Six
Mythologies
On the back of Arlene’s article and our new “overnight fame” (and perhaps in hindsight it looks like overnight fame, but it certainly didn’t feel that way), the group started getting invitations all over the place: the Kennedy Center in DC, SUNY Purchase, London, Paris, and beyond.
For the time being, I was bicoastal, wherever the work was. Either in Seattle, where I stayed with Terry Grizzell, a friend from First Chamber who’d also been with me in Port Townsend, in his apartment in the Central District, or in Manhattan with Rob, on Seventh Avenue and Fourteenth Street.
IN SEATTLE, I premiered my solo piece The Vacant Chair, the saddest thing I’d done, degrading in a way that gave me enormous satisfaction. It’s also how I first injured my neck.
It was set to three parlor songs: first, George F. Root’s 1862 Civil War song (from Henry Stevenson Washburn’s poem “The Vacant Chair”—“We shall meet, but we shall miss him, / There will be one vacant chair”—I cry just thinking that, let alone writing it down), then a setting of a poem well-known from everyone’s childhood, Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” (“I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree”), and finally “A Perfect Day,” a phenomenally successful sentimental ballad from the turn of the century, and one of the songs my grandma Mabel hummed quietly to herself.
My notion was to illustrate these three sections with title cards like a silent movie—Guillermo made drawings for me, at least one of which he had to redo every night because I tore it up. Between songs, I’d change the title card and then dance. But the point of horror is this: for the dance to the song “The Vacant Chair,” I was clad exclusively in white briefs with a brown paper bag over my head, so other people could see my naked body but I couldn’t see anything at all. It happened mostly in place, but I had to trust that I knew where I was because the dance, though not long or terribly complicated, was punitive and hazardous, including repeated violent throwings to the ground. Because of the paper bag, I might end up facing the wrong way or running into something. That was part of it. I was mostly naked, blind, and wearing ugly underwear. It wasn’t sexy in any way. (Though there’s always someone who thinks something is sexy.)
I was handicapping myself, partly as a constraint (I couldn’t do the things that I normally could, for example, see) but partly out of showmanship—“You’ve never seen this done before.” Failure was possible, as success was almost impossible. It represented a form of self-torture, but it was also ceremonial, a ritual, like much of early dance. Yvonne Rainer was the first to instruct someone, as part of her choreography, to “lean over until you fall down.” It’s a challenge, and there was a lot of this in my early dances, my heritage from early minimalism. Lucinda Childs set the rules and executed every possible variation. It wasn’t an arc; it just stacked up until it was complete, which is when the dance stopped. My love of strict formal problem-solving came directly from my great appreciation of her work. And Bach’s.
Besides, testing oneself is one of the basic pleasures of dancing, of choreography. Though my dances were very hard, structurally they were nothing tricky. Later, their beauty increased exponentially with their difficulty. The dances were always structurally sound, based on complicated systems. As the dancer, you had to keep track. Like my favorite painter and conceptual artist, Sol LeWitt, I was interested in establishing similarly strict rules and fulfilling them. That’s what I like. If it was something repetitive, I rang changes on it, and even if it looked like a repeat to the audience, it wasn’t. There was some slight ornament or change. These solos were so tricky that, at times, I had to have someone in the wings telling me how many repeats I’d done, because I couldn’t simultaneously dance and count.
When The Vacant Chair ended, I tore up the blindfolding paper bag and faced away from the audience, so they could see my bare back, to dance the role of the tree in Trees. I became a tree—who doesn’t love being a tree?—and those shreds of paper bag became falling leaves. There was nothing else to the dance.
The finale, A Perfect Day, was wild, spastic, primitive ballet; a tombé pas de bourrée that got bigger, louder, and more grotesque. The torture was that I would do the dance, then exit, go all the way around backstage, running as fast as I could to make my entrance at the end of the four-bar bridge, reenter, do the next verse—the same but harder—exit again, run all the way around, reenter (by this time quite breathlessly), and repeat even bigger and harder still, until I was completely spent.
It ended defiantly (and stupidly, I now think) with me knocking the music stand over. A mic drop.
The end.
THAT SAME YEAR, 1984, I was invited to the American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina, at Duke University as a choreographer. So much happened during those few weeks.
I took three dancers with me, Penny, Guillermo, and Erin. There were choreographers and composers from all over the world. We stayed in dormitories (it was summer so there were no students), it was unbearably hot, and I had a giant crush on Guillermo. Erin, on the other hand, had an affaire de coeur with a young milk-fed dance student. The young man in question was new, gorgeous, and smart, and though I had no right to be, since Erin and I were no longer together, I was jealous. I shouldn’t say his name—he personally arranged with another author not to be revealed in her book about me, and I’m not going to out him—so I’ll call him H. He was beautiful, so beautiful you couldn’t quite believe it, straight and athletic like a wrestler. He even sported my preferential boyfriend look, fair-haired with glasses. (I wouldn’t have necessarily been able to predict my predilection for glasses.)
