Four

Brummagem

I moved in with Ray Wolf, a friend from First Chamber, who was already in the city. We split the rent of his apartment in Washington Heights—at the very top of Manhattan, where the George Washington Bridge crosses over the Hudson from Jersey—and I started taking classes with Marjorie Mussman, who’d also moved back to NYC. I went to many classes—David Howard was the choice of the serious ballet types; Maggie Black, so popular she had to turn people away, though I couldn’t stand her; and later on, Jocelyn Lorenz, a very fine ballet teacher—but Marjorie’s were the best, an immediate benefit of my move. The Seattle diaspora congregated at Marjorie’s—Penny took class there too—and it’s where I met my dear friend Tina Fehlandt, not to mention Ruth Davidson, both of whom were to become founding members of the Mark Morris Dance Group.

Tina was one of those women who had wanted to be a great ballet dancer but was dissuaded by ballet’s systematic body stereotyping, even though she was a fabulous dancer. She was big and she was strong—can you imagine such qualities in a ballet dancer?—but she remembers herself as “chubby little Tina” trying to get her life going, on the point of giving up dancing. She was wild too. On the occasion of her thirtieth birthday, she invited all of her ex-boyfriends to her party and went around slapping each of them across the face in turn. By the time the party was in full swing, she was out cold, facedown on her bed in her leather miniskirt.

Ruth, who had been to SUNY Purchase (where you went if you didn’t get into Juilliard), was a big, fearless, long-limbed dancer—the finest imaginable—who went about it with such abandon that at every show, predictably, she’d fall down. I never minded. It was very exciting. (In fact, it turned out she couldn’t see—after she got glasses, she never fell again.) She was fabulous, enthusiastic, quite vain, and very gullible. She never stopped talking and regularly screamed with laughter. I could never quite figure out how she thought.

I was nineteen, turning twenty; it was our nation’s bicentennial, and my nephew Tyler was born (to my sister Marianne). I wasn’t teaching or making any money—my entire income consisted solely of the Social Security from my father’s death, money left specifically to me—so after a couple of months, I went to my first ever New York City audition. I had been hoping to get into the Joffrey, but it was the Eliot Feld Ballet that was looking for men.

I got the job.

ELIOT FELD WAS A GOOD DANCER, a precocious choreographer—he made his first piece for American Ballet Theatre when he was eighteen—and then a famously demanding and impatient boss, traits I may have learned from him. Through him I met some wonderful people with whom I later ended up working, for example James Maddalena, the great baritone, and Gladys Celeste, Eliot’s marvelous pianist. One of my first gigs with Eliot, when I was too new to be cast, was turning Gladys’s pages at the outdoor Filene Center at Wolf Trap in Virginia, for Prokofiev’s fiendishly complicated Fifth Piano Concerto. I found myself in the pit with this giant orchestra, and though I could read the music, I couldn’t read it quite fast enough . . . I will never ever forget the quicksand feeling as I tried to keep up. Terrifying, like a dream.

I’d commute to company rehearsal—a full hour each way, from the 181st Street subway station all the way down to Fiftieth Street on the 1 train, then across on the E, then up to Seventy-Fifth on the 6—at the Harkness House on the Upper East Side, owned by the madcap heiress Rebekah Harkness, who’d run the Harkness Ballet for years and then started the Harkness Foundation. This fancy Gilded Age mansion had been converted into studios where many choreographers worked, including Eliot, who based himself there until he moved downtown to take up residence at the Public Theater. It was a wacky fantasy palace—fireplaced, chandeliered, and tapestried—and a huge pain in the ass to get to. In the lobby, there was a rotating display with a jeweled cremation urn, the Chalice of Life, designed by Dalí, commissioned by Mrs. Harkness, which eventually held her ashes, though apparently they didn’t all fit. You then entered a minuscule gated elevator that ascended three or four flights past bejeweled walls decorated with mosaics—glued-on shit—and murals.

After a scant two weeks’ rehearsal, we embarked on an eleven-week State Department tour of Latin America. Back then, the State Department was a goodwill international propaganda arm of diplomacy, which brought over American art to show the people. These wonderful trips were part of the itineraries of many dance companies; then it all ground to a halt (and seems unlikely to be revived anytime soon). Everywhere we went seemed to be in the middle of a coup d’état, a junta singing the new national anthem composed the night before, with machine guns, militias, and gangs everywhere. It would have been scary, were we not endlessly performing. The United States had no trade with China, but in Venezuela I saw actual objects and artifacts from the People’s Republic of China, including a program from the original production of my beloved Red Detachment of Women. It was an adventure. We sometimes shared three to a room—three young men to a hotel room—imagine!—as we toured Eliot’s version of, appropriately enough, Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat, in which I played a soldier. Being the new boy, I still wasn’t in much, and found myself most valued as a Spanish interpreter, though I did get to gamble away my per diem at the hotel casino. What I did most of all, as I recall, was dance a lot around the periphery of rehearsal. I’d happily assassinate anyone who does that at one of my rehearsals, but Eliot intuited that I was a choreographer in the making. I even fondly imagined that a couple of my steps showed up in his works, but then I did have such a high opinion of myself. Though I was by no means a draw for his company, Eliot trusted me with a few of his parts (including a promotion to the role of the pimp in the Stravinsky).

I stayed with Eliot for a year and a half, and left because I no longer liked it. It was too heteronormative, too “blokey,” veering toward Jerome Robbins, and I was already tired of that. I don’t remember whether he officially fired me, but I no longer wanted to be in a ballet company. I didn’t want to wear tights and shoes.

