Five
Gloria
I didn’t just want to be a dancer. Doing my own work turned out to be practical because that’s what was taking over my life. In the end, I had to get a group together because, frankly, who else was going to do my dances?
I WAS CHOREOGRAPHING CONSTANTLY.
Lar was my senior, but we talked about matters choreographic, and he welcomed contributions. Hannah and I worked more as peers, choreographer to choreographer. The specific reason I left Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians (after doing only three pieces the world over, each time with the same people) was a dance called Skylight, which later became part of the repertory. The music was in 11/8, a very fast 11, which I understood because of my experience with Bulgarian folk dance.
“Just do that in a canon,” Laura instructed us, a canon being the device by which movements are introduced, then reproduced sequentially by other dancers a little later. “Start halfway through.”
But you can’t start after five and a half beats—she hadn’t thought it out—and it dawned on me that I was spending time solving other people’s problems when I should perhaps be solving my own instead, regardless of whether I had a company or not. A lot of choreographers, Paul Taylor for example, might say to their dancers, “I like this; now make it fit into the music.” That’s a legitimate way to work. But I didn’t want to be the one having to work it out, making it fit, for anybody’s dances but my own. I was happy to lend my skills to other choreographers, but I wanted to make up pieces for other people to dance.
Granted, I had neither the time nor the money—the two indispensable requirements to putting on a dance show (besides dancers)—so I started to make each part up on myself. If you watch any one person’s part in Gloria—my first big dance—each one of them looks like me; they’re each doing a thing I taught them to do, based on my body. I’d then arrange all the parts structurally, but it was still basically me doing every part, and at that point the only way you could have seen the dance done better than with my dancers was time-lapse photography of me dancing every role. As soon as I could, I started to make the dances up on other people so the moves were based less on my own anatomy or style. They were my preferences, of course, but no longer “do an impersonation of me.”
So time and money were a problem, but I had enough courage and I had enough friends, so I had enough dancers. The urge, however, wasn’t to start a company; that was a by-product.
Lar’s rhetorical advice was “You’re not going to start a company, are you?” He meant “It’s a pain in the ass, it’s impossible to raise the money, it’ll drive you crazy, and besides, no one’s that interested in dance.” All totally true. Jerome Robbins once similarly warned me, “You’re not going to choreograph a piece for the Paris Opera Ballet, are you?” I did, and it was a nightmare. Lar and Jerry weren’t just being dismissive and unhelpful; experienced people know what they’re talking about.
I WAS NOW A KNOWN professional dancer in New York; I taught Modern Dance at the Boston Ballet summer workshop and guest taught elsewhere. My own work seemed to be gaining some slight momentum, piquing the tiniest interest. I had a very modest reputation, about which I was somewhat modest.
Erin Matthiessen, Brockport, New York, 1988. (Nancy Umanoff)
Things were certainly vastly improved in Hoboken; home became homey. Erin was quiet and taught me Transcendental Meditation, and we went to a lot of shows together. We read poetry to each other; things were smooth. He even got a job dancing for my favorite, Lucinda Childs. Her dancers would arrive at rehearsal to find a chart for each of them, containing their instructions and sharpened number two pencils; they’d work out their steps and trajectories for the first hour, then she’d come in and put it all together.
Then Tina and her boyfriend, Barry Alterman, moved close by. They’d met working the same shift at the Häagen-Dazs on Christopher Street (when Christopher Street was the center of gay everything), united by a shared love of baseball and, more specifically, the Yankees. I met Barry at that same ice creamery. I liked a black and white malted, made a particular way with vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup. The first time we met he gave me a scoop of chocolate chip, gratis.
Barry was interesting, cultured, smart, and taking acting lessons; we became great friends. He’d gone to City Ballet with his mother for years—he was always a bit coddled—and was a devout opera queen. He was also cute and in good shape. We went to the same gym, the Jack LaLanne in the Woolworth Building. (This is the time to mention that he once saw a turd bobbing gently by in the Jacuzzi.) He was the gayest straight man I’d ever met, completely comfortable with queers, with a voracious heterosexual appetite. (To this day, we’re still sifting through the aftermath.) He was a good editor, a very good writer, and he took an immediate interest in the potential of a company, started helping me write grants, and even took the press photos we used for years. He was invaluable in helping me mobilize.
Tina and Barry became our neighbors and companions. We ate together, drank, exchanged books (there was an Iris Murdoch obsession), watched TV (I Love Lucy, Dynasty, and Jeopardy!, still a nightly ritual). It was every possible combination of friendship, with Tina, Barry, Erin, and me—not to mention Bobby and Donald; not a huge social group but tightly knit, with regular cameos from various friends from class, and colleagues from other companies. One thing: when Barry came over, he’d make straight for the refrigerator and eat anything he could find. We were all broke and I started to get resentful. We’d hide the cheese in advance of his arrival.
FROM THE VERY FIRST CONCERT, we were the Mark Morris Dance Group. The name came naturally. It was the time of the Patti Smith Group and the Wooster Group; those were the other “Groups.” Everyone else had a “company,” either that or “& Friends” or “& Dancers.” I thought of it as more of a communal thing, though certainly not a “cooperative.”
The first Mark Morris Dance Group concert was on November 28, 1980. I wrote the grant application to the New Jersey State Council on the Arts myself, and because I was possibly the only choreographer in Hoboken, I got $2,000—plenty—which I could use to put on a show in Manhattan, provided I also did a couple of performances, along with some teaching, at the Jersey City Museum. The grant paid the rent of the loft theater at the Merce Cunningham Studio at Westbeth, which was the right place for us to make an entrance. The space itself wasn’t expensive, but once you’d rented it, you had to pay for everything and do all the work yourself. We couldn’t afford anywhere to rehearse, however, so we used my loft with its terrible broken-up floor. Even worse, the building had once housed a sewing machine factory and there was still the odd needle lurking, a dancer’s nightmare.