After the festival, when Erin went back to Seattle, H moved to NYC to continue his studies and became my boyfriend. It was nothing as exciting as revenge, and there wasn’t a plot, so I had nothing to feel guilty about. We just ended up together, and Erin was far, far away. H turned out to be a ravenous sex creature—I don’t know if he was like that with anyone else, but we had sex on our very first date—and we were full-on frequent sex partners for a couple of years, though he never publicly acknowledged that kind of bond between us, which was a little manipulative.
In the end H left me for another of my dancers (female, because he was basically straight). I don’t hold many grudges that way, but it was upsetting. I can confirm what everyone fears: homosexuals get no greater thrill than converting straight people (which is not entirely true, though I won’t deny it was part of his mystery and appeal), but I was pissed with both of them, particularly her, and we had to live with it, even as we worked together. My tactic in that situation is to keep going because it’s the professional thing to do. If anything, I’m so perverted that, rather than give that person the cold shoulder, they’ll get a solo. There may perhaps have been a few tiny examples of torture built into the rehearsals in that particular situation, but it can’t have been anything too bad, because that particular woman danced with me for many years afterward. We lived with it.
There have been a few other examples of rehearsal trouble, but it’s not always because one feels sorry for oneself. Sometimes you may know something about one of your dancers that you’re not supposed to know, behavior that disappoints or even horrifies you: an affair, a lie. The remnants of my Protestant work ethic mean I feel I have to work through it and keep working. Everything will pass—I don’t ignore things, but in the Jesuit way I feel you should smile when you’re sad. I’m good at persevering. (A collapse of a relationship between two of your dancers can also be heartbreaking and difficult. They’re doing a love duet together, they hate each other, and you haven’t understood the half of it.)
In Durham, amid all this intrigue and chaos, I choreographed a dance (to Herschel Garfein’s music based on the madrigal “Four Arms, Two Necks, One Wreathing”) for sixteen students and the four of us, each of us with our own solo and a corps de ballet of four dancers, which is pure Balanchine. For obvious mathematical reasons, I therefore called the dance Forty Arms, Twenty Necks, One Wreathing, a system-based dance for Herschel’s complicated modernist music.
O Rangasayee, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 1984. (Tom Brazil)
Remembering my trip to India with Erin, I made up a solo, O Rangasayee, to a wonderful twenty-minute raga of the same name by Tyagaraja sung by M. S. Subbalakshmi, and showed it in the empty theater to friends, people we’d met at the festival, dancers and musicians from Senegal and India. (I heard later that Merce was watching from the back row.) It was the first flowering of my Indophilia, my first fully “Indian” dance, made up after only the barest acquaintance on that first short trip with Laura Dean’s company in 1981. How dared I? But there’s a fine American tradition of exoticism, and it all ties into early Modern Dance. The Denishawn people (Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, full Orientalists) would have probably thought O Rangasayee a genuine Indian dance. But I wasn’t even trying to be consciously historical; it was just what I liked. O Rangasayee contains much hand gesture, percussive footwork, torso isolation, and facial expression, and if someone has never seen one scrap of Indian dance, they might be fooled—by the music—into thinking it a genuine Indian dance. There was a section about infirmity and death, in which I stood on one leg, then distorted myself, as though I had elephantiasis, and kept it up until I fell over, which cleared the stage for me to do it again. These horrible contortions, my writhing, had no rhythm at all; they were based on the physical fact of curling up and twisting my form and face until I crumpled to the floor.
The dance and music of India underscored my strong native belief that music is, as the composer Lou Harrison said, “a song and a dance.” As I was coming into my own as a choreographer, it was more firmly established in dancing to ignore the rhythm and the tune, but my dances were always tied to the music. I wanted that and still do. It’s not an accident and it’s not because I’m stupid. It’s hard to do it. But that’s how it should be. All my dances are related very directly to melody (raga), rhythm (tala), gesture (mudra), and facial expression (abhinaya), and you can learn a lot about them from the honesty and drama of Indian dance. The Indian artists in Durham liked O Rangasayee, which emboldened me to put it on our forthcoming show at BAM.
This festival was also the year that Twyla Tharp, whose early Deuce Coupe I had so loved, presented Sinatra Songs. It was meant to be a tough, funny Apache dance with the gun, the scarf, and the cigarette: he done her wrong, she shoots him, “Frankie and Johnny”–style. At least I think that’s what she meant. The song was “That’s Life,” the dreamy gowns were Oscar de la Renta, and it was the most god-awful war between the sexes, a man roughing up a woman as she begs for more. She’s on the floor in her ball gown, clinging to his leg as if trying to scale him, to that lyric about picking yourself up and getting back in the race, and he rejects her. As a newly vocal, queer choreographer and feminist, I hated it. I had already resisted the stereotypes of male and female behavior in dance, which is why I was out at that time when most queer choreographers weren’t, and I wasn’t interested in seeing that kind of lazy cliché reenacted. I found myself standing and yelling, “NO MORE RAPE!” That’s what I said. I didn’t boo; I didn’t say, “Rape is bad.” I shouted, “NO MORE RAPE!” just once and walked out. There was no place for the rape in that dance.