But Eliot was a very good music man, and I even ended up choreographing some of the very same music. In 1977, I was in the original cast of his dance A Footstep of Air, set to Beethoven’s arrangements of British folk songs. When I started working on my own dance to some of those same songs in 2009, I remember thinking, “I know this.” I did the same with another piece of music he used beautifully, Samuel Barber’s Excursions for Piano. In 2008, I thought I’d discovered it myself. I’d completely forgotten. The memory simply gets too full to hang on to everything, but it goes to show how deep Eliot’s influence was, particularly musically, even thirty years later.

Right at the end of my tenure, his company moved to 890 Broadway, where Eliot invested in the top two floors. This incredible building was real old Broadway, a factory for Broadway productions and a home for its artisans and tradespeople. Theoni V. Aldredge, the most famous costumer in New York City, had her shop there, as did Woody Shelp, the ancient milliner, considered the greatest in Broadway history; there was even a cobbler. American Ballet Theatre then moved into three floors in the same building.

To this day, anytime you visit 890 Broadway, it’s either Joel Grey or Bebe Neuwirth in the still manually operated elevator. And if you want to run into a sexy ballet dancer, you only have to stand outside.

A FEW MONTHS after I arrived, I moved into an apartment with Penny down in the East Village opposite the New York City Marble Cemetery on Second and Second. It was a fifth-floor walk-up (doable when you’re twenty) with a bathtub in the kitchen, at the outlandish rent of $150 a month. My commute was greatly improved. We brought up a mattress we’d found on the street (because we were new in town and didn’t know any better), around which we sprinkled a ring of boric acid as a moat to keep cockroaches from making love on it. Penny and I didn’t make love in it either, though we did occasionally co-sleep.

Penny was a pixie without being small, a Limón dancer, erect with a very long waist. She’d moved to NYC a year or so previously, and in fact I’d choreographed her solo audition for Juilliard, set to the overture of The Fantasticks, the best Broadway show ever written. She went through many different looks, and our apartment share happened to coincide with her becoming a lesbian feminist, by which I mean an actual radical separatist. Unfairly cast in a new role as the male oppressor, I’d walk in on one of her meetings in our apartment to general horror. She found herself temporarily banished. Then she became a radical lipstick lesbian. She’s always been a mystic spiritualist, a fairies-at-the-bottom-of-my-garden type who’s devoted herself to various gurus, and she did a lot of drugs when I didn’t, but now she’s totally straight edge, a Hindu-inspired meditator, and a professor of dance. But she’s still quirky. She once fixed her radiator with Reiki. I suggested that perhaps they’d turned it on downstairs, but that’s not the way she thinks.

Penny was a great dancer, very soulful, and I admire her more than almost anyone. When the dance group got going, people saw Ruth Davidson as the biggest star, but Penny was deeper.

IT’S SUPPOSEDLY ALWAYS boom or bust with dance, and if those are the only descriptive options, then at the precise moment I arrived in New York City in the late seventies, it was BOOM! Certainly, interest in dance was unusually high, much higher than it is today—the ballet film Turning Point, featuring Baryshnikov, was a huge hit the following year—and various foundations were pouring money into experimental downtown (as it was called) choreography. There were so many Modern Dance companies (many of which existed solely to justify the glorified hobbies of their choreographers), a few of which I danced for, and all of which would be financially unviable these days; and there were so many little one-hundred-seat theaters in which to dance, hardly any of which exist anymore. Put simply, there was work. And where there’s work, there’s a boom. In hindsight, however, it was really just a lot of stuff. And whenever there’s a lot of stuff, much of it is very good, but not all of it is great. I saw everything.

I particularly loved Twyla Tharp’s work. She had the best Modern Dance company in New York; there was unbelievable virtuosity and intelligence in her dancers and in her own dancing. Penny and I had seen a very good piece of hers in Seattle, Deuce Coupe (the first “crossover” ballet), which featured her company plus the Joffrey plus the music of the Beach Boys plus—radically for the time—a graffitist spray-painting live. We loved it so much. There was one part where a dancer went through the lexicon of ballet alphabetically: assemblé, battement, changement, developpé, échappé, failli, grand jeté . . . (I’m getting stuck at h. I’m making those up, but what can they have done for h?) The point is that it was an entire glossary of ballet terms, as if reading through the dictionary, a genuinely funny idea. At that time there was free dancing at the Seattle Center—swing was just coming back for one of its many revivals. You’d buy a milkshake and dance in a crowd that was a mix of old people and complete crazies. There’s nothing more embarrassing than dancers out dancing, doing lifts and so forth—you never want to coincide with a dance company on a layover at an airport, all that public stretching—but ignoring that, Penny and I would improvise in the style of Twyla Tharp (or what we thought it to be), because hers was by far the grooviest and most interesting. I didn’t see her actual company until I went to New York. In 1976, she was premiering her signature ballet Push Comes to Shove at American Ballet Theatre, featuring the young Mr. Baryshnikov.

At the time, I didn’t like Merce Cunningham’s work very much, but I went because I felt it was my job to see all the dance I could. I didn’t know Merce personally, though I knew a lot of his dancers from Marjorie’s class, along with dancers from Paul Taylor’s company. I found his work as pleasurable as cod-liver oil; I could tell the dancers were great, but the shows themselves were lost on me. I got nothing from the music, and the choreography seemed random. It was rigorous but not very engaging, and at the time it just completely passed me by. It wasn’t until much later, 1984, that I saw the dance that converted me: Quartet, for five dancers, including the sixty-five-year-old Merce, which automatically made it somewhat about the end of his dancing career. Previously all his work had seemed more or less the same, but this piece transformed me. I was fully immerced. I realized that he’d been basically making up the same dance his entire life, because he couldn’t get enough of one concept: the body in space and time. That’s it. An entire life of curiosity, spent asking that question, and coming up with beautiful solutions. After this blinding insight, my friend and dancer Guillermo Resto and I would go to Merce shows and, as everyone was leaving, scream “BRAVO!” until we were totally hoarse.

