Who’s Star of Yo-Yo Ma, Morris Show?

When Yo-Yo Ma plays the cello while Mark Morris performs his choreography, who’s the accompanist and who’s the dancer? The answer proved anything but obvious Friday when Ma made music on the left side of the stage at the Irvine Barclay Theatre at the same time as Morris and his 18-member company performed two splashy recent dances in the center.

It would be nice to report that the event represented a starry collaboration of equals--but it didn’t. As the dance world’s current icon of music visualization, Morris proclaims the primacy of music, and his pieces nearly always remain subservient to it. Normally, as in “Rhymes With Silver” at the end of Friday’s program, the musicians stay in the pit and the dancers’ interpretation of the score becomes the audience’s focus. But with Ma on the stage for “Falling Down Stairs” and “The Argument,” Morris’ choreography and company became nonessential viewing: no more than a visual aid, gloss or adjunct to the indispensable performance and prime generative experience of the evening.

No, Ma didn’t compose the music, but his superb performances of Bach’s Third Suite for unaccompanied cello and Schumann’s Funf Stucke im Volkston (with pianist Ethan Iverson) matched rich, singing tone with intense, purposeful motion: such moves as intently leaning forward and back in his chair, changing the angle and force of his bowing attacks or otherwise responding to the needs and moods of Bach and Schumann intimately and spontaneously. In the process, he embodied the musical impetus that Morris sought to visualize with a physical immediacy that no dancer executing an essentially decorative plan of action could possibly equal.

Ah, but were his movements anything you could call dance? Of course: The postmodern generation that Morris belongs to accepts that anything can be dance, and his pieces at the Irvine teemed with shrugs, foot taps and random gestural material used as motifs. But when the dancers thrust downward or tapped their feet in “Falling Down Stairs,” it seemed merely deft or clever; when Ma thrust downward or tapped his feet, he took you to ground zero of music visualization--the moving body fused with the musical impulse.

Based on Morris’ film choreography for the “Inspired by Bach” series telecast last season on PBS, “Falling Down Stairs” reflected the score’s descending cadences with 15 dancers surging off a seven-step platform onto the floor, kicking their bare legs high from under loose velvet robes designed by Isaac Mizrahi or bobbing cheerfully in place before introducing the kind of structural motif that Morris builds into most of his pieces. Here it involved fists punching high into the air, then opening and melting back, though the swirling entrances and exits also served as something like a motif expressing the racing vitality of the cello suites.

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Occasionally, all this restless activity looked hectic against the unbroken line of the music, but such passages as the choral hand-jive on the platform or Julie Worden diving off of it into the arms of her colleagues exuded the uninhibited youthful verve of Morris’ best early work.

Darker and full of dramatic tension, “The Argument” used Schumann to define the combative relationships of three couples: Worden and the charismatic Charlton Boyd (in a role recently danced by Mikhail Baryshnikov); Tina Fehlandt and Morris (short-haired and portly these days); Ruth Davidson and Shawn Gannon. Throughout, the piece soberly balanced the need for intimacy with the frustration it generates when partners become stifling and sometimes blazingly hostile.

Set to a 12-part commissioned score by Lou Harrison, “Rhymes With Silver” featured a backdrop painting by British artist Howard Hodgkin: undulating layers of primary red and green, backed with yellow. Layers also pervaded the choreography, with the dancers often deployed, front to back, in overlapping planes. Harrison’s 35-minute quintet (violin, viola, cello, piano and percussion) evoked a number of traditional dance forms and Morris responded with highly artful suggestions of antique Asian formalism, jaunty social dancing and sinuous folkloric ensembles.

Sometimes, however, the dancing looked overproduced or overwrought compared to the leaner, tauter accompaniment--a major example being Morris’ own whirling solo juxtaposed with the absolute stillness of Kraig Patterson. Music visualization can be an unyielding calling for a creative artist and this faultlessly performed program offered evidence galore of its pitfalls and dead-ends.