Seven
L’Allegro
The company’s next defining moment was a direct result of the director Peter Sellars.
We first met in 1986—all in all, an eventful year—at SUNY Purchase when the wonderful Christopher Hunt was running the PepsiCo Summerfare. Peter was presenting Così fan tutte, one of his three Mozart–Da Ponte productions (the others being Don Giovanni and Le Nozze de Figaro), a watershed of contemporary opera production. He was slightly more advanced in his career than I, not to mention two annoying years younger.
“Mark Morris! Mark Morris!” Peter screamed in the lobby as he rushed over, surprisingly small in stature with a very distinct, slightly elfin face. The straw-broom hair has always been the same, sticking straight up, tight on the sides and high in the middle, like wheatgrass one might buy for a cat. He’s been cutting it himself without recourse to a mirror for probably forty years. “I love your work! We have to work together!” Christopher introduced us, and Peter suggested there and then that we team up for a version of the musical The Pajama Game. That was the first conversation we ever had. We liked each other immediately, though we hadn’t seen much of each other’s work. We knew. We’re close friends to this day.
Peter is the most optimistic and appreciative individual. If anything, he’s overly appreciative of everything in everybody. He embraces people all the time, cries freely, and has the amazing ability to make the person he’s talking to feel like she’s the only person in the world who matters at that moment. Someone who once sang baritone in the back row of the chorus in Salzburg in 1991 remembers him warmly, because Peter will have taken that person aside and made him feel special. None of it is a con trick. It’s just who he is. Of course he’s also incredibly opinionated, observant, and knows bullshit when he steps in it. He can also participate fluently in the language of the international art and theater market, which is a real skill. People are devoted to him, as am I, steadfast.
Like Yo-Yo Ma, he deflects. If someone tells me a show was great, my response might be, “I thought it was too!” To me, that seems regular. It doesn’t mean I’m saying my performance was great, and indeed I may not even have been in it, but I feel fully able to say, “Thank you! I was watching too! You’re right!” That’s conversation. Yo-Yo, however, would more likely say, “I’m glad you liked it. Do you play an instrument? Tell me about your lessons.” Whereas Peter would say, “I had nothing to do with that; the room is filled with fabulous artists.” Of course he had everything to do with it. The truth is we’re all saying the same thing but in different ways. However, Peter and I are quite direct with one another. Before I see something of his, he’s bound to let me know, “You’re going to hate it!” Sometimes he’s right. He once said a show of mine—I don’t remember which one; there may have been several—was the most boring thing he’d ever seen. I’ve certainly said to him, “That made me sick. Why are they crying onstage? I want me to cry! I don’t want them to cry!”
Peter is very hard on himself physically, surviving basically on a diet of coffee and ice cream. I’ve only seen him sleep once, in my apartment in Brussels, as a result of which he missed his train; perhaps a clue as to why he never sleeps. He loves color and he dressed in extravagantly African clothes for a long time. The bathroom in his apartment is like a pirate’s booty boutique of bright, shiny baubles. In fact, the only thing that annoys me about him is when people occasionally ask if I got my habit of wearing necklaces from Peter. No. I’ve been wearing beads, ornamental rather than religious, my whole life. People still confuse the two of us, supposing that we work in the same way. We don’t.
Our first collaboration was John Adams’s Nixon in China, which Peter asked me to choreograph. John Adams, whom I knew as one of the founding fathers of contemporary American music, was still writing the opera, while the great poet Alice Goodman was working on the libretto. Nixon was a production of Houston Grand Opera, though we auditioned dancers in New York; bizarrely, almost nobody showed up, so I used everyone who did.
Peter had a regular crew of collaborators, artisans of the very highest quality with whom I’d be working for the first time and with whom I’d work many times after. Nixon in China had nothing to do with MMDG. There were ten dancers: a corps of four couples and two principal dancers for the reimagination of my beloved Red Detachment of Women that is an integral part of the opera. The whole preparatory six-week period was in Houston.
Of the singers, several, including James Maddalena (the original Nixon) and Sanford Sylvan (Chou En-lai), came from Emmanuel Music in Boston, run by Craig Smith at Emmanuel Church, whose choir sang the Bach cantata cycle, the appropriate cantata for each Sunday of the liturgical calendar, which Craig conducted for twenty years straight, starting the cycle over every few years: unheard of in America. All Peter’s first operas (before he was in the big houses) were with Craig’s singers, some of whom, like Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, became big stars because of this association (and their own brilliance).
The music for Nixon was gorgeous and extremely complicated; the meter changed almost every second bar.
“Do you really need this one-eighth bar of rest?” I once asked John. “Isn’t that basically the same as a breath? Or a comma?”
“It has to be there,” he assured me.
He certainly wasn’t writing for singers to feel good about themselves, but he hadn’t written much for voice yet. That’s not to say he didn’t do it well; he did it very well.
The Red Detachment of Women is written into Nixon as part of the argument, this being the show that China chose to present to the traveling Nixons. In the opera, the Nixons interrupt the show and enter the story of The Red Detachment. It’s a surrealist moment, and Peter wanted certain things to happen, which of course I did because I was working for a director; you do what he wants in order to tell the story. Given my love for that dance, I was the ideal choice as choreographer, though neither Peter nor John could possibly have had any idea of my long-standing attachment to the Detachment. To make up a twenty-minute version for only ten people, for a three-hour ballet normally danced by one hundred, was a challenge, but I decided not to look at the source material at all, relying only on my memory of it on TV in 1972. The weird thing is that it remained so vivid to me (as it had when I referred to it in Barstow) that I was more or less right.
And somehow Adams had made Nixon in China funny, which wasn’t easy. When Pat Nixon is touring a factory with three female interpreters, the workers show her a figurine of an elephant.
“This little elephant in glass brings back so many memories . . . ,” she says. “Tell me, is it one of a kind?”
“It has been carefully designed by workers at this factory,” the interpreters cheerfully reply. “They can make hundreds every day.”
Nixon in China was controversial, partly because its subject was alive—the libretto drew from writings and diaries—and partly because people had assumed that Nixon would be depicted as a buffoon.