I also saw the work of Lucinda Childs, a piece her company does to this day called Dance (a fittingly bold title, as far as I was concerned, since I thought it the greatest dance I’d ever seen). A seemingly simple combination of upright moves, it was a collaboration between three similarly minded geniuses—Lucinda, the composer Philip Glass, and the painter Sol LeWitt. Lucinda’s dance was the equivalent of LeWitt’s conceptual art: a vertical line, a horizontal line, and both diagonals in every possible combination, then done. That was the finished object. End. Everything was beautiful, in both design and concept.

Lucinda herself seemed glacial (in temperament rather than speed) and scared the life out of me; she was so erect and glamorous, all sculpted cheekbones and hair pulled tightly back. I always felt like I was saying the wrong thing around her (and still do), but I later plucked up the courage to ask her out to lunch at the Noho Star, during which I admitted I’d stolen from her—moves and conceptual ideas—right from the beginning. Of course, she didn’t mind at all. I borrowed many devices I thought were great, be they from Lucinda, Gerald Arpino, Busby Berkeley, or Paul Taylor. I also worshipped Meredith Monk, whose “mixed-media theater piece”—though she calls it an opera and so should I—Quarry (1976) was a life-changing experience. In those days, her performances started with a blackout that lasted for exactly one minute, just long enough for people to freak out.

Meredith, Lucinda, Trisha Brown, not to mention Yvonne Rainer—these powerful genius women—had all been part of Judson Dance Theater, a collective of dancers who performed at the Judson Memorial Church in the Village in the early 1960s, which was a reaction against not only ballet but Modern Dance itself in its heroics and theatrical artifice, its relationship to music. It started as happenings, anti-performances that spawned Yvonne Rainer’s NO! manifesto delineating everything the movement rejected, including spectacle, virtuosity, style, camp, “moving or being moved.” It was egalitarian, in that there wasn’t a hierarchy of beauty or of skill; sometimes improvised, sometimes formless, it blurred distinctions between participant and viewer. The emphasis therefore turned to improvisational music and improvisational dancing that then became conceptual—“postmodern” is a word that can be accurately used—including Lucinda Childs’s Carnation (1964), during which she puts rollers in her hair, and if you stretch the definition, Paul Taylor’s piece, one from Seven New Dances (actually from 1957), where he stood still as the time was given over the phone (for which Louis Horst’s famous review in Dance Observer was four inches of blank space).

Another important arts collective, an offshoot of Judson Memorial Church, that came out of Yvonne Rainer and Dancers was Grand Union—David Gordon, Trisha, Yvonne, and Deborah Hay—a post-hippie moment that left its mark. It was feminist, queer (but not quite queer enough), and chaotic, inspired by Fluxus and Dada. Very few people saw it (and I wasn’t one of them), but everyone who was there, if they didn’t walk out, found their lives changed. Some elements appealed to me a lot—the emphasis on the humanity of the body.

In a recent article, Joan Acocella wrote in The New Yorker that whenever someone just stops dancing and walks offstage, it’s because of Judson Church. I prefer to dance people on and off. There’s a modicum of improvisation in my work, but it’s disguised; likewise there’s minimalism, repetition, and systems but always in the service of something else. The art movements of that period were fully influential on me, yet, in terms of performance, I was never worried by the same things that worried these choreographers. Nor did I have to be, because they had been, so they freed me to be something else.

That’s incidentally why people were so happy with early musical minimalism. It was no longer aleatoric, dependent on the throw of dice. Beauty had made a welcome return. It was no longer John Cage or Morton Feldman, those pioneers of indeterminate music; it wasn’t the uncompromising serial music of the Darmstadt school of Stockhausen; it wasn’t only experimental computer music. Even though there was often no more than a single major triad in minimalism, the tune was back, and the appeal was that music was consonant once more. It was no longer purely about theory, dissonance, harshness, and musique concrète. When Philip Glass added a third chord, it was like the sun rising again. People were relieved to return to consonance, suspension, and resolution, and that’s what appealed to me too.

My spirit, despite being drawn to occasional ugliness, was more aligned with Western hymn harmony, which is why I loved Virgil Thomson, Henry Cowell, hula, baroque music, gospel music, and country music. Charles Ives’s music appealed immediately, but Boulez’s didn’t, though I appreciated his music intellectually. The interwar modernism of the music elite writing for each other is certainly fascinating per se, but not to listen to. I don’t particularly like listening to John Cage either. (Though I reject the idea that he was more of a philosopher than a musician. He was fully a musician.)

One reason I’m drawn to Indian classical music is the skill of the improvisation. The chaos of free jazz comes nowhere near it. Indian music is so sophisticated that I can’t even keep the beat after a while. At a concert, I’ll look around to find myself the only one on a different beat. It’s a different galaxy of intelligence that I was never able to find in jazz, let alone the Grateful Dead, whose music I’ve always detested. I still don’t find myself drawn to free jazz or late bebop. In fact, I wasn’t really into jazz at all—much of John Coltrane and Miles Davis is incomprehensible to me—until I realized that ragtime was jazz, the blues was jazz, and big band (which I hated when my father played it but I now like) was jazz too. And then I fell in love with certain things: Erroll Garner (far and away my favorite pianist), Art Tatum, and of course the blues singer Bessie Smith, with whom my sister was obsessed and I am to this day.

