The unmistakable presence of Mark Morris is hard to disguise, even beneath aviator shades and enough veils to giftwrap a harem. He knows this; he’s tried. Morris created his own version of the perennial Christmas ballet The Nutcracker back in 1991. He called it The Hard Nut, and decided, against all canons of taste or decency, to perform the slinky Arabian dance from the second act himself, as a big-hipped houri swathed in robes “she” clearly imagines to be diaphanous, while the audience offers silent thanks that they are not, and nervous prayers that they all stay in place. A travesty tour de force, this hilarious little dance should have been sponsored by the US State Department to tour the Middle East as a one-(wo)man warning that the rewards of martyrdom may not quite live up to the hype.
Now it is too late. When The Hard Nut comes to London this month, Morris will appear as a party guest in the first act, but he has hung up his pointy slippers, perhaps for good. At 48, he is dancing less each year. To anyone meeting him for the first time, this might not seem much of a loss. Morris is a powerfully built, greying six-footer with big hands and shire-horse buttocks. There is an unnerving, corvine inquisitiveness to his gaze, and his mercurial, flirty, fight-me-flatter-me manner calls to mind a cross between Ray Liotta and Miriam Margolyes. Those who never saw him dance would probably find it unimaginable that he was ever more than a novelty turn; those who did see him will remember the balance, the poise, the musicality, the implausibly brilliant technique and the daring with which he would discard it, and will mourn all the roles we will never see him dance again.
Morris himself just shrugs all that away. “Dancers don’t last for ever, and even dances don’t last for ever,” he says. “And, let’s be honest, with most there’s no reason why they should. Making new dances is what I love most, and that’s what I’ll be remembered for.” Since forming the Mark Morris Dance Group in New York in the early 1980s, he has been described many times as “the Mozart of modern dance”.
It is a tag he lives up to with characteristic abundance. There is the glee he takes in low humour and the sheer messiness of flesh, and the contrasting, intuitive ease with which he delineates the most rarefied of emotions and abstract of ideas. “I’m interested in the high and the low,” he says, “because everything in between is so boring.” There is the deceptive simplicity of his methods and the raucous, unabashed, outspoken belief in his own genius: no new dance is ever less than “fabulous and beautiful”.
He was a precocious child, jamming his feet into plastic cups to imitate his sister’s pointe shoes and making up little solos to the 1812 Overture and Carnival of the Animals before he was eight. At 14, he made a “real” ballet. With characteristic bravado, instead of dismissing it auto- matically as juvenilia, he says: “I can’t remember it, so I don’t know if it was good or not.” Morris’s productivity may not be quite Mozartian, but more than 120 works in the past 25 years is, by the standards of modern dance, an almost incontinent output.
“The difference between me and other choreographers,” he says, “is that I like to make up dances. A lot of people don’t. They’re scared to. That’s why they spend five years making up a dance you could have done in five minutes, really.” In the past 12 months, there have been only three dances, but he points out defensively that one was “really huge”. He means Sylvia, a three-act, full-evening piece to an 1876 Delibes score, commissioned by San Francisco Ballet.
Morris is now one of the most sought-after choreographers in the world. He has created works for the Paris Opera Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
The Mark Morris Dance Group, however, has always been his second family. (“Although there’s nobody left from the beginning,” he says, “except me.”) But he still recruits on the same sort of principles, choosing people with experience and with bodies that are interesting rather than perfect. “So they’re not young. I mean, the youngest is 25 or something — they’re all adults. I don’t really like to work with very young people because it’s a small group and we have to get on together. Anyway, they don’t know anything, so they don’t dance well.” He denies feeling more paternal towards the dancers these days, but owns up to “avuncular”. In fact, Morris has made the transition from rude boy to senior statesman with his own brand of louche, protesting grace. He used to be indiscreet about everything, from his sexuality to his taste in cigarettes. Now he is indiscreet only about his profession. “My legacy?” he screams. “What legacy? I’m going to leave all my dances to people who don’t deserve them, but can milk some money and have huge fights with each other. That’s what Balanchine did. And Ashton. You can still hear them laughing.”
Contemporary dances — especially those of charismatic individuals — often struggle to outlive their creators. Ballets have a better survival rate, and Morris has been making more and more ballets of late, though he retains a youthful ambivalence about the academic tradition. He loves the rich movement vocabulary and the technical skills, but abhors the coldness and infantilism. “I think the ballet industry has decided it all has to be suitable for children, and that’s a horror show.” In his Sylvia, a nearly naked male dancer is raped on stage by the goddess Diana: “People were saying I’d have to be careful and I was, like, why? Because of the f***ing Walt Disney industry that has taken over American culture? I don’t accept that. I find it offensive and insulting. I want art that is interesting and sophisticated, and a lot of people in the arts seem to think dance is supposed to be the clown at the birthday party. Well, I don’t think so.”
The look for his take on The Nutcracker was inspired by the horror comics of the cult American artist Charles Burns. It features a party from 1960s suburban hell, a little like Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-in without the air of dignified restraint. There are GIs with foam-rubber Rambo arms, a rat king who could be mistaken for a three-headed Elvis and copious amounts of cross-dressing. “I wanted to take this great Tchaikovsky score and scrape off some of the saccharine that had accumulated over the years. You know, it’s not just about taking your six-year-old daughter so she’ll learn how to get a husband some day.” He also wanted to shock his troupe and his audiences out of the “inoculation of hearing this music throughout your whole life. If you’re a dancer, especially, it kills you, it saps your strength and the will to go on. I thought everyone should be able to really hear it again”.
The impetus for all Morris’s work is the music. His tastes are catholic and sophisticated, and even as a struggling young artist, he would insist on live accompaniment. He feels his work is appreciated more by musicians than by his fellow choreographers, because “they’re more sophisticated, and the world of dance, with some big exceptions, is too small and not very rigorous”. His choice of scores — things like Handel’s oratorio L’Allegro, il Pensieroso ed il Moderato, or Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas — often draws non-dance crowds to his work, who almost inevitably go away converts. “And the great thing is,” he says, “there’s a never-ending supply of music that fascinates me and that I want to make dances to, so I’m just gonna go on and on.” In 2001, he cemented — literally — his elevation from provocateur to pantheon when the Mark Morris Dance Group moved into its own $5m building, just across from the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It has a theatre, studios and restaurant, as well as a school with 400 students, “mostly from the area, some adults and teenagers, but mostly little kids. It’s not an academy — they’re not rejected if their feet aren’t beautiful — but it’s not a freak show. It’s a proper school and they’re shown lots of different things”.
Whether it is his company, his building or his art, Morris cannot help making everything around him in his own image: rigorous without being academic, various without being indiscriminate and, despite initial appearances, definitely not a freak show — except in the sense that there is nobody else quite like him.
The Hard Nut is at Sadler’s Wells, EC1, November 12-27
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