Three
Dad’s Charts
My father was no longer teaching at Franklin High by the time I attended. I didn’t apply myself to much academic work—I was smart enough to get by but not smart enough to study—and only bothered with the things that interested me: reading and music.
Penny Hutchinson, my friend from Verla’s since I was fourteen (she was a couple of years older), was slightly rebellious, a little more chic, and got to go to what was then called an “alternative” high school, where they mostly smoked pot, ignored grades, sat on a couch, and had sex with their teachers in the time-honored tradition. I couldn’t get in—they were very particular—and I was jealous. I wanted to be studying Advanced Lesbianism with her, as opposed to where I was, which I hated. We were so sophisticated by then, the teacher would leave and we’d work. The school offered Swahili, which only the students from Hong Kong studied. I took French. There was an African drumming group: full dashikis, Afros, black power.
I was a tenor in the honors choir, which sang jazzy pop, an unholy blend of hand jive and terrible cravats (“apache ties”), maybe a dozen of us singing mediocre arrangements (that I mostly loved). I was also in the big choir with thirty people (which is where I learned the Vivaldi Gloria, later to be music for my first large-scale dance). I had a big fight with the born-again Christian choirmaster. The class was at eight in the morning—I was habitually late by half an hour (and we lived a half block away)—and he assigned me the gesture choreography for a medley from Jesus Christ Superstar. I refused. I wasn’t a Christian, and I didn’t want to involve myself in bad religious music in that way, so he took me out of the concert; I didn’t perform or even attend, and he failed me because I refused to allow him to exploit my skills as a choreographer for music in which I couldn’t find myself believing. And he was the Christian. I knew I was leaving school anyway, which perhaps accounted for my attitude.
I was done with high school before I even began. I was there only two years.
IN POST–WORLD’S FAIR SEATTLE (the Century 21 Exposition had taken place throughout 1962), there was folk dance. People actually did that then. Interest in other lands and other cultures was high, all part of the general hippie culture and perhaps a result of postwar détente. People picked up the panpipes; everybody played the guitar. And I began going with Jewish friends once a week to do barefoot Israeli folk dancing. I was too young to be a real hippie, but I loved dancing and there was a touch of hippiedom about the whole scene, with a folk dance festival outside on the lawn every weekend. The dances themselves were athletic, totally exhausting and communitarian (not to mention many fake—manufactured primarily to get the kibbutzim revved up so they can work longer hours in the prison that is a kibbutz). We did every single dance every single Saturday until just after sundown; it was the most fun I’d ever had.
And there I met people who danced with Koleda, who rightly considered themselves superior to the Israeli folk dancers. Koleda had a much higher authenticity rating, with someone from Macedonia teaching his or her national dance one weekend, someone from Croatia the next. Their focus was on Balkan folk dancing, from all the then states of Yugoslavia: Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, etc. In fact, my first exposure to Koleda had been a few years earlier in the sixth grade. Representatives of the group, newly returned from a tour in the Balkans, had come to do a show in the lunchroom at my grade school. They danced, demonstrating how they wrapped this twenty-foot-long wool sash around themselves. Their beautiful embroidered woolen costumes had made such an impression on me. It was as though they were in the mountains of Thrace, which, in their minds, they were.
They invited me to join them at international folk dance sessions, open to all, at the University of Washington. It appealed, not only because it was all ages and there was occasional live music but also because of the dances themselves. Some were straightforward, but others very difficult, particularly the extremely fast Bulgarian dances with variations called by the leader. They could be quite ornate yet also very spontaneously improvised to the specific theme of that particular dance and its compound rhythms and polyrhythms.
It was so much fun—the people, the vibe, the crazy Bulgarian dancing—that I started to go twice a week. The dance might be a long line circling a big ballroom. You’d study the dance until you got it, and finally you’d drum up enough courage to insinuate yourself. Then you’d follow along the back of the line as they were changing directions, very fast, very butchy, and then grab someone’s belt (which by the way was not unsexy) and insert yourself into the line. Locked in, you’d dare not do anything wrong. First of all, everyone would hate you, and second, it would be dangerous. If you couldn’t keep up, you were rejected; and if you couldn’t cope with those rhythms, if you hadn’t watched carefully enough and learned, you were out too. So it was very strict and challenging, the survival of the fittest. And those high stakes are extremely attractive to someone who can get it right.
There was a little bit of square dancing, Morris dancing too (the dance that would provide clever writers with so many headlines about me). I loved learning these figures. Often you were singing while you were dancing, and the dances went on for a long time, so you could talk and flirt and have a fabulous time. That, to this day, is what my work aspires to be, entirely.
Koleda was a collective, sometimes thirty or one hundred people, started by a man called Dennis Boxell, who died in 2010. It was a semiprofessional company, which means that they put on professional shows and charged money for tickets but the dancers didn’t actually get paid. All the money went, at least theoretically, back into the running of the company. Boxell himself was an expert in Bulgarian dance, and apparently a pederast who groomed boys of about my age—an “inspirational sleazebag” I once heard him called. He never bothered with me, though some of my friends were having sex with him. I tried but, thankfully, he wasn’t interested. Perhaps I was repellent to him. There weren’t a lot of actual gays in Koleda, but it was perfectly acceptable. I was basically out to them from the beginning, and I found myself accepted, not primarily as gay, just as someone with the chops for the dances. The Koleda family—and it was very familial—treated me well. I was the youngest of the performers, and whether they considered me a prodigy or not (though this was less important, given the group ethos), I occasionally got to lead the line or do an exciting little solo.