Afterward I found myself at the same party as the dancers, all friends of mine, though Twyla wasn’t there. (It’s sort of like we’re played by the same actor; we never appear in the same scene.) A few of the dancers were hurt because they couldn’t understand why I’d walked out, and I was sorry about that. They weren’t too worried about Twyla, though.
It made the Dance Gossip News—not an actual publication—because no one did that kind of thing. Twyla and I have no contact of any kind and never have; we’ve never talked at all. I can’t believe she was too annoyed about my heckling. She was used to controversy, and I would think that was water off her back. But for years after she wouldn’t allow a piece of mine to be on a program with a piece of hers.
Once, at a party on the Upper East Side, I walked in and found myself face-to-face with her, then suddenly back-to-back with her. That dance is performed to this day, and I still hate it.
OUR FIRST SHOW at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—the one that made all the noise—wasn’t in the opera house. It was in the modest (“flexible”) Lepercq Space (now the BAMcafé), holding about two hundred people. This show comprised Gloria (which I decided to bring back, adapt, and improve), O Rangasayee (for which I wore a loincloth, my hands and feet painted crimson), and Championship Wrestling after Roland Barthes, a new piece Herschel had composed for me. He’d proposed something from Barthes’s Mythologies, his musique concrète score recorded at wrestling matches. I went to the wrestling at Madison Square Garden several times in preparation, and I made up rules for a dance that could be done by anyone regardless of size and strength. Any two people could do the various falls and throws. It was precisely as phony as World Wide Wrestling, which meant I could pair Guillermo, who’s big, with Winkie, who’s little—it didn’t matter. Rob, who is the tallest dancer, possibly of all, was paired with Donald Mouton. It wasn’t that dangerous, but it was grueling, made to look as much like real (fake) wrestling as possible, in a ring implied by the magic of theatrical lighting. The dancers wore actual wrestling gear—singlets, belts, knee and elbow pads, and high-laced wrestling shoes—and their moves were wrestling moves, as the dancers variously jumped on top of each other, got each other in headlocks, and smashed each other’s faces into the ground. Certain time limits were set, and it wasn’t even necessarily decided who would win the various bouts. One section featured Penny and Winkie in superslow motion, their moves as exaggerated as wrestling but even more extreme because the women were partnered (though the audience had to pretend these partners were invisible). One dancer could therefore “hit” the other, who would then fly through the air backward, lifted by her partners. It was a fabulous, funny dance. (We later added more Barthes, danced versions of his essays on soap powders and detergents and striptease, and presented all three as Mythologies, first in Boston, where they got it, then in Belgium, where they manifestly and vocally didn’t.)
Clarice Marshall versus Penny Hutchinson in Championship Wrestling after Roland Barthes from Mythologies, Cirque Royal, Brussels, 1989. (Danièle Pierre)
When we premiered Gloria for Dance Theater Workshop in 1981, I hadn’t choreographed the last Amen. False piety, perhaps, but I didn’t feel worthy of it. For the same reason, I also hadn’t choreographed the first movement (“Gloria in Excelsis Deo”), which I left undanced. The audience simply listened; it’s why they’re called an audience. I’ve often started dances that way—music first before the dancing starts. (Besides, it was safer. Back then you never knew if it was all going to work: lights, recorded music, dancing, all at the same time on the downbeat. We had performances where the show started and the wrong recorded music came on. Another great reason to use only live music, incidentally.) By the time of the BAM show, I’d decided that avoiding the Amen was a cop-out, even more pretentious than doing it. I also decided to choreograph the first movement. Two dancers advance on the audience during the instrumental introduction, then at the entrance of the chorus, an abrupt blackout plunges the audience into darkness (often thought to be a mistake), and the audience is left to listen to the rest of the movement. Previously, the dancers had started late and finished early; now the dance and the music were the same length. At the end, as the Amens are sung, all ten dancers spiral to the floor. They turn two at a time and land on their faces, cruciform and in a cross shape on the floor, as if the cross has fallen down because they ran out of nails. I subsequently realized I’d stolen that idea from a famous image from the Met’s great production of Poulenc’s Dialogue of the Carmelites, where all the nuns are lying prostrate before they’re guillotined.