The group was made up of people I liked being with. It was Teri, Elvira Psinas, Ruth, and Hannah (so four from Hannah’s company, including herself), Nora Reynolds and Harry (both from Lar’s company), Jennifer Thienes and Penny from Seattle, Tina, and Donald from next door. We were all friends who became even better friends in the Mark Morris Dance Group. All dancers know each other from classes anyway, so this wasn’t an unusual way for a group to come together. Besides, I was so confident in the dances, so sure of my choreography, that if you were there for the rehearsal, you could be in that part of the dance; I believed there was no way you could fuck it up.
Then there was the question of what to put on the program. Frankly, there wasn’t a lot to choose from. Dad’s Charts and Castor and Pollux (to more Partch, from Plectra and Percussion Dances) I made up specifically for the show (and in fact only finished at the technical rehearsal). Ženska already existed, as did Barstow, from when I was fifteen at Port Townsend. Those old dances were juvenilia, but then . . . I was still a juvenile. Brummagem had been previously commissioned, but this would be the New York premiere with my own dancers.
I’m not sure how many people were there: two nights sold out, capacity probably sixty or eighty. Some kind of audience was guaranteed, because all the dancers were known with their respective companies, so it was already something to see. Details of that first concert are hazy, though there is a video out there, shot from the far corner of the room. Penny helped me put it on; Hannah gave me advice. There was no live music in the show, zero—and you know how I feel about that—but then the Partch was more or less unplayable anyway.
I was busy, active, having fun, nuts in love, and I remember being excited about the show and feeling, in its aftermath, not let down. And it got us some bites. David White, who now runs the Yard at Martha’s Vineyard, offered to present me the next year on a shared week—Split Stream—at Dance Theater Workshop, the hotbed of downtown dance (also known as the Economy Tires Theater, since it was above a tire repair shop), where he was then the executive director. I’d actually be paid to make up new work and put on a show. This felt like a speedy promotion.
Dance Theater Workshop was the first service umbrella organization of this sort specifically for dance rather than theater. It started a program called the Suitcase Fund, which provided companies with money to tour, and published Poor Dancer’s Almanac (subtitled Managing Life and Work in the Performing Arts), a manual on how to put on a show, everything from applying for a grant to making a poster. It was part of an informal network of like-minded people and producers in different cities, a circuit of similarly sized spaces—little black box theaters that seated one hundred maximum. It was a bare-bones tour, but if you could get yourself there, they’d present you and you wouldn’t lose money. We did that.
THE ATMOSPHERE in those earliest days of the group was the greatest. It was all about the collective. We danced together, traveled together, slept together, brought in clothes (“Everyone bring in whatever you have that’s gray! Dark gray, light gray, whatever!”) and made our costumes together, everything. It seemed like the center of the world, the most fun place imaginable. We’d go out after rehearsal, eat, then hang out, drink, and just keep drinking. Someone would inevitably ask for a quarter for the pay phone to make an excuse to their partner about why they weren’t coming home yet. No one wanted to break the spell or to miss anything, because if you missed anything, you missed everything. No one ever wanted to leave that party.
The founding women—the goddesses, the pillars—of my company were Ruth Davidson, Penny Hutchinson, Teri “Winkie” Weksler, and Tina Fehlandt. The similarity was that they were all strong, brilliant, wonderful women and, best of all, great dancers long before I met them. These were liberated women in the pre-AIDS 1970s and ’80s, when people had sex whenever they liked in a way that was simultaneously promiscuous and fabulously feminist.
From the ballet industry’s point of view, Modern Dance was the refuge of the failed ballet dancer. At that time the consensus was that if you weren’t good enough to become a ballerina, if you couldn’t point your feet well enough, if you weren’t the right shape, you became a Modern Dancer. It looked like it was changing for a little while, but amazingly, it’s still that way. Modern Dance’s response? Ballet is for infantilized airheads who are treated like children, behave like children, and have no thought in the world except how they can lose more weight. The “body shaming” was mutual. People (like those nurses who’d informed me I should do something else) certainly told me I’d never make it as a ballet dancer. Somebody else told me my ass was too big. Imagine what women have to put up with.
Imagine a female dancer. Before puberty, she’s a promising, slender dancer, and suddenly, through no fault of her own, she becomes a woman. She gets tits, hips, and acne, and she’s menstruating. (Ballet wants to prevent that, which is the reason behind those stories, which aren’t entirely untrue, of amenorrhea and bulimia. You have to be skinny and small.) And that change leads to defeatism. “I was so promising,” she thinks, “and now I’m the fat girl whom no one can lift. I can’t do ballet anymore.” So she gets depressed, feels demoralized, and immediately reports to Modern Dance. Tina remembers asking me why I wanted her, and apparently I said, “Because I like you, you’re my friend, and you’re big and you dance big and that’s what I like.”
With Tina Fehlandt rehearsing Mort Subite, Boston Ballet, 1986. (Jaye R. Phillips)
Some dancers don’t even believe they deserve to do this, because they were a failure at that. It’s a fucked-up thing for women in dance generally. Ironically, Modern Dance is where the strong women are. There are many more women involved in its making: it’s more intellectual, more political, more rigorous, and, occasionally, in the wrong hands, less accessible.
These four women were permanently attached to the company; men, on the other hand, mostly came and went. It’s not just that the women were steadfast and true (though they were) or that they had greater stamina and a higher pain threshold (which they did). In fact, the steadfastness of the women might have been true of any dance company; I just liked working with women. They’re usually better. Men, because of their rarity in the dance world, are a different story.
The pillar gentleman of MMDG in the early days was Guillermo Resto, a genius dancer of Puerto Rican descent who’d danced with a million other little companies, and was so modest about his genius that he somehow thought it was all a big mistake (though it is true that he’d got into dancing more or less by chance). Quite gorgeous, a beautiful Caravaggio with tousled black hair and a perfectly proportioned muscularity and virility, he was also a full sex devotee, one of those rare people who fucked everybody yet no one hated. From the moment we met, we were like evil twins. We both liked to drink, and we laughed so much, egging each other on and making each other so giddy that people wondered what on earth was wrong with us.