These were my hippie, musician, pothead, conscientious objector friends, some of whom were dropping acid daily. At fourteen, I felt very young among the sexy college students and kooky adults. There were a lot of married couples in their thirties with kids nearly my age, and college students sleeping with each other in different combinations. All the women dated Serbian men, and to this day, I have American friends with Serbian last names. It was quite utopian. My friend Penny danced there with me too.
Bulgarian Doll Dance, Koleda, Seattle, 1970. (Courtesy of Maureen Morris)
And it was a big social scene. There was a Koleda camp at a state park, which was full commune action, group cooking, dancing, and lots of drinking, particularly slivovitz, which I advise you to avoid. And for a while there was a “Koleda House” somewhere in Seattle, where three or four Koleda friends lived through college. My mother, for whatever reason, bless her, thought it was fine for me to spend the weekend there when I was sixteen or so. Heaven knows what she thought was going on, though I know from Maureen that she was worried that the scene was a little too grown-up for me. She was right. It was on one of these dancing and singing weekends that I first smoked pot, when a lid went for ten dollars. My friend Nona took her first hit, then projectile vomited against the wall. And the pot back then was mild.
I don’t go a day without thinking of some aspect of Koleda culture. Every dance I make contains the germs of that experience, and those days were the first inklings of the life I have now. They provided me with so many life-changing ideas and experiences: queer power, pot smoking, independence, dancing and singing simultaneously, holding hands or belts, communality, adult friends, social fluency, rhythm, sex for fun, slivovitz, cooking for a mob, sight-singing, excellence, pride of accomplishment, enduring friendships, and a never-ending interest in the musics, dances, languages, and cultures of the terrifying, friendly, funny, incomprehensible world.
Every kind of dance is a variety of “folk dance,” and my work is no exception. The kindness and inclusiveness of the greater Koleda family have been among the most moving and influential elements of my life.
Hail Koleda! Hail Terpsichore!
WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN, our house burned down.
I was on the bus at the top of the block coming home from school, and I looked out the window, and as a joke—I was a funny kid—I said, “Oh, I hope that isn’t my house on fire!” I got off at my stop to find out that it was.
No one was inside, and though I wasn’t the first one on the scene—the firemen were already there—it was close. The next-door neighbors’ teenage ne’er-do-well son, whom I was always afraid of, had somehow saved the cats, but they were more or less all that survived. I calmly called my grandmother from next door. “Hey, Grandma, our house is burning down, so we’re all coming over there to stay with you for a while.”
“Okay, honey,” she replied and hung up. (She normally ended phone calls with a cheerful “Better let you go!”)
When we arrived, suitcases (and whatever wasn’t burned or singed) in hand, she opened the door and said with a sigh, “Oh, Mark, I thought you were kidding.”
The culprit was one of those high-intensity desk lamps that had just come on the market; very little, very strong, and very hot. (They don’t sell them anymore. Why? Because they’re very dangerous and could burn your house down.) The place was a wreck and we lost nearly everything. The bottom floor was completely burned out, while the upstairs was badly smoke damaged. We were out of the house for several months. The fact is we were badly underinsured, because my uncle Dave, the agent, hadn’t kept the policy current. It was a financial tragedy. We couldn’t sue and there wasn’t nearly enough money to rebuild and refurbish the house, so all the woodwork was replaced with substandard material, crappy hollow doors, badly and cheaply done. We never seemed to get rid of that smoky smell.
I was teaching by then, and I remember giving private flamenco lessons to a high school kid (who drove me wild with desire) in the dining room of our burned-out house while it was under reconstruction. There was at least a usable wooden floor to dance on.
At the time my mother was working as the secretary in a local church we didn’t attend. She ran the office, taking care of the scheduling. (I’d go there after school, get the keys to the organ, and play for hours, alone in this little church, improvising. This king of instruments fascinated me, and I played it as loud as possible, reducing myself to ecstatic tears in the process.) The church offered us temporary accommodation just around the corner from the smoldering embers. Christian charity! This cute house was newly empty because the old lady who had lived there had just been institutionalized, so in we moved while the builders did their shoddy work. That was when we started finding money. Literally. She had hidden money all over the house. You’d open a book and there’d be a twenty-dollar bill as a bookmark. My mother of course collected it and donated it to the church as a thank-you for their generosity (everything except what I found).
As if the fire wasn’t bad enough, worse was to happen soon after, which added insult to injury. With the little insurance money we received, we went on a well-deserved family vacation to the Olympic Peninsula with brand-new clothes, brand-new suitcases, and the same old car.
We took the ferry over and found ourselves driving on a two-lane highway in an area around Belfair, behind an old couple slowing down to make a left turn. It was raining as usual, Maureen was at the wheel, I was next to her, and in the back were my mother and my father, who’d just had cataract surgery and had to wear contact lenses and glasses simultaneously. Maureen looked in the rearview mirror and, as time froze, exclaimed, “Oh God!” as a huge truck, which hadn’t seen our brake lights, rear-ended us. We shot down the road. Maxine turned around at the moment of impact and got bad whiplash, as did Maureen. When we finally came to a stop, Maxine was just able to get out of the car, but we had to help my father. I was fine; Maureen’s foot was cut; my father was fucked up.
