michael Kelly, with Colin Fowler making the most beautiful bell-like sounds on the piano. Martin Pakledinaz designed Grecian tunics for the dancers, who adopted many antique poses: lying on the side, as the Greeks did to eat and drink; moving in small groups that echo the imagery of the friezes of the Parthenon and urn decoration, and with the shoulders squared off Egyptian-style. In the first dance, pairs of dancers linked up, holding little ropes, folk-dance style.
The most arresting moment for me came when, Socrates having drunk the cup, the dancers suddenly turned around and faced the back wall. It was consummated.
Shakespeare stole from Plato for the death of Falstaff, which Mistress Quickly tells the same way: "I felt his feet, and they were cold as any stone." All the way up the body, cold as any stone. The dancers mimed this quite literally, and all ended up lying on the floor, as the music splashed its heavenly tones over them all.