Though Guillermo believed we’d been married in another lifetime—either king and queen or king and servant—he was full-on straight, though he rather liked people thinking he was my boyfriend. (I always called him Queermo.) I wasn’t afraid of straight men, as some gay men are, and Guillermo was both gorgeous and frequently naked. We never had sex, although we kissed every once in a while. One time he apologized for not being more into it, and I asked him why he’d let me kiss him at all. And he said, “Because I love you and that’s what you want. It’s not horrible,” he reassured me, “but it’s not really my thing. I’d give you anything you need, short of having sex, and maybe even sex . . . but it just isn’t me. I love you and if I was gay, I’d be gay. But I’m not.” Enough, already! That’s why I made up a dance to a Vivaldi cantata, Love, You Have Won, a mirror pas de deux for the two of us, in which we looked like matching altar boys. That was my saying, “I get it, you’re not gay, but I love you,” through the mirror to Guillermo.
He was also sensational in Championship Wrestling after Roland Barthes in Mythologies, in which he “fought” Winkie. When he finally stopped dancing, he tried his hand as my rehearsal director, but it wasn’t for him. (It wasn’t for Tina either. In fact, the only one who ever lasted in that position was Matthew Rose, whom I always trusted with my work.) Guillermo was, however, often a valuable liaison between me and the dancers, representing my point of view or explaining the ethos of the company to them, while standing up on their behalf to me. He saw his job as to make things better, to let me know if I was being too hard on someone. On top of everything else, Guillermo is genuinely resourceful, and he can fix anything, a great handyman to this day.
Rob Besserer, a very important eleven-foot (he’s pretty tall) dancer and another gorgeous man, was a star, but never technically a member of my company, always a guest performer. He had a fabulous grace and suppleness, and a legato aspect to his dancing that sometimes read as late, perhaps because of his size, but looked beautiful. He had the knack of looking like he knew what he was doing while no one around him did, though in fact the opposite was often true. Donald Mouton, a Cajun from Louisiana, was charming, a natural. Keith Sabado, a Seattleite of Filipino descent, who’d danced for Hannah Kahn at the same time I did, was another very popular dancer, with (it must be said) extremely large feet. He still dances with Yvonne Rainer even now, one of the “Raindeers,” as she calls them.
These are only some of the many great dancers I worked with in the first years. Some still work with me to this day, setting dances, teaching classes. I’ve been working with Penny, for example, on and off for nearly fifty years, ever since Koleda and Barstow. She still has a great creative imagination; the things she comes up with as a teacher—movement prompts and exercises to get the dancers to think another way—are so magical, and the students will do anything for her. Guillermo has been part of my life in some capacity ever since I first met him, other than six years off in the middle (due to a very difficult intracompany breakup), after which he reappeared in my office and started midsentence from six years previously. He hasn’t cut his hair in twenty years now and is still incredible looking, though somewhat more like a bison these days.
Tina still sets dances for me. She was always a member of what I call the Step Police, those helpful dancers who patrol rehearsal to see if anyone is violating the rules of the choreography, or otherwise doing anything that might affect the purity of my intention, starting on this leg whereas I originally choreographed it for that leg. To the Step Police, the urtext must be preserved above all else, which requires an attention to detail that is extremely useful to me (even if I also refer to it as “squealing”). To this day, she’s one of the few I trust to set my dances on other companies. Sometimes you need the police.
Other dancers go away and I never see or hear from them again. They want nothing to do with me or it or this.
And I get it.
ERIN AND I WERE FULLY into opera, listening to recordings, going whenever we could afford it. It was the beginning of the early music movement, the rediscovery of the baroque operas, which were now being recorded with period instruments for the first time. I found myself learning a lot about choreography by listening closely to Handel’s astonishing musical architecture.
The first Dance Theater Workshop show featured the Vivaldi Gloria in D, which I’d sung back in Seattle at Franklin High, then listened to while tripping in Hoboken. It was one of the first pieces of early music I choreographed, and also the biggest dance I’d done so far. I’d known it as a huge choral and orchestral piece, but my interest was reignited by the conductor Christopher Hogwood’s intimate presentation in a historically informed style with a smaller group of period instruments. It was as if that was the version I’d been waiting for.
A happy side effect of my use of early music was that it was helpful with people’s initial impressions of me. No one else was dancing to old music or, perhaps more pertinently, good music.
Paul Taylor had a reputation for working with baroque scores—which he used as a grid, a waffle iron—but he had a tin ear. If there was a loud moment in the music, a big gesture inevitably accompanied it. He didn’t like to work with live music, either, because it was too unpredictable. He liked to use the recording to which he’d made the dance up, right down to the pauses between the tracks on the record. People likened me to him—Taylorized me—but I can’t say I ever took it as a compliment.
What is more, I was using legitimate music so that people who liked music might actually have something to listen to. Put it in context: Only ten years earlier there’d been no music allowed in dance at all. Then choreographers took to minimalist music, in which I had absolutely no interest whatsoever at that time. My use of music like, for example, Brahms’s Neue Liebeslieder Walzer (which I choreographed as New Love Song Waltzes, composed for vocal quartet and piano, four hands) was therefore an insanity, but an insanity with genuine musical appeal. My choices were also relatively unpretentious; I have learned that I can only choreograph to music I like, though I can also learn to like a piece of music if I feel, for whatever reason, that I should choreograph it; but if I don’t like something, the work will suck. Luckily, my taste is pretty varied. Nowadays a lot of choreographers use live music, and some of them use good music. It just wasn’t the case back then.
Gloria was the first dance I choreographed where I divided the danced chorus strictly into soprano, alto, tenor, and bass so it matched the singing chorus exactly. The sopranos would be two women dancers; altos, a woman and a man; tenors, a man and a woman; and basses, two men. So when we rehearsed it, the dancers knew exactly what I was talking about when I said, “Tenors, you’re late!” or “Sopranos, you’re on the wrong foot!” I choreographed each of the four voices separately, one by one on myself, when I got back home from class in the city. The floor was so rough up there—with always the possibility of a stray needle—that I had to wear shoes. I’d put on the cassette of the Hogwood recording, referring to the score as well, and then with the sun beaming through the eight-foot windows, I’d get to work, listening until it was so in my head that I could make up the dance without the music. I’d later teach that part to somebody else and make up the parts around it.
All of the moves for Gloria are defensible from any angle, not just rhythmically, but also in their relation to the melody and text. The best example is Vivaldi’s fragmentation of the musical phrases in the chorus “propter magnam gloriam tuam.” It’s precisely what is visualized in the dance. You can actually read what’s happening on the stage from left to right, in those parts, like the music.