DIRECTING AN OPERA MYSELF was an obvious step I was ready to make, and Seattle Opera was the first to ask. The opportunity came the following year and was the second of two jobs for them in twelve months, the first being to choreograph (and dance in) Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice—they chose to use the English name—directed by Stephen Wadsworth. This was the Paris version from 1774, originally in French and called Orphée et Eurydice, in which Orpheus is a tenor; later, I did two separate productions of the earlier Vienna version from 1762, Orfeo ed Euridice, with an Italian libretto and the hero an alto. This was a much bigger undertaking than the work I’d done for their Salome of two years earlier, with a lot of dancing. I had terrible bronchitis, perhaps pneumonia, and I could scarcely even move, let alone dance. I can’t remember being that sick before or since.
The opera I then directed was Johann Strauss II’s beloved Die Fledermaus, which was an almost entirely enjoyable experience. Back then, and it may still be true, the chorus at Seattle Opera was part-time. They worked day jobs and sang in the evenings. I decided that the chorus (rather than professional dancers) should themselves do all the dancing at the central New Year’s ball, so I spent my evenings teaching them the various polkas, waltzes, and social dances. It was funny and realistic, though—granted—Viennese people of that period might well have danced better than the Seattle Opera Chorus after a two-week crash course. One woman had a broken leg, so she sat on her own at the party and got drunk.
The cast was first-rate, featuring the well-known baritone Dale Dusing, but the opera was sung in English. I can’t now remember whether this was Seattle’s particular policy or whether Strauss, like Stravinsky, liked his operas performed in the dominant language. The problem is that when operas are in English, you understand them, if anything, slightly less and you realize how silly they are. My expensive idea was that, since we were singing in English, we should have German supertitles written in a fancy, beautiful old Gothic script. Verboten.
What most disappointed me about the experience, however, in my naivete, was that though I was hired to direct, it wasn’t to be, couldn’t be, my full artistic vision. The sets were rented from this company, the costumes borrowed from a different production.
It was a success, but everyone likes that opera anyway.
THINGS WERE MOVING FAST. Die Fledermaus premiered on May 7 in Seattle, and by the end of the month, I was back at ABT at the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan for another premiere, my very first collaboration with Mr. Mikhail Baryshnikov (henceforth known as “Misha”), an association that led to an enduring friendship that began just prior to our European adventure.
I’d seen Baryshnikov dance for American Ballet Theatre with the great Gelsey Kirkland, when she’d refused to do the curtain calls on some point of bouquet etiquette and they’d stopped bowing together. His recent appointment as artistic director of ABT had been a great coup because, far from being some individual from arts management, Misha was a glamorous defected dancer, working in partnership with Charles France, a brilliant, eccentric, corpulent, flamboyant majordomo, and very much the Barry Alterman of that company. Charles did the things Misha couldn’t.
It heralded a revolutionary, brilliant period for ABT. They hired choreographers who weren’t from Balletland, most famously Twyla Tharp, with whom Misha worked many times when her work was at its finest, though he also imported David Gordon, famous from Grand Union at Judson Memorial Church, and Karole Armitage, known for her punk esthetic. Downtown went uptown. There was a spirit of adventure and novelty that’s now long gone. Outsiders were doing interesting work for ballet companies that wasn’t, like nowadays, just the spawn of the company itself.
I went to meet Baryshnikov in his box at the Met during intermission. “I want you to do a dance,” he said, like someone doing a bad Russian accent, “and I want to be in it.” He moved fast, talked fast, and interrupted himself a lot. I was quite surprised at his diminutive size—everyone looks so much bigger on the stage—and taken with his beautiful blue eyes. I don’t know what he’d seen of mine at the time, but that was pretty much the gist of the entire conversation. It was a very exciting prospect, not to mention a good gig.
We worked together for the first time on a gala AIDS benefit at the New York State Theater. I choreographed a short piece, Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes, to music by Virgil Thomson, beautiful études, almost impossible to play, fabulously and technically bizarre. One is called “Double Glissandi,” where you, the pianist, do slides in parallel octaves with your small finger and your thumb, ripping your fingernails off in the process; “Pivoting on the Thumb,” where your thumb stays and your fingers move; “Oscillating Arm”; and “For the Weaker Fingers” (the fourth and the fifth, as you probably assumed). There was another where one hand was in three and the other in four, and then they switched halfway through—a hemiola, difficult and beautiful. The pianist who’d be ripping her fingernails was my old Eliot Feld accompanist and page turnee Gladys Celeste. The dance was originally for three couples, mostly principals from ABT, big-shot dancers, because Misha wanted to be in it, and of course I wanted him to be in it too.
That’s how I got to know him. In the early days, he was a little intimidated by me, and communicated only through Barry. At one of our early meetings, I asked him why he was using that funny accent—not the Boris and Natasha one, the gay one. Was it because he thought that was how I sounded? I was a new type of queer to him, not one of the fops he was used to working with, all of whom were in love with and fawned all over him. I told him not to talk gay, so he stopped.
I wasn’t used to working with stars of any magnitude, but I wasn’t worried about his star factor. There was no question of “and now Mr. Baryshnikov will come out and do his giant solo,” nor did he want that. It was always going to be a group dance, though in fact I did have him break away to do a very tricky series of pirouettes (though I then also had another male dancer do exactly the same moves).
I’d actually call Drink “postmodern” in its composition; not something I often say. It’s logical conceptually, meticulously built in its math, and a piano ballet (which is already a funny idea, invented by Balanchine). There wasn’t a broken column or video monitor or any other cliché of postmodern dance, but it was postmodern in its references to the full, classic lexicon of ballet-moves partnering and pointe dancing—yet without any climactic arc.
When a new version, fleshed out and expanded, with twice as many people and twice the music, premiered at the Met, I wanted the piano onstage. The stage of the Met is too big for almost all ballet, so instead of putting the piano in the corner, I positioned it dead center and the whole dance happened downstage. Only once did anyone venture behind it. The audience was hardly aware that there was forty feet of deck we weren’t using.
Misha soon left ABT, but through our excellent experience together, we’d become friends. Since he was living in Croton-on-Hudson in a full family relationship with Lisa Rinehart at the time, he kindly offered me his Manhattan loft as a New York pied-à-terre. Then, at something of a post-ABT loose end, he even came to join me as a guest artist in Belgium, where we did Wonderland, and learned a solo of mine called Ten Suggestions.
Rob and I once went to Christmas dinner at his house. We ate mescaline, then we all ate the goose. Guillermo was there too, naked as he often is. He’ll take off his clothes at the drop of a hat: between the elevator and the front door of your apartment, if you’re lucky.