We stood stunned at the side of the road. There was a small trickle of gasoline all the way from our car back to the truck and, as we watched, fire slowly burned down this trail, just like in a movie. The car burst into flames—it wasn’t a huge explosion, but it exploded. Everything went, including our new clothes in our new suitcases in the trunk. We watched it burn. We hardly got any money for that insurance either, though Maureen fondly remembers a beautiful new gold velvet couch.
It was an annus horribilis, the year of fires, and the end of my youth. These two catastrophes occurred within months of each other. I honestly thought that an airplane would crash into me and kill me at any second—why wouldn’t it?
MY FATHER DIED IN 1973 when he was fifty-nine. He wasn’t in great shape. Though he wasn’t obese, he’d always had a stomach—he was gluttonous in a different way from me—and had flatulence and burped a lot (which he has passed on to me). He was taking pep pills (speed) for weight loss, as many people did back then (and still do), and an appetite-suppressant candy, now discontinued, called Ayds. He’d have coffee with saccharine in it, then three donuts. He died at his desk at work, a heart attack.
On the particular day, I’d just driven home from a job teaching a weekly flamenco class at a community center, my first solo job after dancing school. Oddly, nobody was home, but I found a note telling me to call my grandma, who told me that my sister and mother were at the hospital. He’d been DOA.
My friend Page and I had put on a little concert for him at home a few nights before he died, Fauré’s “Après un rêve” and Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies on piano and cello; he fell asleep as we were playing. We were going to play the same music at his funeral, but I couldn’t handle it. Someone else played my part for me.
All told, it was a pretty miserable last year of his life.
WHEN I WAS TWENTY-FOUR, I wanted to pay tribute to my father, though I don’t know what suddenly brought that on.
The result was a solo called Dad’s Charts, a distillation of my father in six and a half minutes: a jazz-structured improvisation—by which I mean that there were themes, then variations thereon, just as he used to improvise on the organ from his fake book, which provided only the melody, chord chart, and words of a given song: you made up the rest yourself. I set it to a cover of the standard “Robbins’ Nest”: direct, very listenable jazz by Milt Buckner, inventor of the “locked hands” style of organ playing. My father would have loved it.
The piece made reference to various scenes from my father’s life, danced: keyboard playing (with its own appropriate gesture), typing (including a carriage return), bowling (which we used to do with that creepy friend, Bruce), taking a sauna (the three of us would go to the local Finnish saunas, so part of the dance was him naked in the sauna, though the audience couldn’t necessarily tell, because I was clothed), falling asleep in front of the TV, and finally the tragedy of his being slapped across the face by that kid at his school. I slapped myself across the face many times.
And then at the end I died, because that’s what he did. It was very personal and people laughed, which was fine. I wasn’t blind to the fact that it was also funny.
We brought Dad’s Charts back for our twenty-fifth anniversary in 2006, in a program called Solos, Duets and Trios. By then I was no longer dancing, so I had to teach it to someone else, in this case Maile Okamura. You can’t just watch and learn a dance like that, so I explained every rule of the improvisation and imagery to her, all the background material. After that, I left her to figure it out on her own. She did it beautifully.
I FIRST HAD SEX with a woman when I was fifteen on a trip to Vancouver. She’s now a midwife in Arizona, probably still recovering from the experience.
Some of my folk dance friends, three girls, and I naughtily sneaked off to Vancouver, British Columbia, to see Pennsylvania Ballet. We shared a hotel room, went to the ballet two or three times at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, smoked Craven A cigarettes, and enjoyed our—my—first ever cocktail, a sloe gin fizz. I remember feeling drunk and grown-up.
There I also saw my first ever Balanchine dance, the genius Concerto Barocco to Bach’s Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins. I found myself laughing out loud because I’d previously seen only knock-off Balanchine, choreography in his style that wasn’t anywhere near as good. (I had much the same reaction the first time I saw real Martha Graham, because I’d seen so much overwrought ersatz Martha Graham.) Concerto Barocco has a section in the last movement where half of the dancers are doing four threes and the other half do three fours. If you see that without an understanding of music or dancing, it looks like they’re not quite together, but if you have the ability to watch those two rhythms, it’s mind-blowing. And that was what I experienced that night. It’s what I loved about Balanchine and what inspired me. Though his choreography was structurally fascinating, direct, and show-offy, I couldn’t believe how similar it was to the Busby Berkeley movies I’d been watching: Footlight Parade, Dames, Gold Diggers of 1933. Balanchine was the most American of choreographers, and the first person to choreograph instrumental music that wasn’t written specifically to be danced to.
Later I went back to Vancouver to see my erstwhile employers the Bolshoi Ballet, three times, in fact. The lure on that occasion was the mature, somewhat scary Maya Plisetskaya dancing the Dying Swan, a famous encore number to Saint-Saëns choreographed by Michel Fokine (for Anna Pavlova)—the corniest, greatest solo in the world, Plisetskaya’s signature. It’s the Reader’s Digest version of classical ballet for people who’ve never seen ballet, a sample of the nineteenth century done by one woman. Plisetskaya did it twice each night, once in the show and once as an encore, but one of those evenings she felt there wasn’t quite enough applause to merit the encore. So I saw her swan die only five times.