There’s very little in my dance that’s a literal representation of the text because, although there is plenty of feeling, there’s no real story in the “Gloria” section of a Mass, which is basically praising God in the highest in every possible way. So I developed smaller narratives within the dance, one of which we refer to as “The Little Crippled Girl,” which introduces one of several healing motifs in Gloria. The “Domine Deus” section features four dancers, a family unit including two men and a woman walking with hesitant, pensive steps on a strictly defined path as they carry a woman on their backs. When they put her down, she can’t walk unaided, only by supporting herself on their shoulders. Their walk is in a three, whereas her walk is in a two over three (technically called a hemiola), which, to people who don’t know music, looks brittle and spastic. The solos of the various family members are filled with grief and hope. After they’ve left, the crippled girl gets up shakily on her own like baby Bambi and does a hobbled solo, a recapitulation of the themes we’ve already seen. As the music ends, she circles her arms as if they’re tiny hummingbird wings—she does it so fast, you can almost hear them hum—and then she pops offstage backward and vanishes. One of the exiting trio looks back but too late: she’s gone, raptured. I wasn’t making fun of healing—actually, I suppose I unavoidably was, because depicting it in rhythm as a dance makes it seem funny—but these healings are, I hope, genuinely moving.
Another healing move in Gloria that happens singly and multiply is that of the faith healer leaning in, putting his or her hand to the forehead of someone who falls backward, healed. It’s a gesture taken directly from Kathryn Kuhlman, the great televangelist faith healer of my youth. We watched her on TV back then, making fun of her billowing angel sleeves and her grand opening line, accompanied by swelling organ, “I believe in miracles!” (By which time everybody at home was in tears, already healed.) When she came to Seattle for one of her services, we got stoned and lined up with all of the Holy Rollers. Members of the congregation would go to the stage to be healed; she’d touch their forehead and they’d pass out. That was the big move. I loved that shit.
Photo compilation of the Amen section from Gloria, Seattle, 2010. Top row: Rita Donahue, Noah Vinson, David Leventhal, Joe Bowie, Lauren Grant. Bottom row: Craig Biesecker, Bradon McDonald, Julie Worden, Michelle Yard, Maile Okamura. (Johan Henckens)
I’ve always been a big admirer of religion: the swindle of religion. I love the snake oil, healings, and miracles. I have water and dirt from all over the world. I love a magic charm. In Houston recently, I went three times to Joel Osteen’s supermegachurch, so unwelcoming to the victims of Hurricane Harvey in 2017. There was terrifying, handsome, smarmy Joel in front of me, preaching to ten thousand people in an arena, with a rotating globe and a giant gospel choir sing-along—far more interesting than going to the ballet. If I were a single mother, I’d go every day for the free daycare, food, clothes, and air-conditioning. Of course, there’s a catch; there’s always a catch.
I know a lot about religion, despite being an atheist (without really wanting to acknowledge there’s even theism—the argument isn’t that there’s no god, it’s that there’s no argument to be had). Atheists often know more about religion than believers. (I once helped to explain Mormonism to one of my dancers who is a Mormon but hadn’t been paying attention as he sat in church with his big family, playing on his Gameboy.)
I love a good creation myth. Every single one is weird. I have no preference for, or sharper ax to grind against, any religion. Nor do I think Mormonism, Scientology, or any Branch Davidian is more absurd than any other religion; they’re just more recent, no more or less bullshit. It’s all the same propaganda no matter which terrible religion you call your own. I like the music that the Lutheran Church caused Bach to write. Hooray! It wouldn’t have been composed otherwise. I love Jesusy paintings. I love a gorgeous cathedral. But I don’t buy a bit of what’s behind it. Not a scrap. It’s the same with Indian religion. Will I tip this beggar to improve my karmic odds? Sure. I’ll knock wood and touch the head of this deity or kiss the Blarney Stone. It’s just like avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk. Superstition.
It’s easy to see how religion works. Go to an Eastern Orthodox service where you have to stand for the whole thing. The incense is so intense and dizzying, the music so hypnotic, that you start to lose your mind—I love that feeling. An organ is tuned to the precise room it’s in. Organs only have their full power in the places they belong, where you, the listener, are the organ’s resonator. A recording can’t replicate that because you can’t feel it viscerally—it doesn’t rattle your bowels—but if you’re there and it’s reverberating inside you, and you’re looking at the light through that beautiful stained glass window: that is heaven. Add the smells, the language you don’t understand, and the outfits . . . the overall effect is irresistible. Count me in! Even though I don’t want to be counted in. A Catholic service in Latin is fabulous; the magic is lost in English because you know what all the words mean, rather like when opera is sung in English (if you can make out the words at all).
And I want to see it all. I’ve been to a Sufi mosque in Turkey, where I happily removed my shoes and washed my feet just so I could witness the dervishes spinning themselves into a trance. When we were working together on his musical The Capeman, Paul Simon and I went to a clandestine Santeria service in the basement of a Dominican family’s house in the Bronx—the priest spat rum at us as he went into a trance inspired by Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. A couple of years ago in Cambodia, some of us visited a little village outside Phnom Penh to hear revered musicians play music that exists nowhere else and hardly, because of the slaughter of an entire generation, even there. We were made very welcome by a regular old granny, then invited within a tiny temple that could fit no more than seven people, where kids sat on our laps to watch. This nice toothless old lady transformed into the possessed priestess, going into a deep trance, spraying arak from her mouth like a holy baptism. She chanted (not even in Khmer), grabbed someone’s face, peered into her mouth, spun, then shook the children—violent and scary—as these old guys played unbelievably sophisticated music on instruments I’d never seen before.
It doesn’t matter if you believe in it—I don’t believe in any of it—but it happens. It’s a fact. And it’s powerful. Prayer (or “mindfulness”) may not hurt, even though it’s a waste of time. But I don’t argue with any of it. I love magic. I love a sunset. I love a baby. I love the ideas and myths of religion, its trappings, though what I really love is the kindness of people who are devoutly religious and don’t proselytize.