THAT SAME YEAR, 1987, Gerard Mortier, the Flemish director of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, the Belgian national opera, was in Stuttgart to see Peter Sellars’s productions of Ajax and Così fan tutte. We were on tour there and, on Peter’s recommendation, he came to see a show of mine, a mixed-repertory program of which one of the pieces was Gloria. We’d had intimations that the Monnaie was looking for a new dance director, and we knew Mortier was in the house.
The strange thing: due to an injury to one of my dancers, I was making my own debut performing in Gloria, faking my way through somebody else’s part. The truth is that though Mortier trusted Peter’s opinion, he didn’t know too much about dancing. (I get a lot of work that way—I know music and dancing; often they just know music.) Mortier was partly ignorant about my work, partly desperate—he needed a new choreographer immediately—and extremely trusting of Peter, so he took the entire company out to dinner afterward, dubbed me “un homme de musique,” and on the strength of that one performance and Peter’s recommendation, announced, “Come to Belgium tomorrow. I would love to install you.”
Mortier was taking a big risk, partly because I was a new thing to him, from—if you like—the Peter Sellars esthetic, but also because I was nothing like what was currently happening at the Monnaie. The Belgians were used to a particular kind of dance, a kind of dance of which I had already tired. As Mortier himself once said, “Brussels was never a city of dance, it was a city of Monsieur Béjart.”
Maurice Béjart, the previous choreographer at the Monnaie, had finally stormed out, heading to Lausanne after twenty-seven long years, partly because of various financial disagreements, but also because he didn’t feel appreciated, which he probably wasn’t. However, it may have also been that Mortier, who had good taste, had finally decided that Béjart’s work was simply crap, which it had been for many years.
But there had been a moment when his choreography was exciting. Back at the opera house in Seattle when I was young, it was the sexiest, most glamorous thing I’d ever seen: the men nearly naked, faces vividly made up, hair wild. I was shocked, the way everyone is the first time they see men in tights at the ballet. I hadn’t seen that much ass even on somebody naked. So as a teenager I liked Béjart; then as a grown-up I hated it, and it remains crap to this day—insane, grizzly, ghastly, vulgar stuff. You think Hermann Hesse and Ayn Rand are wonderful when you’re young and . . . they’re not. Béjart’s famous version of Ravel’s Bolero featured fifty horny men in a circle around a huge table watching as his big star, and presumed lover, Jorge Donn (giant hair, makeup, androgynous), did a seductive dance thereupon. The whole thing was porny-corny, hugely distasteful, and shamefully fabulous.
When I moved to New York City, there was my expensive night out to see Béjart’s company, Ballet du XXe Siècle, perform Lar’s wonderful Marimba. Very soon afterward, I was in Lar’s company myself, dancing that same Marimba, and I realized that Béjart’s had been the most repulsive, crazy, strung-out version. Yet I can’t deny that its over-the-topness was appealing at the time. The other music he choreographed, Le Marteau sans maître by Boulez, was way over Béjart’s head. He was a big ham who liked grandiose sounds, but he had no real clue about music. (Mortier later noted that Béjart used music for his spectacle, whereas I served the music, which was true.) Béjart himself didn’t dance in his shows, but he often appeared in them, generally in the role of the crazy ringmaster, the poet, the seer. When we first got to Brussels, there were all these out-of-date billboards of a goateed Béjart doing this certain mysterious, pensive expression, his finger to his chin. There’s a moment in Dido and Aeneas, our second dance in Brussels, where, at the end of the Sorceress scene, I did that same expression. It was a tiny quotation, a reference to his ridiculously smug look on that poster. Nobody got it but it made me happy. I was not above making fun of him.
I can’t even remember whether I subsequently ever met him, though I don’t believe there would have been any particular animosity between us. He did say something slightly patronizing along the lines of “Let the boy do whatever he wants.” But I said a few things about him too.
The real animosity came not from Béjart but from the country of Belgium itself.
FROM THE START, the very thought of Brussels was thrilling, the prospects amazing.
Mortier was very extravagant, very generous, and totally ruthless. Either he got his own way or he didn’t do it. For example, he was announced as the new head of the New York City Opera, its new savior, in 2007, but then decided not to take the job when he found out they’d sliced his budget in half. He wasn’t easy but he was great. He’d do anything to make a show he wanted to happen, happen: “Your dreams come true now!”
Mortier had been hired in 1981 to put the Monnaie, and more generally Brussels, on the map. That was his job and his thrill. He was a master politician, and, from his point of view, there was no way he could lose by hiring me. It was either going to succeed magnificently, for which he’d get all the credit, or go down in flames, and my failure would be big news. He never pulled the wool over anyone’s eyes. He always did what he believed, hoping it would work, and he knew precisely the power of publicity and controversy. I was aware that I was a controversial replacement, and that was fine with me, while also somewhat terrifying.
We had a glimpse of Mortier’s power one night in Bruges after dinner. Mortier had asked me to drive back with him in his car, and I’d asked Guillermo to accompany us. It was the middle of the night in the barely lit streets of Bruges: a white hippie boy with long hair in shorts walking next to a businessman, followed a few steps behind by a dark-skinned man with long dreads, apparently a bodyguard. Guillermo pulled out a joint (some hash rolled up in tobacco), caught up, and handed it to me. I took a hit and offered it to Mortier, who demurred.
At that moment, an unmarked car swerved in front of us to cut us off, almost hitting us. Two cops got out. They can’t possibly have smelled the dope from the car, so they must have been observing us, presumably thinking they were witnessing the biggest drug deal in Bruges’s history. I freaked out, as did Guillermo, who stood back to stamp out the evidence. Mortier didn’t miss a beat, calmly going over to confer with the driver. When he returned, the cops left. We asked what had just happened. “Well,” said Mortier, “I told him who I was, and I told him that if I didn’t get satisfaction from his commander and from the prefect of Bruges that I’d have them fired.” And that was that.
I was mortified. Mortier . . . was Mortier.
He was a complicated man, slight, mousy, and somewhat effete. He had a manicure every other day in his office, and there was some secret room, an inner sanctum to which I was rarely granted access: who knows what happened in there. His eyesight wasn’t great, and he was obsessive-compulsive and highly phobic, suffering from a kind of preemptive claustrophobia that meant he’d never allow himself to get into a situation in which there might be the vaguest possibility of claustrophobia. As he walked down a corridor, he tapped the walls like a blind man. At least it meant you could always hear him coming.