According to People, that legendary dance review magazine, this performance “stunned the dance world.” In that same article, Donald Mouton mentioned a woman in the lobby with tears streaming down her face. I was “the hottest young choreographer in the country” (Time) and “the crown prince and long awaited savior of the dance world” (Newsweek).
I was also broke.
BARRY ALTERMAN’S and my business relationship proper began, according to him, when he saw me dance O Rangasayee at its official premiere in Montreal. He said it was “like finding out your friend wrote Moby-Dick.” He started representing me part-time, a natural progression.
Barry felt that there were better models for us than the awful corporate ballet company model. His inspirations were the Living Theatre and the Grateful Dead, the socialist idea of keeping control of everything in-house, so that’s how we went about it. Everything had to be consonant: what we were trying to achieve, the shows we were putting on, and the presentation of our company. As far as was possible, we weren’t going to go through other media and other corporations to promote ourselves. We didn’t use a letterhead. If you called us up and you got anyone, you got Barry, whom you’d just woken up. We didn’t court publicity. We were aware that it was a cool calling card, but that wasn’t the whole point. The Wooster Group did the same kind of thing, and they were an influence. I don’t love the theater, but I love everything the Wooster Group does. Even when I don’t like it, I love it.
It was groovy but inefficient and soon got out of hand. So we applied to Pentacle, a service organization that managed fifteen or twenty small dance companies that each had three gigs a year, at a time when we still had an average of two, one in New York and one in Seattle. A woman there named Nancy Umanoff oversaw our account, did our books, wrote the checks. We headhunted her.
At our first meeting, I was wearing mirrored aviator shades in which she could see only herself reflected. Back then, Nancy sported something of an Adrienne Barbeau haircut, sometimes with accompanying shoulder pads. (Slightly later we shared the same hairdo and you couldn’t tell us apart: see below.) She also had the most perfect complexion imaginable; her skin was so soft, clear, and gorgeous. It remains that way to this day.
“I can’t talk to you like this,” she said tetchily. “Could you take your glasses off?” I did. I wasn’t high; I was just showing up for my first business meeting.
Nancy had been a tough new-wave teenager, but by this time, with her background at Pentacle, she was responsible and logical, not to say a workaholic. Best of all, she was passionately interested and involved in grant writing, the part of the arts management that is completely beyond me. I couldn’t do it at gunpoint, and she was already so good.
Nancy and me in the green room at Cal Performances.
We asked if she’d do what she did at Pentacle, but exclusively for us. She wanted to know how much she’d be making, and we said, because we were business geniuses, “You know how money works. You tell us. Hire yourself. Make up your own job, and your salary.” She did.
Nancy has worked with me, run my life and the life of the company, from that day to this. It was a perfect marriage. We were all around the same age—and making it up as we went along, but she was really making it up. She rolled her eyes periodically, about whatever was going on, but who doesn’t? Nancy became the power behind the throne, but Barry was the public face of MMDG. He had many obvious talents, and he was also a great schmoozer, very brave at approaching people. They trusted him the moment they met him. He was charming and versatile, knew everything they knew about and could talk about it: dance history, gay culture, opera, baseball, anything. He’s the reason I met Susan Sontag—they had somehow become very close friends—through whom I met Annie Leibovitz, who introduced me to the genius painter Howard Hodgkin (who became a frequent collaborator), and so on.
Nancy and Barry enjoy a working lunch, Berkeley, 2001. (June Omura)
Barry tried to match me up with other artists for projects. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, but they were generally good ideas: Lou Reed, for example, though nothing came of it, and Taj Mahal, whose music I had loved as a teenager (though when I met him, I thought he was never going to leave). Barry also later talked me into working with virtuoso bassist Rob Wasserman and singer-songwriter Michelle Shocked, which led to the dance Home in 1993, as close to a disaster as we ever came. The two of them were so disorganized that I basically ended up producing the music; they simply couldn’t get it together. Michelle couldn’t manage much at all, and Rob—poor lovely man and rest in peace—was extremely passive. There was a section for Appalachian-style clog dancing, for which I wanted a fiddle breakdown; they said they could do it, which they could, but they couldn’t do it twice, and I needed them to do it twice at every performance. One time in Edinburgh, Michelle showed up at the venue a day late for rehearsal, having had a big fight with her bad husband/manager, without instruments, no guitar or mandolin, without even her suitcase, wearing an airplane blanket as a poncho. The meter was running and she couldn’t pay for the taxi. She’d run away from him and shown up in Scotland; it was nuts. Somehow it all turned out fine, but the experience nearly broke me. The dance was beautiful, but it wasn’t the most blessed union.
Lovey was another foray into contemporary popular music—the Violent Femmes, suggested by Chad Henry, who always had great ideas. The Violent Femmes had a folk aspect I loved, the same thing I loved about the British folk-rock of Steeleye Span and the Watersons. The songs from their first two albums were so funny and terrible, so awfully bleak and dark, so I made up a dance.
