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Mozart Dances, Mark Morris Dance Group, photo by Gene Schiavone
Over the weekend Mark Morris Dance Group returned to the Kennedy Center for the first time since 1999, although we last saw the company at George Mason a year ago for their production of Dido and Aeneas. This was also my first chance to see the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater since its much needed
renovation, which was concluded this past fall. That dingy old theater, which badly needed a face lift, looks and sounds like a new space, and it was a delight to see it play host to Mark Morris's airy, sunny Mozart Dances on Friday evening. Premiered only in 2006, a commission for Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival, this graceful, bouncy choreography appealed on a purely visual level, with movements that corresponded to the Rococo whorls of some of Mozart's most aesthetically pleasing scores.
The production combined two Mozart piano concertos, in a competent if somewhat pedestrian performance by the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra under the capable baton of British conductor Jane Glover. The crucial piano parts, which Mozart generally wrote for himself, were played by a pianist who normally specializes in contemporary music, the veteran Ursula Oppens. Morris often hewed close to the score for the shapes of his choreography, matching the three quarter-note motif of the F major concerto (K. 413) to three bounces by dancers throughout the first act, Eleven, giving many of the piano-only sections of music to a solo female dancer (the pixie-like Lauren Grant), and creating raised-arm gestures to correspond to sforzandi in the piano part. Some of the costumes (designed by Martin Pakledinaz) were inspired by the 18th century, too, but like the set backdrops (large, plain swaths of paint by Howard Hodgkin) they had a simplified, minimalistic feel.
Mozart Dances, Mark Morris Dance Group, photo by Gene Schiavone
Much of the subtext of the choreography was about attraction and rejection, reaching a climax when one dancer ran along a line of his colleagues and leaped at full velocity into a surprise embrace with another. The moods were at times serious, intimate, and jocose, playing with the wit of Mozart's temperament and with the ideas of dialogue between solo and group in the concertos and with the interconnected private conversation of the middle movement's score, the D major sonata for two pianos, K. 448, played beautifully by Oppens and relative newcomer Amy Briggs. When Mozart used refined dance forms, as in the Menuetto of K. 413, Morris's choreography was more suave, while movement recalling reels and other more popular dances came to the fore in the folksy last movement of K. 595. It was one of the most serene and happy evenings spent in the theater by this critic in recent memory.
The next visiting company in the Kennedy Center's celebration of modern dance is the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater this week (February 3 to 8), including its new collaboration with Sweet Honey in the Rock.
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On a cold January night, serve up three parts mostly light-hearted choregraphy and an all-Mozart fest in the pit. Tough to have a bad time under those conditions.
Does DCist send dance writers to cover music events?
As I wrote in the review, it was a serene, happy evening.
Over the years for DCist, I have covered music, the Washington Kastles, museum exhibits, the Legg Mason Classic, and goodness knows what else. And dance, too. It's fun to write about other things.