You can hear the religious in music. At a Trinity Church performance of a Lou Harrison piece, La Koro Sutro, last year, the choir held the first chord on the downbeat, unison with octaves, about four times longer than humanly possible, staggering their breathing so it seemed to go on forever. I felt it then. That’s the embarrassing part of being so moved—because I do find myself frequently moved—by what I assume must be the Holy Spirit, although there is no God. I feel it. It’s how you feel when the music is echoing through you in a church.
That’s what I try to put into a dance like Gloria (which Vivaldi wrote at a time when you were either religious or dead): the thing that inspires me, that feeling, but also a choreographic representation of that feeling. I try to express it frankly and honestly.
I WAS CLAWING my way up the greased pole of a career. We performed three years running at Dance Theater Workshop, first sharing the space for a week, then having our own week, and then a two-week run on our own. The director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the great Harvey Lichtenstein, saw my work there and—perhaps on the back of an Arlene Croce piece in the New Yorker, “Mark Morris Comes to Town”—invited us to appear at BAM as part of the second iteration of the Next Wave Festival. The festival’s name was itself riding the wave of new wave, the music of the time (because the term “avant-garde” was itself a little après garde), or perhaps the nouvelle vague of French cinema, and referred to the next new thing, which included, in choreographic terms, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Trisha Brown, and Lucinda Childs, not to mention, in the wider world of art, Robert Wilson, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, and Laurie Anderson. This enviable company of artistes was more established than I, if only a few years older, and I was thrilled and surprised to be invited. Though I thought I belonged in such company, I honestly didn’t think anybody else thought so too.
The New Yorker article ran at the beginning of 1984. I had assumed that it would be a group pan, or a collective mention of three or four choreographers of my generation, but it wasn’t that at all. It was about me and my work only. In itself, this was bizarre, because Arlene Croce just didn’t do that. She wrote about Merce and Balanchine; those were the artists.
We were somehow in the habit of doing one show in NYC and one show in Seattle a year, along with whatever other work came the way of a fledgling company, and what Arlene saw and reviewed was nine of the best dances I had made by 1983. Frankly, it was almost enough that she’d just gone to the show, but to have such major coverage bestowed was sensational. She described New Love Song Waltzes, a love dance with a lot of misunderstandings, as “purple,” by which she meant that it was evidence of a young person just about to find what he was doing or, in her more beautiful phrase, “his moment of excess before the reining in that signifies the start of true growth”; I read this as a big compliment, basically saying that everything I could imagine was in that dance. (All I’ve done ever since is try to pare things down and clean them out.)
Two of the dances she saw and reviewed were set to country music, another favorite genre. I have a real fondness for hillbilly music, Western swing, country music, and the great duet acts from the 1960s and ’70s. I loved Buck Owens, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, and Tammy Wynette. When people ask that classic question “What would you have done if you hadn’t gone into dance?” I say that I would have made a great pedal steel player (but not out of any talent, I assure you; purely because of my affinity for country music). It’s the authentic emotion that fully moves me; it has nothing to do with kitsch, though I realize why people think it’s corny. My parents, being from Montana, hated that music; my mother, particularly, made fun of cowboys because the cowboys at the dances were dirty, smelled bad, and stepped on her feet. But we sang Appalachian music at Koleda, and Chad played those glorious Carter Family songs, including my favorite, “Over the Garden Wall.” Radio stations actually played that music back in those days, so I was hearing new music by Dolly and Porter in the late sixties; then there was that craze of CB radio and truck-driving songs, Red Sovine’s “Teddy Bear” and so forth. I had a big collection of those.
At On the Boards (the enterprising nonprofit performing arts organization and venue) in Seattle in 1982, we premiered a dance called Songs That Tell a Story, featuring the heartbreaking songs of the Louvin Brothers, their white country gospel. I’d always been very drawn to the sweet, intuitive harmonies of family singers, including the Everly Brothers, the Stanley Brothers (all the brothers), the McGarrigles, the McGuire Sisters, even the Lennon Sisters on The Lawrence Welk Show, so I obsessively started listening to and collecting the Louvins. Their clever tunes and harmonies drove me crazy, and it almost killed me to narrow it down to the four songs, the four little moral tales, required for that dance. In the end I settled on “Insured beyond the Grave,” “I’ll Live with God (To Die No More),” “Robe of White,” and “The Great Atomic Power.”
It was a difficult, exhausting dance with a great deal of gestural storytelling and a tight canonic structure. Of course because I’m me, we had to do it in jeans, real denim; of course they weren’t stretch jeans; and of course I wouldn’t allow fake jeans. No modern technology was allowed, nothing that made life easier, just as, in Dido and Aeneas, I’d wear a real tied sarong (elastic was forbidden) and a real chopstick in my hair—further constraints, in time, in motion, in dress. It had to be authentic: it’s one of the key decisions. Often when I make up a dance, I begin with props and sets; but before long they’ve been edited out and there’s nothing left but dancers and lights on an empty stage. My original concept for my big dance L’Allegro included a bunch of sticks, scarves, and flowers, but they were all gone by the premiere. The dance I’m working on now was going to have three stools; I choreographed it that way, then removed the stools. It was immediately better. They’re still there, of course, their ghosts, integral to the piece, but not actually visible.
Songs That Tell a Story was first choreographed for me and a man and a woman, though by the time we did it for TV it was all men. It could be any combination really—the dancers are doing work that either sex could do. My political idea was that if everyone couldn’t do it, it wouldn’t be in the piece. (Later, however, I realized, more generally, that if I needed to, say, change a light bulb, we had to put the littlest girl on top of the biggest boy so she could reach it; it was like the Grimms’ fairy tale “The Bremen Town Musicians,” in which the characters have to reach something way up high and they stack up, the little ones on top.) Songs That Tell a Story was mimetic, illustrative of the Louvin texts (for example, in “Robe of White,” a postman delivering news of a son’s death to his mother), structurally impeccable, and theoretically perfect, though that doesn’t mean you could do all of it. Some of it necessarily failed because I had set up ideas that, though perfect in my mind, were not actually physically achievable. As a random example, not in this dance, you can’t make a cube out of people. When I tried to execute this platonic perfection—the human cube—with eight people, I found that it was not only not pretty but also physically impossible. They’re people! Legs are longer and stronger than arms. Another example specific to Songs That Tell a Story: there’s a canon in which the dancers are doing the same moves a bar apart (possible) and then two beats apart (difficult) and then one beat apart (impossible, because it requires the dancer to be in the same physical space as someone who is still occupying that physical space from the previous move). You can only get as close as you can. That (as far as the performers are concerned) is the frustrating part of those pieces from the period, the constraints. You can do anything as long as you accomplish this one thing that can’t really be achieved.