My niece Amanda was attached to a baby doll named Lovey, in tribute to whom I named this piece, which included actual baby dolls, dolls that represented different characters, and a lot of unsavory interdoll sex acts. This was perhaps my inner punk, but it was also funny. Besides, I’ve always thought punk, which I didn’t take that seriously because I wasn’t a junkie, was funny. I loved the Sex Pistols, but I didn’t want a safety pin in my nipple. I preferred the cartoon version, the Ramones and Devo. The reaction was, as intended, equal laughter and horror. Early on, people booed and walked out, choosing to see it as a promotion of child pornography and abuse, though to me it was consonant with the horror-comedy of the Femmes songs, cautionary tales that made the audience very uneasy. The point was that the dancers interacted only with the dolls, and not with each other. If there was a message, it was that people should notice each other and perhaps be a little nicer. And believe me, you genuinely need to see Tina eating out a doll.
For “Country Death Song,” the Femmes’ classic about throwing a baby down a well, the dancers acted out the story like a Sunday school pageant. Some people think that too plain, too frank, and in some way not artistic enough, not fancied up enough; it’s what an audience imagines it might do in the same situation, perhaps thinking they wouldn’t have the wherewithal to come up with anything else. In other words, “Anybody could have done that.” But it’s all much more stylized than people imagine and emerges from a vast complication of other choices that I could have made, rather than simply from my genuine affection for simplicity. If it looks artless, that’s down to artfulness. My method is similar to Chinese or Indian theater. In Japanese Noh theater, the actor might say, “I am in my village,” and then, “I will now go on a journey,” at which point he simply turns around 360 degrees and is then immediately on the outskirts of Kyoto, magic with no magic at all. What could be more beautiful than that? It’s called theater. There was talk later of doing Lovey live with the Violent Femmes, but it’s an old dance now and not one I’d care to bring back.
The Lovey rehearsals were the cause of my biggest fight with Guillermo. “I want your foot just to hang!” Guillermo remembers me shouting. “If you have to think of that as a flexed foot, then do whatever you have to do, but goddamn you, don’t change my choreography and make it look like ballet! If you point your foot again, I’ll break your leg!” In this instance, I’d asked them to do what they considered an impossible task: to jump, go horizontal, and then land facedown. No one could do it, perhaps because it was impossible.
I split rehearsals into three groups of four, one of which contained Tina and Guillermo. That group worked so hard, so recklessly, that I focused exclusively on them. I didn’t want to have to coax things out of the others, to have to interpret things for them that this group understood intuitively.
Apparently, Guillermo’s group was thinking, “We’ll get the premiere to ourselves, because Mark will want the dance seen the best it can possibly be done. And we’re the four who do it best.” But that had never been my intent, and for the premiere, I added everyone else back in, despite the fact that the other dancers had only learned by osmosis. Guillermo was livid: “You fucked us over! We worked our asses off, truly thinking that our quartet would get to do the whole piece, and it ended up being twelve!” We didn’t talk for some time.
I knew they’d killed themselves to do it, but there’s only one star in MMDG, and it isn’t even me: it’s the choreography. Everything is in service to the final show, and Guillermo knew this. Once, on the event of someone being injured because they’d gone horseback riding on their day off, Guillermo yelled at an entire dressing room, “The only thing that matters each day on tour is your ten minutes onstage. If I have to understudy for someone on this tour, their leg had better be broken, because if it isn’t, I’ll break it myself.”
There were a lot of casual threats of leg breakage in those days.
OPERA, AND ITS CHOREOGRAPHY, was another new avenue of collaboration fostered by Barry. Dance used to be an integral part of opera (or vice versa), right up until the early twentieth century. In baroque times particularly, there wasn’t an opera and a ballet; there was a big night out containing both, a ballet tragique, an opéra dansé. If it’s a story ballet or an opera, with characters and relationships, it’s all coming from the music and the book. My first brush with it was Strauss’s Salome (Oscar Wilde’s play in German, an amazing piece of music) directed by Sonja Frisell in 1986 for Seattle Opera, who hired me to choreograph the Dance of the Seven Veils, the only dance in that particular opera. As a rule, in a production of Salome, a body double for the female lead is used for this dance, generally a bad ballet dancer, who doesn’t even take all her clothes off, so we decided to have the actual Salome—the great English soprano Josephine Barstow, a wonderful woman, forty at the time—do the dance herself and actually remove seven veils, down to a thong. It was considered scandalous that she was topless. Salome naked? Big deal.
I’D ORIGINALLY GONE TO NEW YORK with the ambition to dance for the Joffrey. That never happened, but the same year as Salome, Mr. Joffrey himself was one of the first people to commission a ballet from me.