Everything you wanted was in New York City. It was the boom time for both ballet and dance. I saw one of Martha Graham’s greatest pieces, Clytemnestra, to music by Halim El-Dabh. Balanchine had his final hit, Vienna Waltzes, in 1977. And it wasn’t just dance but all the arts. Shakespeare in the Park was in its infancy. I saw the director Andrei Serban’s work The Cherry Orchard at Lincoln Center with Meryl Streep and Irene Worth, and his incredible Agamemnon. A Chorus Line had just moved to Broadway from the Public Theater. With friends from Eliot Feld, I saw one of Dolly Parton’s first appearances at the Bottom Line—plank tables, bottles of beer, and Dolly and her band—not long after she left Porter Waggoner. At the Felt Forum (now the Theater at Madison Square Garden) that same year, we saw the Texas Playboys. Bob Wills had died three years earlier, but it was his band of old farts in string ties, fronted by the young genius Merle Haggard. This was music that, to the bemusement of some, I’d revisit for my own dances for the dance group within a few years.

I WENT DIRECTLY from Eliot’s company to Lar Lubovitch’s. It was momentous. I’d read about Lar (who by the way isn’t Swedish; Lar is short for Larry) in Dance Magazine. His work looked like sexy, beautiful hippie dancing. Dancers want to do it because it looks like it feels great. And it does.

So I went to Broadway, the Uris Theatre (now the Gershwin) on Fifty-First Street, to see Maurice Béjart’s company, the Ballet du XX^e Siècle, on tour from Brussels. (If only I’d known what the future held.) It was an expensive night out. I was used to “second acting” shows—I’d arrive late, mingle with the intermission audience enjoying their cigarettes outside, then sneak in off the street for the second half. But Lar’s piece Marimba was in the first half, so this was a ticket I actually had to pay for. Marimba was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, set to the music of Steve Reich (whom I had heard previously only on that little bonus single), an exquisite piece to this day, Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ. The dancing was trancey and I was transported. I lost my shit. When I joined Lar’s company, Marimba, as luck would have it, was the very first thing I learned. It was challenging but immediately comfortable: flowing, traily, and deeply satisfying. You really felt like you were doing something. For the first time, and at last, I was dancing the way I felt like I should.

The company was only eight people, including Lar, who was himself a great dancer, Rob Besserer (his muse and boyfriend, my friend ever since, the original Drosselmeier in The Hard Nut, and also the first person to whom I taught my dance The Vacant Chair), and Susan Weber (who has also remained a dear friend and twenty years later was assisting me at San Francisco Ballet). Lar was “difficult,” stormy (he threw the odd chair in rehearsal, which was allowed back then), and really smart, not exactly a hermit but a shy man who avoided crowds. He was gay, of course, and male choreographers weren’t gay back then, by which I mean that every single one was, but officially they weren’t.

Rehearsals took place far from the palatial splendor of Harkness House or 890 Broadway in a loft on Eighteenth Street that Lar shared with Rob. Lar probably built the interior himself because he’d been a carpenter, and in fact had a steel plate in his head because, while working with a crowbar, he hit himself and was hospitalized, out cold for hours. He’d intended to be a painter but became a fabulous choreographer. You can picture that loft quite clearly, because it served as Bill Murray’s character Jeff’s apartment in Tootsie. Lar and Rob moved out for a couple of months during the shooting, for which they were handsomely reimbursed, and moved back in to find it had been completely destroyed by the camera crew. That’s my memory anyway. Rob claims the apartment was a wreck to begin with, and that the film crew actually left a lot of good things around, painted it, and put up new venetian blinds! One of us is right.

Lar was also a big pothead; he’d stop rehearsals, go to the partially walled-off portion where he lived (though the loft walls didn’t go up to the ceiling), and return anywhere from ten to ninety minutes later. While he was gone, we’d hang out, rehearse a little bit, or sit around the table and talk as the smoke wafted out. They gave classes up there too; Rob’s bedroom served as the women’s dressing room. Madonna, then a student, would sit at the elevator to take the money and names so she could get a free class.

When I was with the company, Lar did a wonderful piece, North Star, to the music of Philip Glass at his earliest and most exciting. The dance was semi-improvisatory, a precise technique I use occasionally, in which the dancers, under close direction and with specific instructions, make it up until it’s fixed. Lar’s fabulous imaginative leap for the rippling, swoony dance of North Star was that the dancers were all parts of the same human body, with a quartet for the arms, a quartet for the legs, and one each for the torso and head. The dance was based on moves done by Rob, which we the dancers would then perform in a larger-scale version—he’d kick, for example, and the two people who were that particular leg would run out and run back in. When I was in the original cast, this beautiful dance had yet to be fixed, but now people would learn it from a video, not necessarily knowing the idea behind it (or the work that went into it).

Despite my love for Lar’s work, I grew tired of it and left after about a year and a half (which is roughly how long I stayed with every company). He was hard to work for, as I am, but as far as I was concerned, he wasn’t choreographing enough; I wanted more new material. However, despite my departure, our professional association wasn’t over. After slamming the phone down on each other a few times (“I’ll never work with you again!” “Fuck you!”), he called me up out of the blue. “I never thought I’d call you again,” he said, “but I have a favor to ask.” His dancer, my friend Harry Laird, was injured, and Lar needed someone immediately to cover his parts on a nine-week State Department tour of Asia: would I do it as a favor, tomorrow? To which my response was “Let-me-think-about-it-okay-fine.” From that moment on, Lar and I were friends.

In fact, I hardly even had to perform on that tour—Rob and other good friends reunited to go to Korea, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia—which culminated in my first trip to Indonesia. It had been such a grueling itinerary (for those actually dancing) that the State Department finally gave us two days off in Bali, which was the beginning of a lifetime obsession.

On State Department–sponsored tours, the relevant ambassador threw a party at his house, and in Jakarta we were lucky enough to meet a couple from the United Nations who took us to a dance club where I witnessed a kind of social interaction the likes of which I’d never seen before. It was a dime-a-dance kind of place, and if it wasn’t a whorehouse, that’s only because sex wasn’t the principal feature. The central idea, like in a hostess bar in Tokyo, was that the male customer felt fabulous on the way home from work with someone who wasn’t necessarily his wife.

