Earlier this week I traveled to Bard College to see The Mark Morris Dance Group perform Morris’ new work, “Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare.” As everyone knows by now, this is the R&J - as Prokofiev originally intended it before those pesky Soviet censors mucked it all up - in which the two star-crossed lovers don’t die.
Happy ending? Tell that to Tybalt and Mercutio.
Even leaving aside the bloodshed that occurs despite the now-absent suicides, Morris’ ending is rather more ambiguous than your typical happily ever after. Still, as the three-hour production unfolded, I couldn’t help but feel that Morris’ take on the play reflects a particularly American impatience with tragedy. This feeling was reinforced by the setting, Frank Gehry’s Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Gehry, though Canadian born, has been based in Los Angeles for decades, and his extravagant buildings have always seemed, to me, to represent a particularly American vision of the world - one that, depending on my frame of mind, can come off as wonderfully hopeful and expansive, or terribly wasteful and vulgar:
This was my first trip to Bard, and I was expecting to find the Gehry building utterly out of place on the gorgeous, verdant campus, like a gaudy spaceship that has crumpled to earth in a remote forest. But this one, unlike many Gehry buildings, won me over, prompting the first nice thoughts I’ve had about the architect since he clambered into bed with the Brooklyn developer Bruce Ratner. The photo doesn’t really do justice to the odd delicacy of the building’s shimmery skin, which reflected the changing light as day shifted into night. The image, instead of alien machines, was of an alien itself, pulsing with strange life against a backdrop of plush evergreens.
I also hadn’t had the highest hopes for this “Romeo,” but here, too, I was surprised. Most people I’ve talked to were not impressed with Morris’ choreographic choices for the lead couple, and I agree with the criticism that there is some pretty weak material here.
But Morris has always been in love with the crowd - a group full of individuals, yes, but a group nonetheless.
Even feuding, the Capulets and Montagues remain gloriously in sync with one another, leaving the lovers to moon about in the shadows. The setting might be Verona, but the idea is All-American.
July 13th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Amusingly, right after I wrote this, I went to a baseball game (yes, another one - it’s the last season at the old Yankee stadium, it is my duty as a New Yorker to attend) with an artist who sweepingly dismissed Gehry’s architecture as stemming “from derivative ideas about art.”
They have “zero integrity as architecture,” he went on to say, summing up with this zinger: “Let me put it this way: if Frank could see a baseball game, he might see things differently.”
Ha!
July 15th, 2008 at 12:35 am
Hi Claudia,
I just saw this too, and wrote a ditty related to it.
I’m interested in your idea of this performance as very American in its impatience with (fear of?) tragedy. It makes me think of watching Maguy Marin a few weeks ago… I’m not sure if that was tragedy, but it invited us to exist in an unclear and often uncomfortable space. And just like you mentioned, people walked out in droves. (my friend heard one demanding her money back because the piece wasn’t “dance.”)
The people walking out of that opportunity reflected the ways that Americans (to totally overgeneralize) live. We don’t know how to acknowledge sickness and death. We don’t know how to exist within uncertainty. We keep searching for ways to fill up instead.
And it also goes back to that age old question of art as escape and entertainment vs. art as a way to learn/ dig into life more deeply. I wonder how these two modes of creating and watching go against one another, and also how they need one another.
July 15th, 2008 at 8:20 am
I was so sorry to miss this — (the crowd is also in love with Mark Morris — tickets were really hard to come by months in advance!). I’m glad to hear there were some redeeming qualities to it. After reading Alistair’s scathing assessment (boy, he is really Off his old infatuation with Mark Morris), I really wondered whether to weather it when it gets to NYC. It sounds much more worth the ride now… (although I’m also sorry to have missed the Bard setting for the piece… I love the Gehry site and feel light– enlightened? — when I see and enter it. But then, I’ve never been much of a baseball fan. I didn’t realize that was the core requirement for recognizing artistic integrity these days!)
Aynsley: where’s your ditty? I’d love to see it!
July 15th, 2008 at 10:49 am
Definitely, we need to see this ditty.
Well, people walked out of Marin in France in huge numbers also. But I do think that there is a particularly American approach to tragedy - even in the way we gorge on it via sickening photo montages set to music on CNN. That would be the bad side, as would the wretched, deeply culturally entrenched idea of art (especially the performing arts) as entertainment.
I think, by and large, that the cultural forces shaping Morris represent the good side (although I can see him reading this and rolling his eyes, somehow), or the more thoughtful side.
There is a general notion of speed, of getting on with things, of not dwelling, of making the best of a bad situation - I think of all of these as American attributes. It’s always funny to note how differently Americans and people from European countries answer the question “How are you?” An American could have just been fired and served divorce papers, and the answer will be “Not bad.” A European will answer “Terrible!” and go on to explain in great detail, simply after a bad morning at the office (yes, yes, I know, this might be the grossest generalization I’ve made yet. Sorry - I don’t quite have a handle on this theory yet…)
The whole idea of “America being about becoming” is antithetical to the idea of tragedy, in a way.
Yes, Martha, the memo went out last week. Only baseball fans are allowed artistic integrity. Sorry.
July 15th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Speaking of stigmas and stereotypes:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/120061
July 15th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
The ditty is at http://www.reflectionsondance.blogspot.com/
it’s sort of related to the Endgame one that you two helped with.
The Newsweek article is nice. It would be interesting to look at stereotypes of female dancers too.
And to go even further out there… I wonder if our political situation would be better if we had a better relationship with tragedy–If we could really see what is going on and, rather than obsessing about “becoming,” actually take responsibility for what is.
July 15th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
There are some really beautiful moments in this piece, Aynsley - delicious, as you say.
And you might want to check out Sally Banes’ book “Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage”
http://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Women-Female-Bodies-Stage/dp/0415111625
Imagine if the arts played more of a role in American soft diplomacy …