I sat so close that I could almost put my feet up on the stage at B.A.M. Saturday night.
I was nervous about making a bad choice coming here; Kevin Wegner had denigrated MMDC with sort of a cluck of the tongue or roll of the eyes at the mention of their name (I'm paraphrasing his gestures).
I continued to have misgivings for the first ten minutes as all the opening moves were in a Devo/Residents mode. I was anxious that the whole evening not be danced that way. It was spastic automaton, übermodern (in the 1930's sense).
But I shouldn't have worried. The first half of the evening's program was seven short dances, each to a different Bartok violin concerto. You can't go too wrong when there's seven short, changing sketches, no matter WHAT the dance company.
Isn't it often the case that art stuff is most pleasing if it gives you a modicum of prettiness but then throws some sand into the paint? To be really tasty it has to make a stroke too light or too heavy. There needs to be something done crookedly to make the thing interesting.
That crookedness happened several times at Mark Morris. The choreography was deliberately insincere, and I liked it very much. With ther moves the dancers were saying, hey, check us out we're doing that trite thing you like, that stupid banal pretty thing, but a little bkwds or too flat. We do things that betray our insincerity, our irreverence shows in our incomplete execution of it.
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