Ever Seen Morris Dancing?
Have you ever seen Morris dancing? I didn’t know he could. Thank you, and good night. But Mark Morris dancing is something else. The American choreographer’s Barbican programme this week, Mozart Dances, defies description. It is simply one of the most inexplicably beautiful theatre shows I have ever seen.
One of Brian McMaster’s greatest services to humanity while running the Edinburgh Festival was to bring Mark Morris and his troupe to the annual beano year after year (five years running, I think). The music is always played live — “The least you can say about me is that I’m a great DJ,” Morris once said — and the dancers always graceful and sexy.
Morris not only brings out the best in his performers. He brings out the best in his audiences. We were brilliant at the Barbican last night: alive, alert and humming with pleasure. I sat behind composer Thomas Ades and next to the director Peter Sellars, who co-commissioned the work for his New Crowned Hope festival in Vienna, and had the great pleasure of introducing one to the other.
And I spent an unplanned interval with two old friends, publisher Richard Johnson and novelist Douglas Kennedy, whom I first met when he was running the Peacock Theatre in Dublin many moons ago. Nicholas Kenyon, managing director elect of the Barbican, said that “I’m not really here,” which was odd as his braying laughter filled the foyer, “but I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”
Re Mozart, Sellars — who still sports his wonderful sticky-up Bart Simpson lavatory brush hair-do — was once asked if he thought that Sondheim wrote operas. “Stephen Sondheim doesn’t write operas,” he replied. “Mozart writes operas.” Quite. And Morris dances Mozart like a dream in the ultimate karaoke experience, karaoke as an art form.