Alexandra Danilova, the prima ballerina, referred to Plisetskaya once in a speech, in her heavy Russian accent, as the “best Fokine ballerina ever.” I’ve heard that exact quote from multiple people, including Mr. Mikhail Baryshnikov, who also has an excellent Russian accent.
I BEGAN STUDYING with the First Chamber Dance Company, which with great fanfare had relocated from NYC to Seattle (around the same time that Pacific Northwest Ballet started), the idea being chamber dance as opposed to a big ballet company. There had always been a strong connection between the Seattle and New York ballet scenes, partly because the highly influential choreographer Robert Joffrey was a Seattleite. (It’s crazy how many choreographers are from the Pacific Northwest.) The Joffrey Ballet did a Seattle summer residency every year, but I was always too young to go. Older friends had taken these workshops and then gotten into the Joffrey itself. That became my goal.
First Chamber Dance was run by a creep called Charles Bennett. The first move, on arrival, was to buy a derelict building—a nameless mess the entire time I lived there—in the Belltown district of downtown. We, as indentured servants, did the entire renovation: stripping paint, repairing, building, and cleaning mirrors and toilets. The company had a team of fifteen-to-eighteen-year-old full-on slaves. Incredible, looking back.
The First Chamber dancers themselves, all in their thirties, were glamorous in a way that hasn’t been possible since the seventies. The artistic director and the costume designer, for example, who were lovers, dressed in identical one-piece bell-bottom jumpsuits with matching chain belts—impossibly gay. Sara de Luis was a wonderful teacher, a great flamenca, and Marjorie Mussman, with whom I was to have a long association, taught Limón, a technique based on the earlier movement style developed by Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman in opposition to the strict rules of classical ballet. It was a full-time program with ballet class, men’s class, partnering class, Spanish dance, modern, and jazz. Though it was basically free of charge, we had to commit to the whole thing, the building (of the building), the outreach. I have no idea how the company survived.
First Chamber also imported a tyrannical, notorious, excellent yet somewhat insane ballet master called Perry Brunson, who’d been with the Joffrey for many years, as had his wife (and he was the gayest thing in the world). He was revered as a teacher, hugely musical, inspiring in that way, and he arrived with a pianist, Harriet Cavalli, who moved wherever he moved and became my very closest friend. She was the best pianist I’d ever heard, the author of a rather scolding book, Dance and Music, that I still force on all of my accompanists. It’s very good about precisely how to play for ballet class, now something of a lost art. She could reproduce any of the ballet scores and sound like a full orchestra, just by extrapolating on the piano score. She played barefoot, chain-smoking, though many years later she became diabetic and stopped playing. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time at her house drinking jugs of rosé, eating popcorn (which she taught me how to make perfectly), and talking endlessly. I learned a great deal from Harriet, a wonderful friend and inspiration to this day.
Perry Brunson, on the other hand, was a mess, bitter and cruel, though he and Harriet were close until he died. At class, if he was fucked up or hungover, he’d sit in the front in dark glasses, smoking a cigarette, and give a combination with his hands. You couldn’t mark it (which I don’t allow either, and by which I mean doing the moves minimally with your hands as you prerehearse them in your head, trying to learn it as you’re being taught—the equivalent for singing would be humming along the first time you hear something); you couldn’t lean against the barre and rest; you just had to watch it. Harriet would play a four-bar intro, and if you fucked up, he’d throw you out. His men’s class was even crueler, jumping for half an hour, huge ballet jumps, dancing hard for far too long. If you did something wrong, out you went. For one class I was at the front of the barre, where you can’t fake it or follow anyone else. A particular combination ended in plié, and though I ended correctly, all the other boys straightened their legs. He curtly dismissed them with “thank you, gentlemen, that’ll be all” and gave me a private lesson for the endless rest of the hour. It was vengeful in the worst possible way. And he tortured the boys he had crushes on—he was in his forties and they were in their late teens—and that exploitation of the teacher-student relationship is the creepiest kind of predation. The straight boys were his prey; I was out as a queer, and glad of it, so he didn’t bother me. Besides, I was busy elsewhere. I developed a huge crush on another dancer, an apprentice like me, despite the fact that he had a girlfriend, whom he later married and with whom he had kids (whom I knew). I was terribly in love, and when we were apart, I wrote him heartbroken letters, about which he was so sweet and affectionate. He later called me and said he was coming out, aged forty: who knew? It turned out he’d been gay while in the army.
Others who were in the same program remember it more fondly than I, my memories colored by the fact that, even as a teenager, I came to realize that a lot of the training was suspect. It was grueling, the pressure was horrible, and Perry worked us too hard, with the result that everybody’s leg had a giant thigh, a giant calf, and a foot that couldn’t point very well. Injuries were common. I’d already had that Achilles tendonitis, but when studying with Perry (after jumping up and down on one leg for an hour, doing precisely as he instructed), my knee bent backward and swelled up to the size of a gourd. I couldn’t walk, and it was squishy to the touch, so I had to have it aspirated, a needle inserted to draw out the fluid. A second nurse advised me to stop dancing, if not forever then at least until the swelling had subsided, to which my reaction was of course to go back almost immediately.