The next year at On the Boards, we presented more country music: three songs for Deck of Cards—“Gear Jammer,” a great CB song by Jimmy Logsdon, “Say It’s Not You” by George Jones, and “Deck of Cards” by T. Texas Tyler. Deck of Cards was another somewhat humiliating dance, in three movements, one per song, the geometry of the choreography identical for each song. I choreographed it on myself, a woman called Pat Graney, a choreographer in her own right, and a remote-controlled truck. Pat, as a male soldier, wore a uniform jacket, hat, boxers, military shoes, but no pants; I wore a coral polyester dress and did my solo as a woman, dancing to “Say It’s Not You,” a fairly obscure song by one of our nation’s finest singers. It’s a very sad dance, barefoot, in a dress, that charts a progress of loneliness, despair, and desolation, a love hangover after a night of sex and drink. It wasn’t a pretty dance. People laughed at it, of course, because I was wearing a dress. The star of the show, however, was the truck. “Gear Jammer” was a truck-driving song, so I felt there should be an actual truck in it. The truck’s beautiful solo was so moving that it made me cry almost every night. Guillermo operated the remote control, which was tricky because he was offstage, the maneuvers were complicated, and remote controls simply didn’t work well back then. The truck was meant to take the same path on the stage as the soldier, but sometimes it would just drive straight off into the wings . . . zoom!
Finally, “Deck of Cards,” a list song. Everyone loves list songs, everything from Mozart’s Don Giovanni list and Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I’ve Got a Little List” to Hank Snow’s “I’ve Been Everywhere,” perhaps the platonic perfection of the genre. Every one of those songs in the musical Hair is a list. (I also love a ballad that multiplies, like “Froggie Went A-Courtin’.” I want endless verses of brother, mother, daughter, sister, all waiting in heaven for me. I love lists.) Deck of Cards was danced by a woman dressed as a man, an accumulation both in song and in the dance, a form made famous choreographically by Trisha Brown in a piece called Accumulation—the thumb move, then thumb hand, thumb hand arm, thumb hand arm knee, etc., a long, satisfying sequence, and one of her very conceptual and brain-complicated dances people do to this day. It’s a dance people remember.
On that same program was Celestial Greetings, danced to popular and beautiful traditional Thai music, and Dogtown, to the music of Yoko Ono. I’d loved her song “Walking on Thin Ice”—John Lennon had a tape of the final mix in his hands when he was shot; they’d just finished it in the studio that day—though I knew only vaguely about Yoko’s career as an experimental artist. I liked the music very much—all screaming; we danced to the recordings of “Toyboat,” “Extension 33,” “Dogtown,” and “Give Me Something”—and it’s evident from the program of music that I wanted to do something contemporary. Dogtown was dog behavior, ass sniffing and mounting, and I chose the ugliest songs—as I was to do with the Violent Femmes for Lovey—because I don’t like popular music that much. I find it soporific and numbing, so I need the ugliest version. I’d heard Split Enz in New Zealand, but the thing I loved about the music—its new-wave bounce and friendliness—was precisely why I didn’t feel the need to make up a dance to it.
We called Yoko to ask her permission, and she watched a tape and generously gave me the rights to do the dance to her music for free. (And I’ve been charged $1,000 for playing five minutes of Gershwin on the piano at a college.) One movement had an evolutionary sequence because, at that time, the Krishna Consciousness people, the Hare Krishnas, were everywhere. At the airports, they always presented a diorama in a vitrine: a representation of karma, the complete cycle of life in a circle—fetus, baby, adult, ancient man, skeleton, repeat. I reproduced that for a thirty-second, twelve-bar sequence here—from flat out as an amoeba to adulthood section by section. The cast was mostly women, so we called it “Pancake to Woman,” a canon of evolution. When we later did it on film for PBS, I had everyone wearing rubber gloves, which made it look unhygienic. It was a violent dance, but kind of funny.
As a gift, Yoko sent me a beautiful print of a drawing of John’s. Later, not long after we arrived in Brussels, it was stolen from our office, a suspicious burglary that didn’t make us feel more welcome than we were. Everything was all over the place, but nothing other than that was taken. We figured the print was what they’d come for. It had value, of course, but more sentimental than anything, because Yoko had given it to me. If anyone has that, I’d like it back.
ARLENE CROCE’S REVIEW also mentioned The Death of Socrates, premiered at Dance Theater Workshop in 1983, to music by Satie from Socrate (which we presented in its entirety in 2010). The music was impossible and I couldn’t afford a score from Paris, so I just counted out the whole thing—and it was long. There was no way to know the meter half the time. The piano and the voice phrases don’t match, because it’s purposefully and famously climax-free and therefore without landmarks. And although it seems incredibly repetitive, it doesn’t repeat at all. So all I could really do was count the number of beats throughout its eighteen-minute duration and, if I got lost in the middle, go back to the top and start again.
To choreograph it, I divided the piece mathematically, disregarding all musical phrasing except the beat. I broke it down into beats and sections so I knew precisely how long each part had to be. Every phrase of the dance is exactly the same number of beats, but danced either slow, medium, or fast, phrases that started whenever it was time to, which seemed fitting since there was no climax in the musical structure itself. This graphing out and division were techniques learned from the minimalists: Lucinda Childs, Laura Dean, and Steve Reich.
