Grand Gestures, but Too Little Meaning

It’s intriguing to watch dance audiences deal with Mark Morris. They’re repeatedly told he’s a genius, and they want to believe, but in the late ‘90s, he doesn’t give them much help.

It’s no accident that Morris choreographies from 1992 and 1993 earned stronger ovations in Royce Hall, UCLA, on Friday than works from 1996 and 1998. Now 42, Morris hasn’t lost his ability to minutely analyze a score in order to physicalize its structural and thematic components. But lately, that’s sometimes all you get--no expressive flowering, no communicative spirit, just a dogged fixation on choreography as academic music visualization. Or worse: something with a private agenda, inaccessible at its core.

Compare the earliest and most recent works on the program, both Southland premieres. In “Three Preludes” from 1992, Morris gives himself a solo to piano pieces by Gershwin, displaying a playfulness and sense of celebration that complement his high intelligence. Starting with a swaying torso that reflects the music’s jazz sensuality, he adds fleet and light footwork to match the rippling virtuosity of the pianism, plus bold, Art Deco-ish arm positions to project Gershwin’s classical style and, especially, the unexpected weight of his cadences in Prelude II. Enhanced by a white-on-black costume by Isaac Mizrahi, the complex yet somehow airy result brings you closer to the music without ever making you feel that you’re in class.

Flash forward six years to “Medium,” set to a four-part composition for string quartet by John Harbison. Here, Morris’ musicality starts as obvious, juiceless structuralism, with three dancers lying on the floor and three standing nearby, the standees swirling to solo piano, the recliners “swimming” to string passages. Eventually, Morris reshuffles everyone and divides the cast into three couples--boy-boy, girl-girl, boy-girl--with only the two women (June Omura and Mireille Radwan-Dana) giving their partnership a distinctive life beyond the mere replication of assigned motifs.

Those motifs include athletic bounding and twisting entrances (with immediate exits) and an increasing abundance of gestural mysteries: an outstretched hand, bent up at the wrist, for example, or arms reaching high to pull something down (a starry mantle? a crown?). Moreover, Morris avoids whole-body statements here, frequently giving one impetus to the dancers’ arms and head and another to their torso and legs. But he provides no key to cracking his code, no unity other than all those oppositions (standees versus swimmers, upper versus lower), no real emotional center.

The larger-scale “Grand Duo” (1993) and “I Don’t Want to Love” (1996) were both danced and reviewed earlier this season at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, each of them performed then and now with great urgency by dancers and musicians alike. But the former (to a score for violin and piano by Lou Harrison) represents an inspired evocation of primitive ritual--with the choreography again teeming with gestural mysteries, but this time set in a clear and ultimately engulfing social context.

The latter (to seven Monteverdi vocal compositions) looks stylish in its gleaming white Mizrahi costumes and artfully develops character relationships from the song texts. But since those texts are sung in Italian, much of the audience remains excluded. Yes, Morris supplies translations in the house program, but the piece comes right after “Medium,” with the house-lights still out, so it’s impossible for people to be as familiar with the antique poems by Guarini, Rinuccini, Marino and Chiabrera as they definitely need to be.

The UCLA audience adored “Grand Duo” on Friday, but seemed to take “I Don’t Want to Love” largely on faith, applauding the dancers but reserving their greatest enthusiasm for the accompanists: the Artek Singers and 458 Strings. Instrumentalists Sarah Roth, Ethan Iverson, Jessica Troy and Jason Duckles also lent their artistry to the occasion. Among the dancers, Radwan-Dana brought gorgeous line and deep feeling to a central role in “I Don’t Want to Love,” and Charlton Boyd summoned impressive concentration for the moments in “Grand Duo” when Morris isolated him against the group activity.