That injury aside, it took me five or six years to change my anatomy after Perry’s training. People come to me now at MMDG with that freakish shape. After a year or two in my company, they find themselves with a beautiful long line of balanced leg musculature. That’s why my dancers look the way they do. It’s what I teach.
Dancing hard is one thing; First Chamber was too hard. As a teacher, I can be demanding, even mean, but the health of my dancers comes first. I’d never do anything injurious; dancing itself is injurious enough. However, despite all the punishment, both physical and emotional—and I don’t remember him fondly—I learned as much from Perry Brunson as from anyone else.
He famously said he didn’t want to live past fifty. He died at forty-nine.
FIRST CHAMBER DANCE COMPANY ran a three-week summer camp in Port Townsend, which I attended three years running. Everybody in the company taught, and their boyfriends would come from New York, which meant, for example, that for one or two summers, my mime teacher, who was dating one of the dancers, was Patrick Duffy, both the Man from Atlantis and the man from Dallas.
Port Townsend was an old military base, farther west toward the Pacific, deserted except for beautiful early twentieth-century officers’ houses with dormitories surrounding a parade ground, gun emplacements in case of a Japanese attack, and bunkers by the beach. It was freezing cold, perpetually pouring rain, and extremely windy. We danced all day long, stayed in dorms, watched whatever movies they screened for us (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Battleship Potemkin, and A Dancer’s World, the great film about Martha Graham), fucked, drank, saw the aurora borealis for the first time, and then woke up and worked really hard.
In addition to the First Chamber teachers, there were guests, including the jazz teacher Jay Norman, who had danced and sung in the original Broadway cast of West Side Story, and a great Limón teacher, Danny Lewis, whose lover was twenty-year-old Teri Weksler. Danny was thirty. I was sixteen. He was my teacher, and Teri did the dancing for him, because he was usually too high to demonstrate. This led to a lifelong friendship. She became my teacher, then one of the founding women in the Mark Morris Dance Group. She was rational, reasonable, fascinating, and tiny—the only small being (apart from a couple of men) I ever had in the group. (Big women and small men seem to do my work better; I like them to be around the same fighting weight for partnering.) By the time I got the group together, she was already a professional dancer of renown.
Best of all, we got to make up dances. After my first exposure to Harry Partch via The Wild Sounds of New Music, I had found another LP, The World of Harry Partch, on which there was a track called “Barstow,” and, aged probably sixteen, I made up a dance for some friends at the workshop, including Penny Hutchinson and this big guy Leo, not a very good dancer but a fabulous, kooky, Krishna Consciousness hippie. The dance was in eight short movements, each introducing a character, as the music does. Partch himself was on the road a lot, a hobo, and he found hitchhiker graffiti on a railing at the side of the road near Barstow, California: “Here she comes, a truck, not a fuck, but a truck. Just a truck. Hoping to get the hell out, here’s my name—Johnnie Reinwald, 915 South Westlake Avenue, Los Angeles.” They’re beautiful texts, recited by Partch himself on the recording in what he called his “intoning voice”: “I too am on the lookout for a suitable mate,” “Car just passed by, make that two more, three more.” He set these boring, touching, lonely inscriptions to his astonishing music. We danced to the recording.
Each of the dances starts the same, as does the music. Partch introduces them “Number One,” “Number Two,” and so forth. The structure is formal. The first dancer does a solo, then becomes the chorus for the next person’s solo, and so on, accumulating until there are six people in total.
The choreography included citations from Chinese ballet. When Nixon visited China, PBS aired The Red Detachment of Women, the great ballet from the Cultural Revolution. Being a product of the People’s Republic, it’s simultaneously terrifying, funny, and beautiful, featuring rifles and pointe shoes. This combination of movement and music was highly inspirational to me and seemed just right for Partch’s music, in which I recognized a Chinese element. Like Lou Harrison and John Cage, Partch had explored San Francisco’s Chinatown in the early part of the century, when only the Chinese knew the incredible sounds of Peking opera. Barstow, the dance, therefore contains very distinctly stylized Chinese walks and rhythms, or what I remembered from what I’d once seen on TV. There was no video back then, but I’d memorized it and I knew it. Barstow also had complex rhythms like those of the Bulgarian and Macedonian dances I knew from Koleda. Partch’s was difficult music, but I wasn’t picking it to be modern or clever. I chose it because it was thrilling—what people called its “primitivism”—and it spoke to me (corny but true). I’d already heard a lot of world music (by which I mean simply “music”), but Partch was like the jungle: garbage, pots and pans, coconut shells.
Though I’d been studying the techniques, my exposure to actual Modern Dance choreography had been pretty close to zero, so I was more or less making it up, but Barstow was my first real dance, because it was the first one that I structured formally in a way that satisfied me. Everything leading up to it was preparation.
FOR MY FINAL ENGLISH CLASS project in high school, I made up a dance. Page played the cello, and I got credit to graduate a full year early. I got credit for everything, for dancing, even I think for masturbating, simply because of the sympathy they had for my father dying. By then, I wasn’t interested in school, and my father was no longer around to push me to go to college.