I love to work with a score—people ask me if I make charts and diagrams, but there already is a chart, called the score—and lengthy transcription without one isn’t something I’d necessarily choose to do anymore. Sometimes, however, it worked better without. For example, there was a score for Partch’s Castor and Pollux, but it wasn’t readily available and the chances are that, given Partch’s bizarre notation, I wouldn’t have been able to read it. I was therefore forced to deduce that piece’s beautiful, perfect structure—A, B, C, and then ABC all together, with time signatures alternating in sevens and nines—from extended listening. So I made up a dance that corresponded precisely to the music. And in that one instance, it was perhaps more precise than if I had done it from the score, because it was abstracted mathematically.
I had decided on The Death of Socrates partly because of John Cage’s relationship to it. Merce choreographed Socrate, which is in three movements, the last of which, as you might expect, is The Death Of. Satie had said he wanted the music to be transparent and unimpassioned, “white, like how we think of antiquity” (before we found out that antiquity was originally in garish colors), so he ate only white food while he was writing it to get himself in the mood. Merce choreographed it but then found he couldn’t get the rights, so Cage wrote a piece of precisely the same duration as Socrate called “Cheap Imitation.” (I actually had to do the same thing later with some Messiaen for which the composer Ethan Iverson wrote a shadow piece. There was an evil widow.)
And the chart I made for The Death of Socrates, which I still have, was so beautiful. I set it for six men, so it’s gay (but only because I said so and it has to do with Plato), and everybody had a system of a certain number of beats. The dancers had to count incredibly carefully, because their moves had no relation to the score except by beat. They wore beautiful short togas designed by Bobby Bordo, and his set—we actually had a set!—was a big drapery hung in curves in the same material as the costumes. The dance was based on a fake idea of the ancient, set at a symposium with lounging, grape eating, and amphora carrying. It was the first time Erin danced with me—he wasn’t officially a full-time member of the company, but I needed men—and there is a beautiful photo of Guillermo and Erin dressed like Apollos, looking their very hottest in togas. Guillermo’s was the first solo (part of a zigzag pattern in which the solos took place at the back of the stage, after which the dancers moved forward), Rob’s was the last, and someone later told Guillermo it read like a love letter to him and Rob, because those were the two solos you remembered, the salutation and the sign-off.
In her review, Arlene Croce liked the idea but labeled the dance “inert,” which is such a wonderful thing to call a dance. You couldn’t even do an inert dance, though it’s easy to have an inert idea. But of course she was right. It didn’t develop; it couldn’t; there was no arc, no narrative, none intended, by either Satie or me.
THE TRUTH IS THAT I read that wonderful Arlene Croce New Yorker article—the one that put me on the map, heralding my arrival in the City of Dance—just as I was leaving town on a plane back to Seattle, exhausted and tired of working (or not working) in New York City.
I didn’t have any money—nobody ever had any money—and I wasn’t earning much apart from the little I made making up dances or dancing. I was at least always in some show, and teaching. For many weeks a year, I lived on unemployment insurance, a lifeline for a lot of people underemployed as dancers (and as everything else), and I made sure I was working just enough to collect it. I spent hours standing on line to sign for my $200, lying a lot in the process. It was quite degrading and very, very helpful. I lived very frugally, semicommunally—we were vegetarians, rent was cheap—but New York was all too much for me. (I still believe it is, by the way, but I’m not moving anymore.) It was time to get away. I wanted to live somewhere nicer, see a little sky.
No single review, in however grand a publication, pays your rent, and I didn’t have enough work. All I had was a great review, and the thirty-three dances I’d made up during my first stay. There was a job at the University of Washington waiting for me, so it wasn’t as if I was leaving for nothing. I was to be an associate professor of dance for two years, teaching and choreographing, ballet and Modern Dance. Barry and Tina moved there too, to work with me. It seemed a more practical base for everyone. But I didn’t like the job—a nine o’clock class every morning is too early. I taught workshops on my own to make money, gain notoriety. Whoever showed up to my technique class was in my next concert.
Erin got a job there too. We lived in a neat cottage in Wallingford, a block from Lake Union. I drove a Dodge Dart, an ex–police car with a searchlight, and I’d drive down lovers’ lane to see what it might illuminate. Living there seemed like heaven, and it was. A little home was what I had thought I wanted, and it was good to be around my family and my very old friends. Erin and I were interested in all the same things; on Saturdays we got up to watch Pee-Wee’s Playhouse together. We listened to music all the time, and though I did most of the cooking, I wouldn’t say I was the more housewifely. We shared the tasks; it was much less fraught than with Stevie, because Erin, a tender spiritualist, wasn’t in any way ashamed of being queer. We simply lived together in fond love. We’d even made the decision not to have penetrative sex (though I was never that into it anyway), even though we were monogamous, because we’d had sex with many people before and we thought that one of us might have HIV. If I encountered people doing anything unsafe, I turned evangelist: “Don’t do that!” I was like Carrie Nation.
One immediate surprise, which somewhat galvanized the company, was that some of my dancers, more or less on a whim, decided to follow me to Seattle. They knew I was prolific, that I’d get straight down to work, and they knew that I’d be putting on shows, shows they didn’t want to miss out on. So they flew out, on the admirable basis of “What’s the worst thing that could happen? He doesn’t use us?”
Everyone made arrangements where they’d be staying except, naturally, Guillermo, who had decided, unbeknownst to me, that since I was now living elsewhere with Erin, there’d be a spare room at the Morris family home, and that even though he’d never met any of my family, he could stay there. His plan was to get a cab directly from the airport, introduce himself, and ask politely.
That’s precisely what happened, except no one seemed to be home to answer his knock on the front door. Peeking through the window, he saw Maxine glued to the television and, unable to get her attention, decided to let himself in, which he did, tiptoeing slowly forward so as not to surprise her. She found herself confronted by a dark interloper, desperately trying to explain who he was and why he was there: “I dance with Mark, he’s probably told you about me . . .” Maxine covered her mouth with her hand, a gesture made not out of fear but embarrassment—she didn’t have her teeth in. So she excused herself to go upstairs. Maureen came down and sorted everything out; Guillermo offered to do the cleaning in return for the accommodation, and moved into my old room.