Inside that beautiful dimly lit ballroom, the men, in their short-sleeved batik shirts, sandals, and slacks, sat in twos and threes drinking Bintang beer, while the ladies—beautifully dressed in outfits similar to the ones they wore for temple: high heels, lace bodices, and ankle-length sarongs beneath big round black-lacquered Imelda Marcos hairdos—sat apart, waiting for someone to buy them a drink or ask for a dance.

The music, to which I became quite devoted, was jaipongan, a hybrid East/West popular dance music style in Indonesia, always sung in the local language—highly amplified with electric bass, saxophone, some gamelan instruments, a drum kit. When the band started up, the men and women, all of whom were familiar with the dances, would line up separately, facing each other down the hall. The music was full of surprising stops and starts, and the men did a full martial arts dance routine, while the women (conversing throughout) did their beautiful classical Javanese hand dancing. Given that the lines faced each other, it was as if the men were endlessly attacking and the women deflecting. They knew precisely when the song ended, I had no idea, and the overall effect as it built to a climax was thrilling. I actually dared to dance once or twice. In these instances, I only try not to stick out.

On that first trip, we were housed in the most glamorous hotel I’d ever set foot in, a five-star beachfront property with beautiful gardens, wonderful room service, and AC. (When I went back there more recently, knowing Bali as I now do, I hated it.) Although we weren’t performing, the people from the embassy entrusted with our care welcomed us. The expats were happy to inform us that we’d missed the boat, that Bali’s glory was thirty years past. That had been the renaissance of Balinese art—the Indonesian National Awakening—when Walter Spies, the primitivist painter, was resident, along with Colin McPhee, the Canadian composer, who transcribed Balinese music for piano, which he then recorded with his friend Benjamin Britten. They lived in a benevolent but basically colonial way, helping to revive the lost arts—dance and music, the old style of painting. This revival, particularly of dance music, was astonishingly successful. The purity of some of it is in doubt, but it’s legit simply because it happened. The renaissance worked.

Before the war, under Dutch rule, Bali had become a tourist spot for Europeans and Australians; Charlie Chaplin holidayed in the big Western hotel on Sanur Beach. Those were the glory days, when this incredible paradise was a Hollywood destination, before the Japanese took over and the Dutch were thrown out. Indonesia was in terrible shape during World War II.

And, to this day, no matter how we try to ruin it, Bali remains great. You might walk into the fanciest hotel with musicians playing in the lobby and imagine it’s for the tourists, but they would be doing precisely the same thing at their village temple. The dancers might be teachers or computer programmers, or they might work at the car rental place, but they’re all involved.

My Indian friend Lakshmi Viswanathan, who visits Bali often from Chennai, says it’s like going back in time to prehistoric early Hinduism. They’re worshipping deities unknown for the last five hundred years. Bali is the only Hindu animist island in Indonesia—everywhere else is Muslim—and everyone is either deeply religious and superstitious or not at all (but honor the fact that their parents are). They believe in magic, evil spirits, and good karma, but the sanctity of religious culture is a given. Everyone has a little temple in their yard where they pray and make offerings four or five times a day. It’s not a big deal: “I just have to go and pray, you wait right here.” It’s how I imagine it was when poetry and singing were the same thing in the ancient world. It’s the perfect blend for me, the way I imagine that religious culture used to be.

I’ve seen very great art and had—if you’ll allow me—deep spiritual experiences in Bali. Though the concierge can’t tell you where that day’s ceremonies are, the housekeepers can, and anywhere you drive you might come upon a spontaneous festival of some kind. You’ll follow the sound of a gamelan and find yourself welcomed—everyone is welcome—to, say, the Nyabutan, the hundred-day naming ceremony, where they touch a baby’s feet to the ground for the first time since its birth—the idea being that they’ve decided this baby is viable (since it’s managed to survive one hundred days) and they’re therefore ready to grant it a name. At the temple, the baby’s feet are ceremonially placed on the ground, and the baby is accepted on earth. Then there’s a party.

When we were there with Lar that first time, we found out about the forthcoming dedication of a temple’s gamelan. It took place in a temple hall, just columns and a roof, and we, in appropriate sarongs, were the guests of honor. The guests of honor found themselves in a particularly receptive state because we’d all just eaten banana omelets with magic mushrooms. You could get that in any restaurant then; it was part of their religious ritual, like peyote in Mexico. Now it’s harder to find and there’s a lot of fake psilocybin, but you can still get a cup of tea in the mountains. Sometimes you were ripped off—sandy mushrooms—but in this instance we were high on tea and omelets.

Rob and I, and a few others, the only white people, sat and watched as the elders of the village filed in. Outside, people crowded around to watch. Then the ceremony began, speeches and singing, and finally the musicians who prayed, thanked everyone, thanked the instruments. Then there was silence as everyone freaked out (though it’s possible that was just us), during which eternity I was chain-smoking clove cigarettes. The only way I could tell that time was passing was when they burned my fingers. Then came the moment of dedication. They hit a loud BONG on the gong, and, as the sound breathed life into the sacred gamelan, everyone screamed. The ridiculous giant white people were in heaven, out of our trees, hypnotized by this crazy spectacle.

They then did a dance in which an old ugly fisherman, all eyebrows and conical hat, came upon a mermaid with a sarong tail. He looked at her, realizing she was a mermaid, and expressed in mime, “How am I supposed to fuck her if she doesn’t have a pussy?” That was the moment I finally understood about mermaids—the irony of the sirens in the Odyssey—though the five-year-olds, who were in on the joke, were also screaming with laughter. It was the dirtiest dance I ever saw in my life, and we were truly shocked and delighted.