Mortier’s longtime partner was Sylvain Cambreling, the Monnaie’s music director, but he also liked to surround himself with very beautiful men. His assistant was gorgeous; his chauffeur was gorgeous; everyone was gorgeous. In fact, the gorgeous chauffeur told me that they were once stuck in gridlock in a tunnel somewhere, when Mortier had a panic attack, opened the car door, got out, and started running toward the light at the end of the tunnel. The driver had to chase him down and get him back into the car.
I loved Mortier.
AFTER THE MEETING IN STUTTGART, Barry and I took an emergency diversion to Brussels, where Mortier wined and dined us. We took a car to Amsterdam to see the Monnaie’s ornate production of La finta giardiniera, a clumsy but charming opera that Mozart wrote aged about eleven months.
Mortier really just wanted me, and since he was laboring under the misapprehension that he’d discovered me, he thought that he could hire me alone, that I’d hire Belgian dancers, that we’d all live happily ever after for the next couple of years, and fuck my entire company and the management, Nancy and Barry. He wanted somebody cheap and malleable. I was comparatively cheap, but he hadn’t realized that I was far from malleable. So there were various negotiations, courtship trips, not to mention a tense summit meeting with my company in Berkeley. Mortier was talking to me in French and English.
“Write this down, write this down,” he brusquely told Nancy, who refused.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “Nancy isn’t my secretary. She’s me, if I knew what I was doing.”
In fact, Mortier needed us so badly that we ended up getting everything we wanted, including keeping my company and management intact. I’d hire more dancers: we’d go from twelve to twenty-four. It was all in the details. We worked on the change of name from Mark Morris Dance Group for a really long time, which was a contract point, a big deal. We tried every possible nonsense variation. (I even suggested for a joke that we change it to Ballet du 18e Siècle to send up Béjart and my love for baroque music.) The one we ended up with—Monnaie Dance Group/Mark Morris—didn’t make a great deal of sense, but we’d removed everything that didn’t absolutely have to be in the name of the newly formed company, reduced the equation, and that’s what was left (that and a virgule). Everyone was happy with the compromise: alliteration and an elegant logo.
We agonized over the decision and finally decided, why the hell not? We were getting lots of work in America, but we weren’t making lots of money, and we liked the idea of official status as an arts organization, which moving to Brussels would immediately achieve, whereas if we stayed in America, we wouldn’t be on that schedule. Up to this point, we’d perhaps done fifty dances, and although we used live music as much as possible, we’d only (aside from the TV work) done one dance with anything as extravagant as a set. This was our chance for only live music and all the décor we could imagine. So we finally agreed. We were on our way to Brussels.
When it happened, it happened fast.
I immediately felt two things. One, this is going to be great. Two, I’ve been set up for something weird.
TO START WITH, we were given our own building.
Thirty rue Bara was a giant warehouse, far from ritzy, on the wrong side of the tracks in an industrial neighborhood that had seen better days, beyond one of the two train stations, the south one, Zuid. You were already on the way out of town. It was a fifteen-minute downhill walk from my apartment, right across the station concourse, where people were enjoying their first beer of the day at nine in the morning. The building itself had served many functions over the years, but most recently it had been Béjart’s own studio, Mudra (named after the hand gestures of Indian dance). It was a deep rectangle, like a U, with a full scene shop in the back, where all of the sets and props for every one of the Monnaie’s huge, extravagant, expensive shows were made. The two wings were divided by a one-lane road so trucks could come in to load the scenery that they’d then transport to the theater, fifteen minutes away. On one side of the rectangle, there were two stories containing a canteen and offices; on the other, a bathroom with scary showers that had nondraining soap dishes (a bad omen) and some dressing rooms. There were several rehearsal studios, one of which was raked at five degrees to replicate the actual theater. Americans aren’t used to dancing on rakes, so this drove us crazy.
It seemed outlandish, getting our own building—we could hardly believe it—but the place was such a big mess of a loft building, more like being outside than in, impossible to keep clean and impossible to heat. We fixed it up as best we could, sealed it for warmth, but it was a losing battle, like bailing water out of a sinking boat. We were near a brewery, so there was the overwhelming smell of yeast, not to mention the waft of chocolate from the Côte d’Or chocolate factory. Yeast and chocolate. Believe me, you don’t want that combination every day. And there were pigeons everywhere, pests, making that horrible sound, shitting everywhere. The night watchman would pick them off one by one with a shotgun.
Office window with pulley message system, 30 rue Bara, Brussels, circa 1988.
I bought junk furniture for my weird, beautiful office, the window of which looked right across at our secretary’s. We strung a pulley message system between us that we used to communicate when we didn’t want to walk down and across and up again. We decorated as we could. Halfway up the stairs hung a beautiful 1960s postcard that I’d had enlarged, a little African American Cub Scout, with the message “You can always do better here,” an inspiration to everyone and the most pathetic thing in the world. In the studio, there was a flag that now has a negative Tea Party connotation, the chopped-up snake from New Hampshire, “Don’t Tread on Me.”
We were housed in nice apartments until we had the time to find something of our own. First I found myself in a gigantic, sterile place on rue Africaine; then I rented a beautiful apartment on a park—three bedrooms, big kitchen, balcony on the front and the back, and roommates all the time. Guillermo was the constant, while others came and went.
One of the best of the new recruits, Hans-Georg Lenhart, had come from the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, the art school that had been started by one of the founders of Tanztheater, Kurt Jooss, in the 1930s and then became Pina Bausch’s, so Hans-Georg was trained in her style. He was a wonderfully clear dancer—probably ten years my junior—who became a vital component of the company for the Brussels years and beyond. He was adorable, very publicly and physically affectionate like Guillermo, and the two of them lived with me for quite a while. I did all the cooking and they did all the cleaning (and the eating).
THE PRESS CONFERENCE WAS DRAMATIC. It was my first appearance, supposedly just my saying hello to Belgium. Coincidentally, it was also my first ever press conference. There were the usual ponderous questions, and I said all the right things about what an honor it was. Then one casual remark did it. One of the journalists asked me my philosophy of dance.