Robert Joffrey was—and I try never to say this about anyone—one of a kind. He was a sweet, brilliant, openly gay, Armenian American Seattleite. Elsewhere, it was Balanchine or nothing, but his was, for years, the only company in the States that performed the wonderful dances of the Royal Ballet’s Frederick Ashton. Joffrey’s was also the ballet of the youth movement, the psychedelic ballet, the rock ballet. His company was the first to stage reconstructions of old pieces: Les Biches of Nijinska and Pas de quatre, a Fokine ballet based on the four great ballerinas of the late nineteenth century (Lucile Grahn, Carlotta Grisi, Fanny Cerrito, and Marie Taglioni), in which they continually try to upstage one another. Joffrey also revived Satie’s Parade with the Picasso costumes, shocking stuff and serious ballet history. Famously, he was also the first person to hire Twyla Tharp to create a ballet. She gave him Deuce Coupe, a masterpiece.
So when Joffrey asked me to make up a ballet?
Mr. Joffrey, I’d love to.
Rehearsals took place at City Center, and the music was Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C Major, with costumes by Santo Loquasto, who’d been principal designer for Paul Taylor and Twyla Tharp for decades. In the slow movement, for what would normally have been the pas de deux, I opted for a lone woman instead of a boy-girl couple, which was considered very bold. There was a corps de ballet of male-female couples, from which one woman—the great ballerina Leslie Carothers—separated herself to do the pas d’une, as it were, a sad and lonely dance.
What could go wrong?
The punch line: I showed up relaxed and happy in LA for the world premiere at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, having just enjoyed a getaway in Hawaii with Terry. The New York rehearsals had gone perfectly smoothly, but I arrived in LA to find that my piece had been completely changed. It had self-Arpinoized.
Gerald Arpino, Joffrey’s lover and partner (they were an admirable gay couple from early on), was a famous choreographer of contemporary ballet. He’s given a hard time nowadays, but I learned a great deal from his work. (Particularly the “wipe,” which means to me, in dance terms, a crowd of people who cross the stage, leaving one person behind to dance for a while, before the crowd passes again and replaces her with another dancer. He used that in every single dance.) But Esteemed Guests, as my dance was called, was now being danced as though he’d choreographed it.
If you look at old pictures of ballet, an arabesque (the definition of which is that one leg is lifted to the back) is low and dignified in the English Ashtonian style. The Balanchinian version is so high that you can’t quite tell if it’s to the back or the side. It’s easier to do, because it’s about flexibility rather than strength, but to me it’s less expressive and inelegant. Arpino’s version of an arabesque was contorted, like ballet is now, like Dancing with the Stars, where you stick your leg up so far that your pudenda are protruding farther than anything else. I favor (both for esthetic reasons and also because of the natural shape of the body) a horizontal line in the old-fashioned style rather than what I call “Swiss Army knife,” which is too gynecological. Esteemed Guests had dealt in horizontal lines, pivoting in a beautiful way, but I returned to find it had been changed to fit the institutional style, because it was easier for the dancers, because that’s how they danced. There wasn’t a thing I could do about it, and no time to make any changes. I just watched, surprised and disappointed. (Nothing changes. I recently made up a lovely, fairly plain piece for ABT. I was asked where all the big steps were. I said, “They’re in all the other dances you do, but they’re not in this one.”)
Esteemed Guests got an okay review from my beloved Arlene Croce, who wrote that she liked it, but said "who doles out the names for these things?” I do, and I liked the title, but this was when I first learned this lesson: as specific and meticulous as I can possibly be when I’m making something up, the exigencies of the ballet industry tend toward a homogenization of style that can’t be exactly what I want. This was to have major repercussions later.
MONEY WAS ALWAYS TIGHT. We worked for free a lot, and when we made money for a gig, I’d divide it up and pay everyone whatever I could. It was a big deal just to fly someone somewhere from Seattle for a show to perform for free. My work earned me my keep—just—but I’ve always lived the same way, so it’s hard for me now to remember how much we were, or were not, making, and when we had enough to afford our own fax machine. It was hand-to-mouth, but somehow we survived.
A classic MMDG MEMBER UNIT COMMUNIQUÉ of the time, typed and xeroxed, written presumably by Barry and Nancy, read as follows:
Much has happened: many deals, maneuvers, projects; many hours spent by your management team slogging through that smoke-filled swamp which is known by the cursed appellation: Show-Biz.
Then, under the heading ENQUIRING MINDS NEED TO KNOW!:
As some of you might have noticed, we have a “cash-flow problem.” There are basically three reasons for this:
A. Late-arriving grant cash
B. Current work which hasn’t yet been compensated. (U.W., California, Jacob’s Pillow, etc.)
C. New and Special Expenditures due to the historical juncture.
The first two reasons are self-explanatory and depressingly mundane, the third is interesting stuff.