I’ve visited Bali many times over the intervening years, and I’ve had the same driver for my last three or four trips. He knows what I like. Once he accompanied me to a particular funeral as my guide and interpreter. We fell in with the men following the gamelan that ended up at the cremation grounds, where they were burning three different bodies. (A cremation is as great a financial commitment as a wedding: you might put someone in cold storage in a morgue for years, until it’s the right day and you have enough money.) On this particular day, there was a poor person’s cremation, with no more than a couple of instruments and some potato chips; then a middle-sized one; then a rich person’s cremation, with hundreds of guests in attendance, a full banquet, a big gamelan, and a fancy pyre with flaming gas jets. (Sometimes the various gamelans all play whatever they are playing, regardless of the others: no one seems to notice or mind.)

“Come,” this guy said to me as he tapped the ground beside him, “sit with me.” As we sat in the little shade afforded by my umbrella, he said, “So that’s my mother they’re burning. She died two years ago!”

Then we ate ice cream.

I WAS NEVER without a job long enough for it to be scary, and my next stop post-Lar was with Hannah Kahn. Through classes, I’d again met up with Teri Weksler (now “Winkie,” as I’ve called her ever since), who’d taught me Limón in Washington at the summer workshop and was now a year or two ahead of Penny at Juilliard. Hannah, a Juilliard-graduated choreographer (she’d been tormented there for being “big-boned”), was taking classes at Marjorie’s too and asked me to be in her next concert.

Hannah was very intellectual, smarter than I, and we spent a lot of time at her loft, drinking and talking philosophy—for me, this was high-level intellectualism. She was a very sociable, warmhearted Marxist (though I don’t know if she’d describe herself that way), always questioning and challenging. She choreographed music I loved, very meticulously, in puzzles. Hers was a completely different paradigm from any other dancing that had previously been asked of me. For the first time the choreography was simultaneously intellectually appealing and physically satisfying. Some of it was task based, almost like a theater game. For example, she might have you imagine an invisible ring of a particular dimension in a particular position through which, without its moving, you had to thread your body. Her work was nonintuitive, intellectually rigorous, and conceptual. The actual dancing, however, was friendly, full-throated, Limón-derived rather than Cunningham-rigid. It was very hard to execute, but not hard to remember.

Hannah was very musically motivated, and I learned a great deal from her, particularly in regard to how to flatten and clarify gesture, to perform without projecting in the classical sense, to dance the moves purely and well. The pieces were beautifully structured with a statement, its development, a recapitulation—classical structure, sonata form, everything analyzed. She was also a great teacher, and I’ve used a lot of her devices, the most important perhaps being her use of the barre in teaching, not normally used in Modern Dance. It’s from her that I learned to make up such complicated and difficult solos for myself. Why? Because it’s just me dancing. Who necessarily wants to watch that? It needs the extra element of complication and objectivity.

Eliot Feld always worked really hard and single-mindedly on one piece at a time; Hannah, on the other hand, always did new work because she didn’t have much money, rarely enjoyed a steady gig, and the same dancers were not always available. Like Lar, she lived and rehearsed in her loft, in this case by Cinema Village on Twelfth Street and University, right across the street from Baryshnikov’s apartment, where I later lived. Also like Lar, Hannah was a great dancer who was still performing with the company. Learning directly from the source of the esthetic as she or he is dancing is fascinating.

An archetypically great Hannah Kahn piece was the duet with the previously mentioned ring constraint choreographed for Winkie and me, to Debussy’s “La Cathédrale engloutie” for piano. It seemed like a very long dance, mostly because we could barely do it due to the challenges of realizing the “task,” in this case manipulating that invisible ring, the irony being that viewers wouldn’t necessarily know that there was any task involved at all. It wasn’t like doing a job where everybody realizes the difficulties and applauds their execution.

Hannah was very prolific, got enough work around New York, in addition to a little bit of touring, and her company, only seven or eight strong, was full of exquisite dancers: Winkie, Ruth, Keith Sabado, Peter Wing Healey, Kate Johnson, Ken Delap, who ended up marrying Winkie, and Dianne McPherson, who became a great Sufi belly dancer. It’s no surprise I wound up working with so many of them in my own group.

I danced with her for a year and a half (as usual), but the work wasn’t steady and I was working elsewhere as well. When I put on the first Mark Morris Dance Group show, I was still dancing with her, so of course she was in my show too. I owe a tremendous amount to her.

AROUND THIS TIME, Penny introduced me to Steve Yadeskie, a guilty Polish Catholic boy from Tacoma (my neck of the woods, coincidentally) who’d moved to New York to go to the School of Visual Arts. She’d had an affair with him, since he was bisexualish. He was handsome, troubled, rejected by his parents, ashamed of being queer, and as gay people say, “straight acting and appearing,” beautiful and well dressed, with blondish-brown hair and an aquiline nose. He was an artist, a painter, and a carpenter, a hard worker paying the rent waiting tables at a Cajun restaurant in Kips Bay.

Stevie and I got together, and he found half a loft for us, divided by its occupant, on Tenth and something in Hoboken, where we moved in: $175 a week for two thousand square feet. He built everything himself, the bathroom, the shower, all of it. We couldn’t afford to heat it in the winter, so we stapled up a plastic sheet around the window like people did, and collected tiles from the dump for the shower and kitchen. Hoboken didn’t even exist then. There was nothing, just old abandoned warehouses; in the bodegas, they only spoke Spanish. I loved taking the PATH train from work every day, a fifteen-minute walk back to my house, then another long flight of stairs. The artist who’d divided the loft in half, our new neighbor and landlord, was Robert Bordo, now a painter of great renown and head of drawing at the Cooper Union, but then an unknown Quebecois Jew, whose teacher was Philip Guston. We became friends right away. At our first big Easter party—I was a vegetarian, but I’d make a big ham (thank you!)—Bobby met his boyfriend Donald Mouton, who went on to dance with my company for years. So it was we two queer couples, and Stevie’s lovely dog Daisy, in barely divided apartments.