“I make it up and you watch it. End of philosophy.”
No one had ever asked for my philosophy of dance before—in America, there’s no philosophy of dance and no one would ever bother—and that’s what came out. The assembled company of Belgians, who had settled back in their seats expecting me to expatiate for thirty minutes, were shocked. They were used to Béjart, whose work was all very well thought out. He’d been providing thirty pages of program notes for every new dance. (Wagner was to blame for all that.) While my answer was meant to be funny (though the joke fell flat), it was also true. Come to think of it, it still is my philosophy.
Someone then asked me if it was queer for a choreographer to use the music rather than the movement as the starting point, and I answered, “Well, I am a queer choreographer.” It was another turning point. Béjart was the gayest thing in the world, and they didn’t mind him. The difference is that I actually said I was gay, whereas the policy in Belgium was strictly Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Mortier was sitting beside me, rubbing his hands with glee.
Then, when they asked me specifically what I thought of Béjart, I made a comical face of horror. Of course that was the picture they used in all the newspapers, with the headline NON, JE DETESTE BEJART! They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but maybe that was imprudent. It bit me straightaway.
Another true story: Vanity Fair almost immediately sent a writer, Charles Siebert, over to trail me for a week. I said some supposedly bad things to him that made it into his article, one of which was “Béjart’s work is shit. . . . On my worst day, with the worst hangover in my life, I could never do anything that bad.” (Although I did add the proviso “Well . . . maybe in the future.” I’m not a monster.) One night, we were at the opera house with King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola, the royal patrons, in attendance. As we were leaving, people were shouting, “Vive la reine! Vive la reine!” and when asked, I said I thought they were talking about me. I certainly didn’t have anything against the queen, so perfectly ornamental with her Maggie Thatcher hairdo, and in fact, I was happy to bow down before her, delighted to be invited up to her box to meet her.
As I left, I did happen to say to Charles, “Best blow job I ever had.” He had the good taste to leave that out of the profile.
WE HAD THREE MONTHS to prepare for our first performance. Mortier had said we could do anything we wanted.
“What’s your dream show?” he asked.
“L’Allegro,” I replied, without needing to think.
L’Allegro, il penseroso ed il moderato was a very popular piece in Handel’s time that disappeared for a couple of hundred years; the first version I’d heard was a wonderfully rough-and-ready recording on early instruments by Banchetto Musicale, rustic and fabulous. It was the perfect time to go for baroque in Europe because of the many great early music conductors and players just starting out in Holland and Belgium—for example, Philippe Herreweghe and Marc Minkowski, both great artists, superior to most of their American counterparts. Mortier hired Craig Smith from Emmanuel to do the music for L’Allegro, so he and I set about devising the performance edition of this music. It was complicated.
L’Allegro was to be by far our biggest and longest production yet. I had previously suggested it to the Boston Ballet—my company dancing with their dancers—but Bruce Marks, the artistic director at the time, would have been taking a sizable risk on me to make an evening-length dance with the Handel and Haydn Society, the big period band at that time, and it didn’t work out, due to both lack of money and lack of interest. However, because of this possibility, I’d started imagining the project—the band above the dancers in the air in the baroque style—and before we even moved to Brussels, we were working on L’Allegro at a summer residency in upstate New York at SUNY Brockport.
L’Allegro, il penseroso ed il moderato is a pastoral ode from 1740 based on the poetry of John Milton, who had written “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” separately, though they are invariably paired, about one hundred years earlier. Handel had the good idea of interleaving the two poems to contrast the happy, mirthful man (l’allegro) with the thinking, melancholy man (il penseroso). These two moods also represented the inner and outer states of man—public and private, pensive and gregarious, friendly and hermetic—so, for example, there’s the lark (the happy bird) in “L’Allegro” as opposed to the nightingale (the sad bird) in “Il Penseroso.” Unfortunately, Allegro and Penseroso weren’t enough for the Age of Reason, and Handel also had the not-quite-so-great idea of balancing this debate with an extra poem, “Il Moderato,” by Charles Jennens, the Messiah librettist, an extra act with just as many arias and choruses. A record of the entire thing is about half an hour longer than our version, featuring a dull series of Moderato numbers, for which the poetry is noticeably less good.
I had decided that I wanted the show to end with L’Allegro as the dominant idea, the winner of the debate (partly because I’m a cockeyed optimist, but also because I simply wanted to end it happy—that’s show business!), so we reordered some things and cut a few things. Moderato didn’t really apply, because the Thinking Man and the Having-Lots-of-Fun Man cancel each other out, so no one really needs the Boring, Stupid Man Who Doesn’t Do Anything without Being Told: the dialectic implies moderation without actually having to present it. I therefore decided to more or less ignore Moderato, except the two highlights, the duet “As steals the morn upon the night” (the only duet in the whole piece) and “Each action will derive new grace.” I reimagined these so that no one watching would imagine they were from an argument for moderation. (I almost used a third, a very ornate aria for mezzo and a cello obbligato, but it turned out to be too difficult to play.)
Armed with that structure (which wasn’t too far out, just a bit of replacement and shifting), knowing it would be in two acts—dark in the first half, lighter in the second—we went to work.
Considering that half the company was new, in a giant studio with a new team, stagehands, a big staff, and assistants to assistants, we worked fast.
Hundreds of people had come to the auditions from all over Europe, even from Mudra, Béjart’s dance school. Most of them were terrible, but we were able to find the requisite number. Then the issue became “how many Belgians have you hired?”
It turned out I’d hired one Belgian. I hadn’t looked at their passports. And this lone Belgian, Olivia Maridjan Koop, was a woman of Indonesian descent, so she didn’t even count to some Belgians. No one had ever mentioned that it would be more politic to pick more Belgians, but I can’t honestly say that I’d have picked more Belgians just to keep people happy. And there were problems even with the dancers I’d picked, though it wasn’t necessarily their fault. I wanted it to be barefoot dancing, the honest origins of Modern Dance, and neither ironic, bad ballet nor historical reconstruction. The dancers who’d come with me—Penny chief among them, because she had my folk dance background—knew how to do the required stuff plainly, but I now found myself with newer dancers who didn’t know what I was after.