I had been planning for a long time to have a gap year abroad. Dance would be my passport around the world. The original concept, inspired by a Romanian woman whose class I loved at Koleda, had been to go to Bucharest for a year precollege (not that I was ever going to go to college) to study Romanian music and dancing. This was thwarted by the Ceauşescu coup. I then applied to work on an archaeological dig in Switzerland—further slave labor, the kind of thing young people are still suckered into—but on closer inspection, I decided against it. My new secret plan was to visit the smallest countries in Europe (Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, San Marino, Andorra, which no one had ever heard of at the time), to spend time in the Balkans, and, most important, to go to Spain. Being a flamenco, it was the obvious choice. The plan was to go from September through July, then move to NYC to join the Joffrey, with no thought of going back to school.
Despite the fact that my father died during the planning, my mother insisted I go. Whatever city I was in, I’d get a Social Security check from his death for $150 every month at an American Express office. The itinerary was planned out beforehand in minute detail, insanely so. We hardly did any of it, but I’d never traveled before. My companions were Linda Metzner, who danced in Koleda and had been a student at Verla’s, and Nona Weatherford, the undertaker’s daughter. The plan was to go on a Eurailpass with our backpacks for a couple of months, staying in hostels, ending up in Yugoslavia; then after Christmas, they’d go home while I continued on to Spain. It was also arranged that I would meet Maureen and Maxine (who, newly widowed, deserved a vacation) in Paris.
It was a fabulous European culture tour, everything you dreamed of: the sardana (a folk dance) in Barcelona, Tangier for a day by boat, Oktoberfest, Checkpoint Charlie when it was a perilous place rather than a theme park ride (though you could visit East Berlin for only a day). It was the first time I tried to get to Pompeii. (I’ve tried five times, it never happens, and I wonder whether it’s there at all.) And we did get to go to the smallest countries and principalities: Monaco, Vatican City, Gibraltar—a rock from which you can see Africa. We couldn’t afford to go to many performances, but we went to all the free sons et lumières, the cathedrals and museums. We did go to see some Balanchine (Le Palais de cristal) at the Wiener Staatsballett, where I had a fight with an elegant older lady who had reserved herself a standing room spot with a glove I ignored. I excused myself as she yelled at me in German.
In Macedonia, we traveled to Skopje and stayed with Atanas Kolarovski, choreographer of Tanec, the state dance company, at whose house I was introduced, for the first time, to the chicken we were going to eat for dinner. From there, we took an illegal day trip by bus to Petrič, Bulgaria, hidden among the regular Macedonians. The reason for this imprudence was a festival featuring dance from all the various regions of Bulgaria, and though we didn’t have visas, the lure was too strong. The border patrol stopped the bus both ways, looking for people trying to illegally enter or exit. Scared to death, we tried to look as Macedonian as we could, but there was no trouble. We were seventeen. Why would they suspect us of anything? From there we went to Athens, to all the ruins, and then by boat to a nearby whitewashed, goated island. These were dances we already knew, so we were able to walk into tavernas and join in. The reaction, initially one of surprise, became an immediate welcome. It was so satisfying.
There weren’t any major disasters, except the odd missed train, though we bought too many records in East Berlin, where the state-sponsored recordings of the great orchestras were irresistible, if cumbersome. Periodically we ran out of money and slept a couple of nights in a bitterly cold train station, to be roused and moved on by the cops—nothing out of the ordinary. I was in Cape Sounion, at the very bottom of Greece, when I realized that I had inadvertently left my airplane ticket at some previous hostel. I kept this from my companions, had a quiet panic attack, and hoped that it was somewhere we might be returning to, perhaps Vienna. It was almost impossible to make an international phone call in Europe in those days, but somehow I called, got through to a concierge, and they found my ticket. A miniature miracle.
I ENDED UP IN MADRID, where I was planning to study flamenco. I had basic skills, and I was in the belly of the beast to find out more.
Flamenco’s appeal had been immediate, and my passion raged for a long time. The clichés of flamenco are all true. It’s arrogant, fiery, and supermasculine (even the women’s dancing, which means that the women therefore have equal power to the men, unlike, for example, in classical ballet, where the women do the dancing and the men do all the portage). There is a posture of pride about flamenco, a self-possession that looks cocky. The first thing you learn is flamenco’s archetypical expression (and ballet’s, come to think of it), the “I smell shit” face. Then you learn the different techniques. Rhythmically, what those dancers do, second nature to them, is almost impossible, so infinitesimally subtle, yet completely over-the-top show-off. “Take that!” they seem to say as they dance. “I spit on you!”
Flamenco is originally “gypsy,” from the Roma peoples of Spain and North Africa (and wherever the Roma people were, which includes the Middle East and South Asia). There’s a direct relationship between flamenco, which is always solo and includes the music—the guitar playing, the singing, and the clapping—and a North Indian classical dance form, kathak, which is also always solo, all foot rhythms, turns, and arm gestures. The music itself is fascinating: Moorish, North African in origin, back when Spain was Muslim. The relevant term is duende, “soul,” the thing inside you that makes the dance take off: the passion, the expressivity, the quick-firing capacity to improvise in a situation—the thing that Spanish people say you can’t learn. But you can, and I felt inspired to do so.