Stevie was absolutely the first real boyfriend I lived with as a mate or a spouse, a domestic move into boyfrienddom that turned almost immediately into a husband-and-wife scenario. He worked in the restaurant, and I baked, danced, and ironed his shirts. It was a little weird. I remember thinking, “Wait a minute! Noooo!” after which nightmare realization it continued for a couple of years. He was embarrassed to be gay, especially with me, the way I am. He tried to hide me. Once we went to see Laura Dean’s choreography at the theater on Second Avenue, across from where Stomp! is now. It was so gorgeous that I cried. Stevie got mad, told me to shut up and control myself. Asshole!

And he drank. He wasn’t drunk all the time, but when he binged, it was bad. Ours was a sex relationship, and there was a lot of guilt, at least on his part, which he took out on me. He ended up hitting me in the face, punched me while he was holding a glass. Nobody had ever hit me. I immediately knocked on the dividing door, asked Bobby if I could stay with him, and moved next door for a while. Stevie was mad at me. He was fucking some other friends of mine, even though he was barely gay. It was one-way monogamy, my role too wifely for me. He later punched me again, in the stomach, angry that I was staying the week with Hannah while he was alone in Hoboken. It was his way of trying to discourage me from doing EST—Werner Erhard’s supposedly transformational (self-help) sixty hours of seminars that stretch over two weekends—perhaps intuiting that the sole reason I was doing EST was to have the strength to get rid of him. It was a psychologically abusive relationship, if only rarely physically abusive, and this was the second time I’d ever been hit by anybody, twice by the same man. Afterward, to make up for it, he said, “Let’s have sex, and you can do whatever you want to me. Hit me as hard as you like wherever you like.” I didn’t want to either hit him or have sex.

His paintings metamorphosed from weird beautiful Sheetrock-stained fantasias to razor blades, chains, and spikes, scary nihilistic S-M imagery. At one point, because he wasn’t making it as an artist, he decided to abandon personality and selfishness, and informed me that I too should work in the post office or join the Peace Corps because my art was doing nothing for humanity. Another time, he announced we were moving to Santa Fe. I said I’d stay in Hoboken for another couple of months, so he packed all of his shit, and Daisy, and drove across the country to get a house and a job in Santa Fe. We had sad, longing phone calls from New Mexico, but I was never intending to join him. Then he came back, we had a big fight, and he threw me out. I came back to find my possessions in a huge pile in the middle of our loft, like a bonfire waiting to be lit, and then we had an argument and he left. There wasn’t a lot of logic involved. It was terrible.

Before he left, I lay in my own bed and took some mescaline. (We slept together or not. I don’t like to sleep with people that much. I like sex, but I’m not a great cuddler in the aftermath. I also like sleep.) I placed speakers on either side of my head, lay back, and listened over and over to the same two records, alternating between the Vivaldi Gloria in D (I’d sung the tenor part in high school) and some old Tahitian chants. It was an insufferably hot summer, and I was lying in my underpants, tripping, looking at the peeling paint, and listening, for the whole day, only to those two records. Both of them became dances—Gloria and Not Goodbye, a set of three of those chants.

Stevie ended up dying of AIDS. I don’t even remember when I found out or who told me, but I hadn’t seen him in years by then.

I WAS PERIODICALLY going to Seattle to teach, and I applied to choreograph for a Pacific Northwest Ballet workshop. This is the hopeful handwritten application letter I sent:

Hoboken, NJ, March 12, 1978

Dear Mr. Stowell and Ms. Russell,

I understand you are commissioning works from young choreographers this summer. I’m a young choreographer who would like to apply.

My name is Mark Morris. I was born, raised and trained in Seattle. I now work in New York with the Lar Lubovitch Dance Co. I’ll be out of work for most of this summer and would very much like to choreograph for your company and for Seattle. I could be there from around May 10th thru the last of July.

I love dance—I love music: that’s what my work is all about. Enclosed is my resume. If you need more information, please write or call. I wish I had a typewriter.

Thank you,

Mark Morris

This resulted in a commission, my first real dance in three years. Things looked promising at first. They wanted to know what I was planning. I replied:

Hoboken, NJ, May 21, 1978

Dear Kent,

I can’t answer all of the questions in your letter until I’ve seen the dancers I’ll have to choose from. I’m doing what work I can and am prepared to alter my sketches to adapt them to the individuals. Here’s what I can tell you:

Description—style

I am certainly influenced by several people whose choreography I admire very much: Eliot Feld, Lar Lubovitch, Jennifer Muller, Laura Dean. I also draw from my extensive involvement with ethnic dance. I take a strong balletic foundation for granted and from there I alter, distort, modify, you-name-it, to achieve the movement that most fully expressed my musical ideas. The music is tremendously important to me. The structure of this piece I’m unable to discuss until I’ve chosen dancers.

Music—Beethoven’s trio in B♭ maj (op. 11) for clarinet, cello and piano.

No. of dancers—5 to 9.

I would like to request that my friend Page Smith perform the cello part. She is principal cellist with the Northwest Chamber Orchestra and has worked with me before. I admire her playing and she has a very good understanding of my work.

I’m sorry this response took so long. I just finished performing in Lar Lubovitch’s NY season, had visiting family to entertain, etc. I’m available anytime in June and July. We can discuss that or other details when you call or write. Thank you so much for including me in this project.

Sincerely,

Mark Morris

I choreographed it on Tina, Winkie, and Ruth. The dance started with Tina running backward in a circle that got slower and slower until she stopped. I made her do it over and over and over again. “I should have known you’d be a perfectionist,” she commented, with genuine regret.