One of my little casting jokes was that the longer you’d been in my company, the more you were featured and the more dancing you did—see above for the underlying rationale. Everybody was in all the corps work all the time, but if you were Penny, Ruth, Keith, or Tina—among the lifers who’d come with me from New York—you got a big part. And the dances were so lovely, whether ethnically inspired—a Highland sword dance, a Walachian dance from Romania, and an old Croatian dance (simply jumping)—or made up. There was the Stupid Men’s Dance, as we called it (in act 2, where they slap and then kiss each other), which followed perhaps my favorite piece of my own choreography, if I’m allowed to choose: the Dream Dance, where Olivia floated up like a balloon, the men made a forest, and the women escaped. Then there was the Kleenex Dance for all the women, a very hard dance, meant to be a Busby Berkeley crane shot. The Walking Dance (“As steals the morn”) is based on a harvest dance called a bujenec, originally done by virgins arm in arm in the fields of Bulgarian Thrace (and not in front of an audience). The leaders of the two lines symmetrically nod to each other, turn right (the Thracians would have been improvising these patterns), and the lead girls carry a huge sheaf of wheat, the others follow her—and that’s the whole dance, tracing patterns in a field. The first time they do it in our version, they do up-down, up-down. The second time they do it, a recap of that same pattern, they go down-up, down-up: totally different and very satisfying. It’s an abridged repetition and ornamented in a slightly different way, which is what baroque music itself is all about. As I told the Vanity Fair writer, “Even if you can’t read music, if you really listen and you’re somehow accidentally moved by something, that’s why, because of a tiny, tiny secret thing that was plotted out in the structure. One reason I make dances is to trick people into hearing music better.”
Paul Lorenger, Penny Hutchinson, Raphael Brand, and Joachim Schlömer in “Day’s Garish Eye” from L’Allegro, Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Brussels, 1988. (Klaus Lefèbvre)
The finale of act 1 of L’Allegro is six quartets—twenty-four people—doing symmetrical square figure dances, which then become lines, then circles; six, then four, then two, which magically become one very slow circle. Then there’s a joke, or what people see as a joke. Paul Taylor used a step all the time, common in musical comedy, where the man picks up the female beloved as if she were a baby. He might rock her like a kitten in his arms. It’s a tired old trope—“Don’t worry your pretty little head about that”—and I wanted to redeem it, not quite to do its opposite, but to fuck with it. So in L’Allegro, the dancers form a big circle, and the women pick up the men, carry them around like babies—everybody chuckles—and then the men pick up the women. The women are protecting the men, which is maternal, and beautiful, as if the men are boys who’ve fallen asleep in the back of the car on the way home from the drive-in, and are being carried inside by their parents. The music accompanies the lyric “By whisp’ring winds soon lull’d asleep,” and that’s a beautiful way to fall asleep. Everyone needs to feel he’s being carried inside by his parents. And that horrible cloying, degrading move, that weak person/strong person dynamic, was redeemed for me by placing it in that new context. Twenty-five or so years ago, this was radical; now it’s classical.
I WANTED L’ALLEGRO TO BE, and knew it had to be, a big stage production. I’d chosen it not just because the music is gorgeous, but because it’s not a linear narrative. Most of Handel’s oratorios are biblical and most of his operas (of which every single one is great) are mythological, lengthy, and complex character-driven narratives. L’Allegro, on the other hand, because of Milton’s poetry, is evocative as opposed to purely narrative, so it afforded me a great deal of variety in the realm that dance does best. In particular, Handel’s musical word painting is spectacular—the music is specific, but the situations are vague—and the music is much more (I hate to use the word) “accessible” than Bach, but equally genius. Handel is Bach’s equal, Telemann not too far away.
I’d worked with Adrianne Lobel on Nixon, so I asked if she’d design the sets. She immediately came up with brilliant ideas, based directly on Josef Albers, Mark Rothko, and other color-field painters, to make an identifiably abstract series of looks. Her central idea was to divide the stage in depth—the Brussels stage was very deep—and she started showing me a million options in slide form, watercolors, drawings of all different color relationships, proposing many different ideas, most of which we ditched, ending up with twenty-one drops (which are opaque) and scrims (which are translucent gauze), a huge project. I had to choreograph with the drops and scrims in mind: were they see-through or not? Would we dance between them? They offered infinite combinations both choreographically and in perspective (once you bring in a drop, you can’t do anything upstage of it because the audience couldn’t see the dancers—it became a visual-spatial puzzle, how the scrims changed the look of the drops). You can imagine a line of eight people, on a heavily raked floor, dancing in and out of sight lines among these obstacles.
Working with Christine Van Loon, the costume designer, I decided that I wanted the costumes based on the beautiful William Blake drawings for L’Allegro. Adrianne wasn’t wild about that, alongside her color-field idea, but I hate to see the sofa match the drapes in a show’s design. The world simply doesn’t work like that. The costumes were beautifully simple, a tunic or Grecian drape based on early Modern Dance of the barefoot variety.
My original, impractical idea was that the dancers would, one at a time at regular and precise intervals, change their clothes throughout the evening, and that the palette would therefore brighten imperceptibly throughout the show, the reverse of leaves in autumn. But everyone was dancing all the time, and there was simply no opportunity for constant quick changes. A simplification of this idea, however, did work. We’d go from muted-colored costumes in act 1 to brighter colors in act 2. Everybody had two costumes: the darkened version in act 1 might be a dark green with a deep orange beneath, and in the second half, a lighter green on top of a pale yellow. It was the same with the men in their very expensive dyed silk chiffon shirts. The two Moderato dances feature every dancer, without any drops or scrims, on the perfectly white empty stage, colorless to this day.
My original inclination was that there would be props. I wanted the sticks and kerchiefs of Morris dancing, sticks to hit and hankies for ladies to wave, or for gentlemen to brandish in a folk-dancey way. I was also thinking of bigger baroque stage machines inspired by the greatest opera movie ever made, Bergman’s The Magic Flute—not only the greatest music film, but also perhaps the greatest ever single production of an opera. That’s what I wanted: the cranked spiral of the ocean, the thunderstorm rumbling, the mechanical shrubbery. Bergman’s Magic Flute was filmed in the Palace Theatre at Drottningholm, the residence of the Swedish royal family in Stockholm, where all the real baroque devices were still in use; our production used zero of those magnificent contraptions but simulated their effects through dance. That was as much of the baroque (and one could equally say Bunraku) spectacle as I wanted, those artifices and illusions that could take us from springtime to snow in the simplest, most beautiful way. And that’s what Adrianne achieved, with a strip of grass, a strip of river, and a strip of sky, a vision enhanced by the genius lighting design of James F. Ingalls.