As we continue the extremely rapid transition from “alternative” performing spaces to major (and electronic) auditoria—and thus from poverty to economic decency—certain operating requirements are being thrust upon us. These requirements and their attendant cost must be dealt with now. They cannot be put off for some future “better time.” We must also act now if we are to seize the approaching high-visibility moment (Autumn = TV, Joffrey, BAM) and insure our future. In other words, we have to spend it to make it.
We just didn’t have it. The communiqué ends on a slightly optimistic note:
And, you know, we’ll be OK with the bucks in a couple of weeks. Really. I mean it. No kidding. The check’s in the mail . . .
SEIZE THE MOMENT
THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT
PERSEVERANCE FURTHERS.
An invitation—referred to in this communiqué—to present my work on the PBS series Great Performances was a very big deal. It was almost unprecedented, someone like me getting a show like that. My work was already being seen, I may even have been something of a hot property, and my company was great (because it wasn’t only my company, it was also excellent dancers), but this was entirely unexpected.
My entire previous TV experience boiled down to the choreography of a commercial for Capri Sun, the famous “juice drink.” I’d been offered a couple of grand to work for five days in the Puck Building. It was fun and helpful in that it taught me how to adapt dances for the camera, which would be useful for all the other TV shows I haven’t been asked to do. (The secret is the wedge shape, because that’s the camera’s-eye view. Everything has to happen in depth to give the illusion of width. Now you too can choreograph for TV! You’re welcome.)
There was a lot more dance on PBS back then, but there’s almost zero now. In a way that’s good. They showed Paul Taylor so many times, you wanted to kill yourself. Jac Venza ran the arts wing of PBS; his was the ultimate credit, a full second long, at the end of every art show on PBS for thirty years, and it was he who approached me. Jac produced and Judy Kinberg directed. She’d done a lot of dance, including Baryshnikov on Broadway, and I liked her and her work. The show was intended to be a sampler of my dances to date. Though I had a lot of say, the pieces were to be adapted for the small screen. I understood the need for editing, though I was very reluctant to amputate half of Gloria, a weird compromise. But I would have done anything to be on TV, and please note: I will choreograph any horrible movie in the world for enough money—it just doesn’t happen. Some principles aren’t principles, they’re prejudices. Wayne McGregor choreographed one of the Harry Potter movies, and a recent Tarzan, and I should hope he made a lot of money.
We shot for a full week in Aarhus, Denmark (a lot of dance was filmed there, Balanchine included), and it was the time of year when it’s perpetual daylight; I’d never seen so many drunks. PBS wanted visuals, so I asked Bobby Bordo to make designs for everything, which meant that for the very first time the dances were done with sets. For my solo Jealousy, Bobby had the floor painted so it looked like an overhead special, a comic-bookey stage spotlight. I made up the dance because I was jealous of a boyfriend, or perhaps because he was jealous of me, I can’t remember—jealousy was a topic, is the point, and I would certainly have been remembering and tapping into things I’d experienced with Erin. This Handel chorus, from the oratorio Hercules, features one of the first great mad scenes, in which the jealousy of Hercules’s wife, Dejanira, is described as an “infernal pest, / Tyrant of the human breast!”—a dignified, passionate, and terrifying response.
Jealousy was perfect for the PBS show—a stand-alone piece, seven minutes. My programs at the time comprised small pieces, because that’s what I could afford and rehearse and because that was the size of the company. I’ve always enjoyed making up “short story”–scale pieces.
THEN I BROKE MY FOOT. The right foot. It was in Ottawa, and I ottawa’ve been more careful.
I was warming up before Pièces en Concert, choreographed for Rob, Susan Hadley, and me. I jumped, landed, and rolled my foot—I always had glass ankles—and broke the fifth metatarsal. Cleanly, I thought. My full body weight was on it, and it sounded like stepping on a Styrofoam cup. POP!
Though I suspected it was broken, I optimistically iced it at seven thirty for an eight p.m. show. It was swelling so badly, however, that I had to call out to Tina, my understudy, “Do you want to do Pièces en concert tonight? I think I’d better go to the emergency room.” They made the announcement (“Mark Morris will not be performing tonight . . .”), at which the audience groaned, and we all looked at Tina with the sarcastic sad face. She put on my costume, went in at the last second, and faked her way brilliantly through the part, including an improvised section in which she hadn’t the faintest idea what she was doing. It was then we found out she was not only excellent under pressure, but a gifted natural comedian. The crew kindly nailed me together a cane so I could take a bow. I walked out as if I wasn’t injured (a matter of pride), which led to a sarcastic remark in the paper the next day, along the lines of “Was he really injured?”
