San Francisco Classical Voice

DANCE REVIEW Ma and Morris, A Most Musical Dance Team
April 20, 2002

By Robert P. Commanday

The reasons for Yo Yo Ma's teaming up with Mark Morris were easy to see during their operation at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall Saturday afternoon. The choreographer's musicianly approach is certainly primary and that includes a good ear and a respect for the composition. In the piece entitled V, to Schumann's Piano Quintet in E flat, the second of their two collaborations on the program, through his 14 dancers, Morris traced the form and painted the feeling of the work with affection. Hand in glove, Ma and skillful associates who came with him, Lisa Lee, Andrea Schultz, violins, Jessica Troy, viola, and Ilan Rechtman, piano, gave a rich performance of this classic quintet (positioned stage right just off the stage).

Seven dancers in blue described the music's opening theme, Allegro brilliante, in exuberance, then seven in light green developed the motions of the first group. The lilt of the second theme was borne on the glow of Ma's cello. It had to have lifted their buoyancy, and all 14 worked out the development section. Dancers in pairs picked up on the dotted rhythms of the In modo d'una Marcia. The pairs again, but now in ensemble, attacked the Scherzo with a speedy galloping cross, and the finale dance caught the music's joy with its own humor, the dancers rushing into each others arms at the end. In such a work, Morris shows the Balanchine gift "to make the music visible," and, importantly, never exploiting or caricaturing.

V, by the way, was given its preview performance here in Zellerbach Hall last October, just before its official premiere in London, but shortly after the September 11 tragedy, which accounts for the work's dedication to New York City.

In Kolam, the program's "World" premiere, funded in part by the presenter, Cal Performances, the music and dance helped each other. In this case the score, while attractive as a continuity, was not substantial enough to stand alone, certainly not a unified composition. Instead the larger musical coherence depended on the idea of a stylistic transition and fusion. Three movements were pieces by the tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, arranged by George Brooks for cello (Ma, of course), string bass (Ben Street), tabla and percussion (Hussain) and piano (Ethan Iverson). Iverson provided the finale in a jazz style.

Flow of movement and design

The dance reflected the music's style fusion, the evident East Indian idea in Hussain's music with such designs as body movements in angles, after Indian sculpture and dance forms and forms suggesting poses in Yoga. Initially this was shown in multiple as the lighting cast the dancers' silhouettes against the backdrop, a few great swashes of color as if done by a giant brush in oil. The flow of movement and its shifting design fascinated, now taking the dancers into floor "exercises," developing sequences with different curvings and outstretchings. For this, in the second Zakir Hussain/Brooks piece, with 4 women, 4 men, the percussion set up a slow ostinato beat.

The third piece was all Ma, playing a rhapsodic solo that began in a wide ranging melody inflected with portamentos, evoking an Indian manner, then turning mid-Eastern or Hebraic, in the manner of Bloch. The assimilating continued as Ma's performance unmistakably took on the character of his Bach sarabande solos, double stops and all. As in his earlier collaboration with Morris on the Bach solo cello suites, Ma, in the front of the quartet (positioned stage left), kept his gaze on the dancers. His timing of his rhapsodic playing to their movement (and presumably the timing of their response to his music) occasioned a unified, intimate music/dance ensemble surely comparable to the chamber music experience. No one collaborates more closely than Yo-Yo Ma. (Amusingly, the solo's melodic idea, generated from what was probably an Indian mode, reflected the pattern of an American popular tune, "That's All.")

The dance involved solo and five dancers against four (Morris for the most part avoids even numbers and obvious symmetries), and there was subtle grace to their movement. (Compared with the dance for the Schumann, with its long melodious designs, the dance to this Indian-derived music had to be short phrased and was, in consequence, intricately detailed. This was no doubt suggested by the title, Kolam, a Tamil word meaning, the program noted, a particular decorative art.) Iverson's finale was in the jazz manner. Jazz could be heard in the earlier fast movements in the tabla's playing, and here it was outright, the connection or fusion carried through. Naturally, Morris picked up that syncopation and energies in the finale's dance.

Mark Twain's denunciation

The opening work, World Power (1995), a political statement, was inspired by Mark Twain's devastating denunciation of America's conquering of the Philippines, from his Homage to Pacifica. The music was from a Lou Harrison work of that title and another, Bubaran Robert, for gamelan (UC's Gamelan Sari Raras), harp (Henry Spiller), small chorus (UC's Perfect Fifth) singing Twain's text in unison, and trumpet (Patricia Lujàn Grima) — the male singers and trumpet not in tune.

World Power, originally a Cal Performances commission, draws choreographic design and gestural detail from the East Asian tradition, the dancers holding arms and hands out in characteristic patterns. The dancing here is more obviously imitative of the music and the ethnic source, as in the fluttering of hands to mirror the tremulant sounds in the gamelan. As Harrison's music is his own, after the Indonesian manner, it has a western tunefulness, and the dance too, follows a syntax and narrative design that is Morris, not emulative. The dramatic theme is invoked as dancers appear singly from the wings and, with the periodic thump of heavy drum, fall prostrate, signifying victims' deaths.

The dance continues through the Bubaran Robert music with two males, and, over an incessant syncopation, Morris introduces head jerks as dramatic accents. Quartets of the dancers enter and take bent-over postures and shapes suggesting the agony or tension of the work's subject, and the work, though hardly a unified one with a consistent line, ends dramatically. In this work however, as the others, Morris produces dance, refreshingly free of athleticism and virtuosity for their own sake, dance that realizes the music and captures the expressive purpose.

(Robert P. Commanday, the senior editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music and dance critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)