Adrianne might agree this was her best work ever. We had a big budget and lots of time, and the Belgian scene shop realized it beautifully. She had several weeks with the full crew in the theater before we opened—you can only imagine what that costs. That’s quite usual in Europe, though unheard of in the States. The Metropolitan Opera House in New York does sixteen operas in rotating repertory, so they’re always on an insane schedule, loading out and loading in overnight for the next show. European opera companies do it by season, stagionale. They perform one show for weeks, then close for a spell to put on the next show. Consequently, you have the luxury to rehearse at length in the actual theater in which you’ll be performing, to build the sets there, fit them perfectly, and perform the same show multiple times instead of rotating.
This production is where I first came into contact with Johan Henckens, who’s worked for us ever since (and been married to Nancy). But the truth is that everyone on their crew was helpful. They were glad Béjart was gone—they’d hated him—and I seemed like an easy mark. Everything was so extravagant that there was a luxurious week of rehearsal for the set alone, complete with a pianist in order to synchronize it to the music, to see how far to fly the trims, how fast to bring that black thing down in front of the pink thing so both were still visible, whether it should touch the floor or not. It gets dangerous when three or four things are flying in and out at the same time. You had time to iron out the problems, to make sure the backdrops weren’t too close together, thus avoiding that undesirable moiré effect and so on.
It was all magical luxury. There were technical rehearsals, orchestral rehearsals, rehearsals with lights, rehearsals with costumes, music-only rehearsals; all of the rehearsals that come before the final dress rehearsal, which, in Brussels, is open to the public. In fact, the possibilities for perfectionism were endless, and at some point, we had to draw the line. When it was finally time for me to watch, it was immediately evident that certain aspects were too complicated. The dancers needed more clearance overhead; they couldn’t dance that far downstage, even though it suited the design. You couldn’t really know these details until you got in there, however true to scale the maquette, the model of the set we’d used as reference.
The pressure, the deadline, the atmosphere, the importance of it . . . none of those were daunting, though they were facts. What was daunting was the project itself, trying to corral all these various things, because, having made all the decisions (on everything from the edition of the music to every step of the dance), I was really alone.
In the theater at dress rehearsal, there was a production table, lighting, computers, people communicating on walkie-talkies, an orchestra of thirty, a chorus of twenty-nine, twenty-four dancers, a crew of one hundred, wardrobe, makeup, videographer, sound balance, my management, publicity people coming in and asking, “Do you mind if I . . . ?” to which I might respond, “No, get out of here quick or I’ll kill you.” And in the middle of all that, me with a microphone saying, “Stop!” at which everything ground to a halt and I’d say, “Okay. Let’s go from bar number 622 in big number 7, from . . .” And then someone had to translate it into Flemish and French.
It had been a fraught and very complicated project, and I knew I’d tortured the dancers. I get very engaged and agitated when I work on something new. I can be curt, blunt, even cruel sometimes, certainly, but that’s not anger. Screaming, shouting, chasing people around a room: that’s excitement and it’s usually good. Occasionally I might even yell, “Can’t you fucking do anything right?” That’s excitement, not anger. Anger is when I speak very quietly and don’t talk at all or just . . . stop.
But there wasn’t a huge personal crisis. I was both happy and miserable and working very hard. We’d discovered that Brussels wasn’t only dank and cold but creepy, and we quickly noticed and felt the xenophobia and misogyny that would make anyone targeted by them feel awful. There was one Flemish poster everywhere, silhouettes of stereotypes of “colored” people with a long-suited, cuffed, authoritarian arm telling them to GO HOME. Leave Brussels to the white people, was the message. There was a general air of defeat among the population, and they certainly made us feel unwelcome. It didn’t hit me getting off the plane, but it didn’t take long, and L’Allegro stands as a testament to the agony. All the strife is in it, yet somehow it ended up heaven.
THE THÉÂTRE ROYAL DE LA MONNAIE, the building itself, was elegantly beautiful, one of the great theaters, like La Fenice in Venice but less gaudy. It was either called the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie or, if you were Flemish, the Koninklijke Muntschouwburg—De Munt for short. (In fact, part of the laboriousness of it all was that everything had to be in two languages to placate the Flemish and French camps. They even annually flipped which was top and bottom on the letterheads and the logos on the side of the company trucks.)
Mortier had updated the theater, put a multipurpose party room on the top floor (the Salle de Sandwich, we called it) with a suite of offices below, and commissioned the lobby floor and columns from Sol LeWitt, my favorite artist. The ceiling is by Sam Francis, the wonderful painter. It was already a million-dollar extravagance, and Belgians just thought, “What the fuck?” The combination of Sol LeWitt and me was too potent. They looked at his work, as they looked at some of my dances, and thought, “There’s nothing there.” On opening night, Belgian dancers were passing out white carnations outside the theater. We were told these meant “I wish you would die.” Maybe it meant “Never come back to this theater.” Either way, the flowers weren’t positive, a protest against the fact that there wasn’t one Belgian dancer, except the Indonesian Belgian, and that I was not a Belgian choreographer. The popular vote had been Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, whom I childishly called Anne Teresa De Tearjerker, when I unwisely criticized her work thus: “All you have to do here is not wash your hair for a week and then sit onstage and act depressed and you’ve got it. Magnifique! Formidable!” The irony is she’s a good choreographer and I like her.
Despite all the noise and distraction that night, L’Allegro was a huge success. The reaction was rapturous. Mortier immediately understood its quality. I was relieved and very proud, and I still am, though I am thankful that enough time has passed that it is no longer seen as my defining work. For a long time after, the default critical response to a new piece of mine would be that “it doesn’t hold a candle to L’Allegro.” Well, I’d done L’Allegro already. The project also had the advantage of helping get a big chunk of baroque music out of my system. And it’s still a success everywhere we do it, and we still do it all the time, through many years, many dancers, many singers, many conductors, and many theaters.