But as I pieced together a life in dance—a show or two in Seattle, a miniature tour that hardly paid for itself, a workshop, or choreography for the Boston Ballet—I found myself heading back and forth to New York, where all my dancers (except Tina, and those briefly lodging at my mother’s) were, as often as I was in Seattle. I tried hard to work from both coasts, but it ended up that Erin and I were living apart more than we were together. He said in retrospect that it was a little like A Star Is Born in that I was away and he stayed at home taking my calls. This led to eventual infidelities on both sides, and, after we’d broken up, he fell in love with a student, which is apparently what happens if you work at a college. Nothing brutal occurred; we never had a single fight; it was merely sad and difficult, but we were good friends, so no one felt the need for revenge. When I finally did move back to New York, he stayed in Seattle and taught there, and when I was invited to Brussels, I hired him as a dancer; we were always good friends.
When Stevie had moved to Santa Fe, I almost went. Coincidentally, Erin had previously lived in Santa Fe, and later joined a Catholic monastery there (the kind of thing that inevitably happens after you go out with me), Christ in the Desert, a silent Benedictine order. He was deeply interested in theology, not just the ceremony, and he’d always been quiet and calm—fake calm but still . . . Finally, he decided against becoming a monk, though he was a lay brother for years, before moving back to Portland and becoming a nurse. He retired recently at sixty-five. He remains adorable.
I’M AFRAID TO SAY, for those with a lurid interest in that private aspect of a memoir, that though this moment doesn’t signal the end of my personal life entirely, I haven’t had a real full-time boyfriend, or a live-in domestic relationship, since Erin.
I have sex, but rarely. I’ve had sex relationships, and long-term love relationships that didn’t involve sex at all. It’s nice when love and sex match up. Combined effectively, they work very well together—that’s my preference—but it’s also sometimes nice when they don’t. Their combination isn’t mandatory. If you’re gay, there’s an option to have sex be anonymous and unattached. Once one removes the end of “living together” as a goal (which I have, long since), one is left with various couples, some of which are sexual and some of which are not, but all of which have a serious emotional component.
My ex-dancer Shawn Gannon is a best friend, as is Isaac Mizrahi, the designer—but neither of those relationships is about sex. Isaac and I may have kissed once. I first met him, back when fashion was fashion and he was the new young thing, having our picture taken together at a gala at BAM in the early nineties, possibly for L’Allegro. He’d graduated from working for Perry Ellis and Calvin Klein to go out on his own, when he became very big, very fast. Living the life then of a very glamorous young designer, he was tall yet somewhat schlubby, baby-faced, adorable, and purposefully nerdy. He wore his pants unnaturally high around his waist and modeled kerchiefs, headscarves, and cravats. He was funny, clever with words, spontaneous, and combustible without being volcanic. Of course, you could just turn on QVC right now to find out what he looks like, and you’d certainly see a version of Isaac Mizrahi, though perhaps one with an exclamation point after his last name.
With Isaac Mizrahi at the New York City Opera’s Spring Gala, 2008. (Patrick McMullan)
A few weeks after that first meeting, Anna Wintour, the longtime editor at Vogue, gave a dinner at which she sat Isaac and me side by side with the intention of setting us up. We never dated, but it was exemplary matchmaking because we became best, then lifelong, friends, and in a sense we’ve been dating (not to mention perpetually interrupting each other) for thirty years. We also met in other ways. I used to call an anonymous sex chat line—an expensive, by-the-minute, hookup arrangement. When you called in, a deep basso voice would say, “Okay. Let’s go dowwwwn,” and then you’d be connected to someone, with whom you’d talk for a little while, and either keep talking or move on to another of the 1,800 male New Yorkers, all cruising for sex in some form (mostly solo), looking for a good fit. One evening, this particular anonymous stranger seemed cute, and he thought the same about me, so as the conversation went on, we decided to meet. At some point the penny dropped and there was a long pause on the other end: “Hold on. Mark?” It was Isaac. He thought my voice had sounded familiar. I owed him a phone call anyway, so we talked on for quite a long time, just at much greater expense than usual.
Darling Isaac and I have been somewhat coupled in people’s minds, not only because we’ve collaborated many times, but because I made a cameo in Unzipped, the celebrated Mizrahi fly-on-the-wall documentary directed by his then boyfriend Douglas Keeve. At the time, Isaac had a beautifully decorated, very contemporary SoHo studio of unfinished plywood, poured concrete. (I remember asking his assistant, in all sincerity, what it was going to be like when it was finished. My mistake!) It was suggested they film a real design meeting for whatever project was then occupying us, which we agreed on, but in the movie we seem to meet by chance on the street. Isaac, who was just finishing up with Naomi Campbell, exclaims on seeing me—I was early, on my way to my scheduled interview, and they were running late—and introduces me to Naomi, whom I greet with the words, “You are my heroine; how could you not be?” Nevertheless, however fake it may look, that was a genuine chance meeting, if only by minutes. That may be as real as documentaries get. These days, my most consistent social engagements by far are the regular family dinners shared with Marjorie Folkman (who danced with me for many years), John Heginbotham, and Isaac himself. We eat, Isaac talks, and one of us pays.
Since Erin, however, I’ve never been interested in a live-in boyfriend, and there’s only ever been he and Stevie, but I do like roommates, people with whom I can cohabit who aren’t actual boyfriends: Guillermo, for example. I’ve always liked people to cook for, but I think what one needs is, in the Virginia Woolf sense, a room of one’s own, and basically I advise everybody against living together as a couple. Nor do I like the institution of marriage. I love that people love each other, or agree to be together forever, but I’m a bit of a Marxist in seeing marriage as a property exchange or unpaid employment for one of the partners. I also don’t like automatically to have to relate to people as couples once they’re coupled. It’s not good for two people to add up to a total of one person; they should add up to a minimum of two people. But that’s just me. You can do whatever you want.
Someone I ended up having sex with two or three times over the course of twenty years? That’s not a boyfriend. But then I don’t need a definitive “relationship status” descriptor to put on a business card. Sex aged eighteen in the shrubbery of Volunteer Park, a few days a week, coming home high from somewhere, was thrilling and fabulous, but it was also a style. Nothing was better than New York in the seventies sexwise. And luckily I’m alive to tell the tale.
Barry once said that my perfect boyfriend would be someone I visited in prison. We’d both put our hands up to the Plexiglas that separated us and stare at each other. Longingly.
And then I’d leave and get back to work.