In the event, the finished piece, on which I’d worked extremely hard, was almost saddled with the name A $200 Dance. I’d intended to use live music, and though we’d rehearsed with piano, cello, and clarinet, Pacific Northwest Ballet decided to pull the plug at the last minute because apparently we couldn’t have live music. It was a budget thing, I seem to remember, about which there was miscommunication. I had been paid $200 (which wasn’t very much money at that time) to work for two weeks on a dance, and then they took away my music. I was so angry that I decided to call it A $200 Dance, because that’s how I think. Instead I found the word Brummagem (an old name for the English city of Birmingham and also a nineteenth-century expression for counterfeit coins, for which that city was apparently notorious), a title that referred to the commission rather than the theme of the dance or the music, “a cheap piece of shit that looks expensive.”

My response to the musical dilemma was a little Cage inspired. I used a recording of the music and three radios playing at the same time to ruin it. Fine or stupid or both, depending on your point of view. But it was still a beautiful dance.

MY FRIEND PETER WING HEALEY knew of an opening at Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians, so I auditioned. I stomped and spun for hours and I got the job. I had replaced Peter at Hannah Kahn’s when he’d originally left for a job with Laura Dean. It all goes around. (And it still does. It’s a world you like to try to make bigger, but sometimes you stick with the people you trust. Never a bad idea. Even when you want to kill them, at least you trust them to die.)

Laura’s choreography managed somehow to combine everything I liked: Koleda, minimalism, conceptualism, trance, and always live music. That first piece I’d seen with Stevie, when he got mad at me, was Song, for singing dancers and Laura’s own piano music (extremely minimal minimalism), which went on for about an hour, half of which was spinning in a circle in identical costumes. Incredible. Later there was an electrifying piece called Tympani, scored for two tympani and stomping.

Like everybody else, Laura, who made up one dance every two years, rehearsed in her loft, in that same area of Manhattan, in the teens. She’d been lovers with Steve Reich and had choreographed Drumming when it was first written in 1975. The work was exhausting, fully aerobic, hard. At that time the piece we were performing most often was Dance, six dancers stomping in concentric circles clockwise, then counterclockwise: sixty-four beats clockwise, the same counterclockwise, then thirty-two, and then sixteen, and so on. It took a long time to go through the whole system. Like Lucinda Childs, she set up problems and worked through them; when they were done, the dance was finished. Laura wrote the music, a lovely piece for two Autoharps, and us stomping, spinning for fifteen straight minutes in a circle, and singing. That’s what I loved.

We toured France with her. The program of each show was two pieces of about equal length with an intermission; everybody was in everything. The older pieces had been precisely eighty minutes long, but she reduced them for touring on the smart commercial assumption that people probably didn’t want to see dances that long. The funny thing was that, wherever we danced, the stage spacing was based on the original circle that fit in her loft as we’d rehearsed it. It didn’t matter what size stage it was, or how big the theater, the dance was still done on the dotted lines from her apartment. There were no entrances or exits, the curtain would go up and you’d dance, and then you’d stop and the curtain would go down.

Then she started choreographing a new dance I felt was a little Broadway, the key difference being that it was front facing. That’s when I lost interest. I always wanted to dance in a circle.

ERIN MATTHIESSEN, one of Peter’s friends, was also dancing with Laura. He was a Catholic like Steve, but devout rather than merely guilty. (His real name was Gary Cobb; he’d changed it as an homage to the writer and naturalist Peter Matthiessen.) We both found ourselves in Laura’s company for a State Department tour, a long five weeks—six dancers, two musicians, and Laura—starting with two weeks in Auckland, teaching a workshop. We were treated very well, as you used to be by the State Department. (International touring depended on the State Department, and vice versa.)

New Zealand itself was the Land That Time Forgot: Dinosaur Country. I’d never seen such plants, and such vast expanses of emptiness, as if nobody lived there. Despite all this, the first person I encountered when we walked into an Auckland bar on the very first day was a beautiful seven-foot tattooed Maori drag queen. We were having such a wonderful time, and Erin—so handsome in his glasses (all my boyfriends had glasses)—and I suddenly went DING! We had sex for the first time in Auckland, and then we were lovers, done, and falling in love, and in love. And what places to start! The next stop was one week in Indonesia, when I was first woken up by the prayer call. I’d never heard the Muslim muezzin before. That was also where I found a little roach of New Zealand weed left over in my bag. Not the right place for that. Death sentence.

We had two weeks together in India, my first trip, the beginning of another lifelong obsession. First-time visitors either feel immediately welcome and at ease or in a terrible blind panic. Though it was overwhelming, I loved it. Of course men in India hold hands, because men rarely touched women in public, so Erin and I, now boyfriends, held hands without any self-consciousness. Laura and the people from the embassy were worried by this public expression of queerness. That’s what it was, but it didn’t matter.

Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians in India, 1981.

Back row from left to right: Erin Matthiessen, me, Peter Healey, Angela Caponigro, Laura Dean, David Yoken (musician), and Ching Gonzalez. Front row from left to right: Paul Epstein (musician), US State Department employee, Nurit Tillis (musician), and Sara Brumgart. (Holly Williams)

I was familiar with a little bit of North Indian (Hindustani) music, but I’d never before encountered South Indian (Carnatic) music. And it was now that I first heard M. S. Subbalakshmi’s singing—it blew my mind entirely. India’s classical music, northern and southern, is like that of a more advanced planet; Western classical music is a petroglyph by comparison. It’s a natural, practiced, and inherited ancient oral tradition. An Indian audience hears the first two pitches and, judging by that interval, knows the mode that it’s in and probably even the duration of the piece. It’s like a periodic chart of the elements.

I knew I needed more of that music, but it would be a decade before I was able to return.

ON MY WAY back from the airport, I met Tina coincidentally on the PATH train. “I have to tell you something so incredible that’s happened to me,” I said. “I’ve fallen in love.”

Erin left his boyfriend and moved in with me. We were in love, and he would never dream of hitting me.