My theory on its success is that it’s what the audience for dance thinks it doesn’t want but is in fact dying for: people simply dancing to music, responding to music, doing what the music makes them (or me) believe. L’Allegro isn’t “You’ll never get this because it’s too sophisticated and esoteric for you.” Nor is it “We’re doing something that’s physically impossible for humans to do.” It’s just people dancing to music. That’s not to say it isn’t extremely difficult to put together and perform. Neither is it, like the proverbial six-year-old who could have done that Picasso, “Anybody could do that,” which is how some people see my work to this day.
It’s anything but simple, but it looks simple and natural. My decision, my esthetic, is to make the complicated look simple. First, my dances are hard. Everything starts on the wrong leg and turns in the wrong direction. Much of it is counterintuitive and initially awkward. You have to find a natural way to solve it. When people first learn a dance of mine, they might say, “Oh, this is so easy, we just run over there.” And I say, “No, you’re running in a counter-rhythm, and the stress has changed, and your feet aren’t flexed or pointed”—the only two positions that people know—“they’re natural and relaxed.” In general, dancers expect instructions to toggle between all or nothing, but in my world there’s a gigantic range of modalities, a kinetic energy that isn’t just full force or zero, turgid or flaccid, on or off. I’m very facile at making up dances—I can come up with a dance in one second—so in order for it not to be the most obvious thing right away, my default is to start with the opposite (“The music sounds like spinning, so let’s lie on the floor facedown and twitch”). My thought is “Everyone would do this, so let’s do that.” It’s partly experimental and partly so the audience is able to dishabituate itself from its normal expectations of dance and dance traditions. It won’t be quite what the audience expects from the music either, if they know it (which is one of the reasons I often choose obscure music).
L’Allegro isn’t difficult music, however. It’s consonant (in that it isn’t dissonant) and relates directly to the dancing—that in itself was a little transgressive in contemporary dance—and the dance relates directly to the music and the text. I’m not afraid of the obvious, as someone once kindly said about me. I do what I do on purpose; it’s not an accident. That’s what I want to see and what I want to do. I don’t want someone dancing at me, I want them dancing for me. I want them to dance as the music plays and I watch and listen. That’s our relationship.
With perspective, I can see that L’Allegro is the summation of my old style: hippie and Isadora Duncan, but conceptual, argued, and constructed. I still love working on and watching L’Allegro, whereas I have little interest in some other older dances. I cry. I love the music so much.
YEARS LATER, IN JULY 2014, we finally had the chance to film L’Allegro.
We’d always thought it would make a beautiful film, but it had never happened. There had previously been some well-shot segments in the British TV arts program The South Bank Show, and the director, Nigel Wattis, had an idea to do part of it for Channel Four, filming some of it outside and blending it like a crazy fantasia. For example, at the beginning of the solo that opens the second act, Gorgeous Tragedy, the curtain would rise to reveal Ruth standing on a cliff by the ocean, and then when she turned around, she’d be in a theater on a stage. I’m not generally in favor of exterior dancing, but this seemed imaginative. Scouting locations, looking for old-timey villages with greens, bosks, and ha-has made for dancing, we ended up in the Greenwich observatory, its floor checkered black and white like a chessboard. The director’s inspired idea was to make a sprung deck of that floor, put it on the actual floor, and do the Walking Dance—“As steals the morn”—on the facsimile. It would have been beautiful, but there wasn’t enough funding, and the whole thing was shelved.
But we never gave up, because we don’t, and suddenly, a mere twenty-five years later, the opportunity arose for us to shoot it with PBS as a coproducer. Mortier had already invited us to perform L’Allegro at Madrid’s Teatro Real, where he was now the artistic director, perhaps the greatest opera house in Europe, a beautiful nineteenth-century jewel box with the added advantage of state-of-the-art recording and filming facilities. We were going to perform it anyway, so why didn’t we shoot it there? By the time we made the film, Mortier had died. It was complicated.
We’d previously had a hit in Madrid with Mozart Dances, and when we found out we’d be returning to do L’Allegro, it was suddenly very “now or never” to raise money, specifically for the costumes. Christine Van Loon’s once-beautiful chiffon costumes were dead; they’d been replaced years previously in off colors and cheaper fabrics, but even these replacements were patched and threadbare. They wouldn’t survive the scrutiny of high-definition film. Nor would the set: there were mends and smudges everywhere. So we resorted to a crowdsourcing campaign. This would pay for “272 yards of silk chiffon for 52 costumes . . . , 78 yards of lycra for 26 leggings, skilled small batch dye processing to match the 18 original colors, 26 leotards and seamless undergarments, professional costume shop reconstruction of the original patterns, labor to build the new costumes.”
Confirmation of the filming finally came through. We were going to do it over three live performances and two extra pickup sessions (because you can only film so much when there’s an audience), one where we did the whole dance (at eleven in the morning, which is universally agreed to be the best possible time to dance in full makeup and costume by no one) to a recording of the orchestra the night before, with all seven cameras in position. It was eerily silent without a houseful, so I cheered the dancers on from the wings in the giant empty theater. The film crew was francophone, the theater was all Spanish, my dancers were English speaking, as was the conductor, Jane Glover. It was intense. Although the sound didn’t turn out great, there’s nothing I don’t love about the film.
L’Allegro itself keeps changing over the years—I don’t change the piece, but the piece changes because at some point every single dancer is new. The parts have been passed down genetically, dancer to dancer and through me, in the oral tradition. A new person learns it, exactly the same part, the only difference being that every person in the world dances uniquely. For example, the solo that opens act 2 (Gorgeous Tragedy) was originally Ruth Davidson, one of the greatest. Yet she was so worried by one particular turn that, though perfect at every rehearsal, she fell down at every performance, if not on her ass, then coming out of the move with a stagger, a thrilling stagger; she even went to the length of spraying her soles to make them more slippery for the turn, though of course that only made her more self-conscious. Years later, Maile Okamura did the same part. The text of the dance (meaning the choreography) was exactly the same, and Maile was able to do the same turn, two times around, with relative ease. A dance critic said, “Maile is so beautiful, but I miss Ruth. Her version was so tormented and dangerous-looking.” That was because Maile didn’t fall down every time she did it. Does that make her a better dancer? I don’t know. She’s doing the exact same dance, just not falling down. Succeeding generations of dancers have different skills. It was perhaps just disappointing that someone could do it as well as Ruth.
L’Allegro is even better than I thought it was when we first presented it in Belgium. And I thought it was great then.
AS FAR AS BRUSSELS was concerned, everything went to shit soon after that first show.