In the Ottawa hospital, an idiot put my foot in a plaster cast up to the knee. The next morning, I rolled onto the plane in a wheelchair; by the time I got to New York my foot was swollen out of the cast. I went straight to a highly recommended doctor, orthopedist to the stars, who gave me her considered opinion: “Oh, this happens all the time; it’s a dancer’s injury, just a clean break of your fifth metatarsal.” She put me in a little boot, fiberglass cap, and I went back to Seattle, walking on it. All seemed fine.
I kept teaching at UW, on one leg. Guillermo, my hero, came out to help me. He’d carry me, on his back, up and down the three flights of stairs at Terry’s place. It was a workout for Guillermo, but less time-consuming and hazardous than the alternative: crutches on the stairs in the wet Seattle winter. Guillermo hated teaching but he’d demonstrate in class as I taught from a chair, on crutches, while he did the heavy lifting, literally. I was quite successful in my role as an embittered teacher. In my woeful crippled state, I’d throw the crutches across the room, yelling, “Can’t you do anything right? Fuck You!” I meant it as a joke, but I was still throwing my crutches across the room.
At my six-week checkup, my foot still hurt and felt lumpy. The doctor, an orthopedist for the Seattle Sonics, said it was as if I’d broken it the day before. The New York doctor had misdiagnosed it as a clean break, but it was a spiral.
My foot had to be rebroken.
I TAUGHT AND CHOREOGRAPHED in Seattle for a semester, during which I made up a dance for Seattle Men’s Chorus (which was of course the Seattle Gay Men’s Chorus, as all men’s choruses were), Strict Songs, to beautiful music by the composer Lou Harrison.
The chorus had a sign language interpreter in their concerts who was a pleasure to watch: they had a lot of deaf queer fans. At their Christmas concert at Meany Hall, the entire chorus would sign the last verse of “Silent Night” without any singing. It was so moving that the entire audience was in tears. So, being that I had a broken foot and couldn’t dance, I was inspired to start studying sign language, and in fact became lovers with my sign language teacher, Kevin, a full-hearing guy who worked with hearing-impaired kids in the public school system.
Dennis Coleman, who directed the chorus, asked me if I’d make up a dance for them. Of chorus I would! I’d just heard Lou Harrison’s music for the first time, and you either love Lou’s music or haven’t heard it yet. It sings and it dances, and it hit me like that first trip to India. It felt like home—strange, satisfying, and just right. It emerged that, coincidentally, Dennis actually knew Lou. I proposed a piece, Four Strict Songs, which I’d heard on an out-of-print LP (made in the 1960s by the Louisville Orchestra), set for 8 baritone vocalists and orchestra. Dennis asked Lou to increase the number of singers from 8 to 120 (which actually ended up, the program confirms, at 114). Lou loved choruses, his boyfriend, Bill Colvig, happened to be going deaf, and Lou, who had many deaf friends, was learning sign language, so he was attracted to the notion of the piece being signed. Bill, by the way, refused to learn sign language. He just said, “What?” and shouted at you. The first time I met Bill he fell asleep at the dinner table, his beard wicking up the soup.
Lou not only agreed to all this but came up for the week from Aptos, California, and attended every single rehearsal in his customary attire of red flannel shirt and bolo tie beneath long white hair and a white beard. He was kind, femmey, and potentially volcanic. I never saw him get really angry, though I could tell when he was frustrated—there was a quiet madness in his eyes. He’d written the text, based on Hopi Indian verse forms, in praise of the elements (“Here is splendor, here is holiness”)—corny, beautiful, sung in English. Kevin translated the words to the songs into American Sign Language, and videotaped himself for me so I could learn it.
I was on crutches, hopping up and down on one leg, so the dance (which was for my company—we were technically bicoastal, though I don’t remember how we managed it) was very one-sided and demandingly unidextrous. It was staged thus: 114 men singing on risers, along with a small orchestra, and in front of them my dancers, and in front of them the sign language interpreter. It was a very difficult piece, for which the performance of the music was itself a production. All of the instruments had to be retuned because, being Lou’s, the music was not in equal temperament. Even the piano was retuned, not to mention the mixing bowls that were filled with water and used as percussion instruments—Lou’s own nesting bowls, brought all the way from California, filled, then covered with Saran wrap to keep them in tune.
I dedicated Strict Songs to the memory of Liberace. I’d gone, for kitsch value, to see him perform on his final tour at Radio City Music Hall, but I found myself genuinely moved by his performance and generosity. Best of all, Lou and I hit it off instantly and became friends, collaborating many times on remarkable projects.
THE FINAL SURGERY on my foot was extremely painful, but properly done. They opened it up, ground the bone to make a paste, and put in a screw, the full length of that fifth metatarsal.
I rerecovered for another six weeks, angry and miserable because I’d been disabled, in a job I didn’t like much, having just endured a slow, sad breakup, frustrated and alone in winter . . . in Seattle.
I still have the screw in my foot. I could have had it taken out, but I’m rather attached to it.