There’s a 1963 movie called Los Tarantos, inspired by Romeo and Juliet, about a gitano family in Barcelona (weird in itself because flamenco isn’t Catalan), starring Carmen Amaya, the greatest ever flamenca, in the role of the matriarch, her last movie. She memorably dances in the dirt on a piece of wood. Her son, the Romeo character, played by the great Antonio Gades, does a number in which he dances down Las Ramblas, the pedestrian street in the middle of Barcelona, as they’re hosing it down at night. Imagine Singin’ in the Rain, only great. It’s the absolute essence of flamenco, a wonder of a movie.
That’s why I was in Spain.
BUT SPAIN WAS COMPLICATED. Generalissimo Franco was in charge, which was bad for everything. Flamenco was more or less dead, definitely old hat, and it wasn’t national—Franco didn’t like regional culture. No one was allowed to speak Catalan, Andalusian, Gallician, or, most pointedly, Basque.
I found a room in a pensione near the Prado belonging to an Andalusian woman and her daughter. No one spoke English, which is how I unavoidably learned Spanish. After a little while I could understand the daughter’s castellano, but andaluz remained incomprehensible. This was a full cultural immersion. I went to the Prado on weekends and also to the bullfight, sitting in the cheap sun-drenched seats, where I systematically developed a huge crush on each and every matador.
I started taking classes at Amor de Dios, a bustling dance school recommended by friends in Seattle, with a teacher called Maria Magdalena in an old studio with splintery wooden floors and the smells of the perspiration of many years. I’d take two or three classes a day. This was her teaching method: Monday, hands, just hands; Tuesday, feet; Wednesday, turns only—and that’s all you did, an hour of turning as this tiny Spanish woman screamed at you, and then hit you; Thursday, castanets; and Friday, finally, dance routines. She was very strict, very funny, and great. I was seventeen and made for this kind of class. And I was the only pale white boy among the Spanish, so very pale and thin that I was nicknamed Blancanieves, Snow White. I had very little money, and I ate a lot of Chinese food.
I also began studying jota, a regional dance from many different areas, the most beautiful being from Aragon. My teacher was the jotero Pedro Azorín, the star of Nobleza baturra, a famous movie set in Aragon. Jota is a real workout, very stylized. With flamenco, there’s dance flamenco and sung flamenco, and it’s the same with jota, though it isn’t the same type of music at all and it’s always for couples; the castanets are worn on your middle finger, and you shake your hands like a chimp.
I had been weighing whether I’d like Spain enough to move there and have a career, but there didn’t seem to be a career to be had. The technique was great, as were the teachers and the guitarists (many of whom were Japanese), but what little flamenco work there might have been—cruise ships and tourist shows—wasn’t appealing. Not that there was a career as a jotero available either, but it was livelier and more fun, and I ended up doing more of it.
For several months, I danced with a fly-by-night ballet company with the grand name of the Royal Chamber Ballet of Madrid, which had seen me in class and needed men to tour. The touring was mostly regional, little theaters in little towns, though we did go as far as the Canary Islands, closer to Africa than Spain. It kept me in money and therefore food.
I was on my own, making some kind of a living, and this felt like independence. I’d started making friends, gay dancers, and I even had an encounter with an older gentleman (he was in his twenties!) whom I met at a bar and on whom I developed a big crush. I’d even go so far as to say I stalked him a little. We had a couple of dates, some sex, and that’s when I realized that I was unequivocally queer, that it was a one-way street. I wrote my mother an aerogram—“I am gay!”—and she replied, “We love you.” She knew, of course she knew; I also knew she knew. Her only worry, she told me, was that she didn’t want my life to be any more difficult.
It was certainly more difficult at that moment for one very specific reason. In Franco’s Spain, homosexuality was illegal, and that law was enforced. The nightlife was fabulous in Madrid, where some of the bars closed at one a.m., then clandestinely reopened as gay bars. I didn’t have a lot of sex, frankly, but I did have a lot of gay life. There was one very delicate guy we called Swanson, hair bleached blond like Gloria, who was arrested for public effeminacy. I wasn’t there that night, but I saw others herded away. It was very dangerous—a repressive society and an oppressive atmosphere—and I couldn’t take it. The timing of my coming-out wasn’t coincidental.
Now, people think, “Hey, I am gay!” But it used to be that you couldn’t be gay. Not only in Spain. In America too. It was against the law. I tell my younger gay dancers, “I worked hard so you don’t even have to pay attention to the fact that you’re gay. I was supergay on your behalf for the future.” Now things are turning back again.
I WAS A FOLK DANCER, so everyone rightly sees folk dancing in my work, but it’s rarely an actual quote. Mostly it’s a paraphrase or an homage. Holding hands and going in a circle isn’t a dance that belongs to anybody in particular. It’s everybody’s dance. I’ve occasionally made very specific citations of a dance, and I’ve done that very rarely with Spanish dance. Four Saints in Three Acts, however, has a jota, a sevillana, and a sardana, the national dance of Catalunya, and these are direct quotes.
Another dance of mine—From Old Seville—a novelty number, features a sevillana, an old folk dance for couples. If you go to a fiesta in Seville, the music starts and everybody in the room—male, female, young and old, drunk and sober—does the sevillana; mine was an exact copy. It’s a beautiful form, always in four verses, short phrases that get more complicated as they go on.
The rule of my dance—for a man (me), a woman (Lauren Grant), and a bartender—was that we had to drink an entire bottle of Rioja in the dance’s six-minute duration; that was the assignment, my dancing version of a drinking game, performed to a 1970s recording of a sevillana, “A esa mujer” by Manuel Requiebros. John Heginbotham, the original bartender, poured three glasses of wine at a high-top. I drank one, he drank one, and then Lauren did too. We danced the first verse, stopped, and, during the intro to verse two, went back to the bar, where we each took another glass of wine. Four verses, twelve drinks, three slightly drunk dancers. John smoked a cigar throughout, which was vile. We once shared a dressing room with Meredith Monk, and she was doing her vocal exercises while I was trying to teach John how to smoke a cigar. Bad idea.
From Old Seville was a pièce d’occasion that we’ve repurposed for other occasions, and is one of the few dances that I still perform, most recently during a program of Solos, Duets and Trios. Lauren performs a textbook sevillana four times, whereas my part—flamenco clichés, including the jacket flashing that has become a trademark of contemporary flamenco—is purely improvised, variations that become wackier as I try to disrupt and mess with her as the dance progresses. Between the verses at the high-top, we drink and I get increasingly carried away with Lauren, and the sexy bartender, and myself. She’s the control and I’m the variable. It’s an ideal dance for me.
IN MY EUROPEAN ABSENCE, Uncle Jim had died. Grandpa Bill died just after I returned, which was when Mabel moved in with us. That made one major death a year from 1973 to 1975: Dad, Jim, then Bill. Devastating. Maxine lived thirty-five years after Dad’s death but never had a boyfriend.
There were now three generations of Morris women in the same house, and me again. (In fact, a Morris has lived there to this day, and it’s now the home of Maureen and her partner of thirty years, V’kee.) Dad’s death had left Maxine cash-strapped. None of us can now remember whether it was because he was fifty-nine when he died, one year short of the required sixty, or because he’d worked only twenty-four years rather than the required twenty-five, but the school district had provided no pension on what was basically a technicality. On top of that, he’d just been getting ready to pay the mortgage insurance, but he hadn’t quite got around to it—the bill was sitting right there on the desk when he died—so there was still a mortgage to pay. There was a little life insurance, but it was hard for Maxine. She couldn’t even get a credit card. Resourceful and pragmatic as ever, she went to work for the city engineering office for the next ten years.
I filled my time as I could, resuming my studies with First Chamber and teaching Spanish dance at Verla’s, but a lot of my friends had moved on, some to New York City, and I felt I was done with Seattle. I occasionally went to Anacortes to teach Croatian dance to the people who started the Vela Luka Dance Ensemble, and did a little bit of art school modeling with Penny. Chad got us into it. The money wasn’t bad, but it was excruciatingly hard work. I’m quite comfortable with being naked—that aspect was kind of sexy—but I had no idea how grueling it would be. You couldn’t suffer any more than twenty minutes at a stretch, and twenty minutes was unbearably long. It was the opposite of dancing. But it’s some consolation to think there may be some amateur nude portraits of me lingering in the thrift stores of the Pacific Northwest.
My dance Ženska, which translates to “Women’s” in Bulgarian, is about all I have to show for this interim year in Seattle, a five-minute solo I made for Penny, set to the fourth movement of Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet. The dance was based on Macedonian and Bulgarian dances, and a direct result of my European travels. I did it myself a few times as a solo. I revised it for our first company show in New York, adding a little bit of the Bulgarian women’s choral music, the Voix Mystères, and made it a duet for two women, Penny Hutchinson and Hannah Kahn.
Weary of Seattle, I knew it was time to move to New York as planned. Maureen and Maxine drove me to the airport to see me off at the gate. Maureen cried. As far as she was concerned, I was leaving forever.
IT WASN’T THE FIRST TIME I’d been to New York City.
When I was fifteen, Verla sent me to a weeklong dance conference. Such conferences still exist. The registrant learns jazz from this person, tap from that person, all day, then takes those routines back to the studio and teaches them—a lot of my company dancers went through that machinery.
I was teaching already and somewhat responsible (for a fifteen-year-old), so Verla sent me to a conference at the old Biltmore Hotel. She paid for the whole thing and gave me some spending money. I flew by myself and was treated to lunch by older ladies entrusted with my welfare. The conference itself wasn’t much, but that wasn’t the point. Verla was testing me to see whether I was mature and trustworthy enough to be a representative of her school. I brought back a couple of routines, but I didn’t teach the dumbest dances anyway.
On the second morning, I was wandering around being a tourist on Forty-Second Street. When I returned to my room at the hotel, the door didn’t have a chance to close behind me before a man pushed his way in. He yanked the phone cord out of the wall and said, “Give me your money, don’t tell anybody, and wait ten minutes before you do anything.” He’d followed me up from the street. I must have just looked like an average victim tourist mark. I did as he said, gave him all Verla’s cash, waited ten minutes, went down to the desk, told them, and phoned home weeping. It was arranged that I receive more money to live on, and I stayed the week, finished the conference, and then went home.
And now I was going back.