Eight

Dido and Aeneas

I had a big salary in Brussels (with 60 percent income tax), health insurance for my entire company (a big deal), fabulous orchestras, and a great stage. I was so excited to work in a beautiful, perfectly proportioned proscenium theater; I’d always seen my work like that, even in the black box of Dance Theater Workshop, which is why Gloria had translated so well to an opera house.

Mortier himself was always helpful, making connections and introductions: “Have you met this conductor?” “Have you heard this singer?” I had a great experiential education at his hands. I don’t entirely bury myself in my work—I watch TV, read books, and cook; I socialize, I have fun; I’m pretty healthy for a crazy artist—but I realized this was my empirelet, and that basically I could make up the rules and do what I liked. In America, we’d been skimping and saving; now we could do whatever we wanted. But it was weird. Though we were separate from the opera house, we no longer had autonomy. Everything had to be approved by Mortier and the board and the accountants, and everything was a struggle. There were fights; everything had to be planned far in advance; there was very little room for spontaneity. I could do everything I wanted; it was just a very different way to do it.

For example, Nancy had a secretary for the first time, Marina, the daughter of the secretary of a man called Deschrijver, who had approval over all the budgets. Yet Marina couldn’t get us a meeting with him, even via her own mother. The only way was to get Mortier to intervene, which only ever happened at the last moment. It was like that with everything all the time. Yet, despite the fact that no budget was ever refused or cut, we couldn’t get a simple pay raise for Marina. I could add a $100,000 backdrop, with approval, but I couldn’t get a twenty-five-cent increase in salary for Nancy’s secretary. It was deeply sexist, in the same way that they couldn’t accept that Nancy was my manager.

It soon got petty. Nancy had to redo entire budgets purely because the Belgians couldn’t read her ones. She drew a 1 like we draw a 1, a straight vertical line, but they wanted the Belgian upside-down V. We were computerless back then, so the budgets were quite beautiful works of art in their own right. Luckily she already crossed her sevens.

The Belgians may have been happy to see me go after the press conference, but L’Allegro was an undeniably great show and they loved it. The next wave of reaction was “Have we somehow been duped? Was it really that good?” Classic media stuff.

The crime was that I was American and not highfalutin enough: no philosophy. At home, I see myself as somewhat conservative; in Belgium, they thought I was an American moron. Forget homme de musique; I was homme sauvage. Over there, it was peak postmodernism, broken columns and video monitors, which I’d always hated. They saw my dances as art brut. “That’s dancing? They’re not doing anything. They’re just running around barefoot.” They thought there was no story, no subplot; but of course there was. It just looked too natural to them, like children playing.

When we brought L’Allegro back a year later, people realized they were no longer supposed to like it. The public changed its mind. Between these two L’Allegros, we had a controversial hit, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. I imagined it would be my last ever dance.

I’D ASSUMED I was going to die in a few years from an AIDS-related illness. I knew a lot of people who already had: an early boyfriend, close friends, people I’d had sex with. I knew people with Kaposi’s sarcoma, wasted, damaged, and dying. I’m not a hypochondriac, but I didn’t need a test; besides, tests weren’t very common then anyway. I knew I was going to die and didn’t need it confirmed. During L’Allegro, Erin fell hopelessly in love with a beautiful young dancer who died of AIDS shortly after. Tall, skinny Jon Mensinger, on whom I used to choreograph my moves for the Sorceress in Dido, died later, rapidly. At one point, people were dropping dead all over the place. Why not me? I wasn’t a “top” or a “bottom” either—those are bullshit terms—nor was I ever into bad drugs, but I suppose I was lucky (it’s all luck in the end anyway), because I’d had sex with hundreds of men in many ways, over many years. I’d been a gay radical, all in favor of the promiscuity afforded by the 1970s—it was very important to me—but I learned that I didn’t have anything like the depth of experience others had. I was a virgin compared to some, even though I’d fully enjoyed myself.

As someone with narcissistic tendencies, I presumed that I was HIV positive. There was no particular evidence. It was pure weltschmerz. I can laugh at it now, but it wasn’t a laughing matter at the time. It was heavy and intense, and I very melodramatically and monodramatically decided that the next dance would be my last. My thought was, for my swan song, I shall do the tragedy of Dido, and I shall be Aeneas and I shall be Dido. I shall be the cause of her death, and I shall be her dying, and it will be only me. I was dancing marvelously and freely then, and I wanted to do a big, dramatic one-man show, and my original thought was a solo with me doing all the parts. Nuts! But that’s how I started thinking about and working on Dido. There’s even photographic evidence from a shoot with Annie Leibovitz, which accompanied a Vanity Fair article. We’d been intending to go to Malta to shoot me like Isadora Duncan at Cape Sounion (where I’d realized I’d lost my ticket on my European trip), but we ended up taking the pictures at her studio in Manhattan. They were my studies for Dido. In the photos where I’m naked, I’m Aeneas, and when I’m Dido, I’m in a drape. The dance was based on those pictures as much as anything else. My mother had one of them up in the dining room for years, shockingly revealing her son’s penis. Nancy and Barry thought the photos too drag-queeny, and perhaps they were. Dido stayed that way, despite the fact that it no longer remained a one-man show.

IT WASN’T THE FIRST TIME I’d associated Purcell, blood, and mortality. In 1985, I premiered One Charming Night at Dance Theater Workshop. Like everybody else, I’d just read Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, which I loved. Her work may have gone downhill from there, but that was a great book, as erotic as her pornography. Vampirism is always bubbling under, then over—the films Nosferatu and Dracula were in my veins, as was a great tragic song by Buffy Sainte-Marie called “The Vampire”—but this Anne Rice revamp was everywhere, the zeitgeist, though I’d never have made up a dance based solely on my enthusiasm for a book. It doesn’t work that way, and besides, the dance ended up having little to do with the book. My inspiration was the music.

With Teri Weksler in *One Charming Night*, Jacob’s Pillow, 1986. (Tom Brazil)

I had a residency at Robert Redford’s experimental Sundance Institute, an exclusive summer intensive for composers, filmmakers, choreographers, and designers. I went with Winkie and Herschel (working on Mythologies), and there I started on One Charming Night to a recording of some Purcell songs, unrelated except inasmuch as they were by Purcell, and I made them into a suite. The four component songs were “Be Welcome Then, Great Sir,” “One Charming Night,” “Hark! The Ech’ing Air,” and “Lord, What Is Man?” To me, they were diabolical—two religious, two not—deeply Christian, and unsettling. They were all about love and sex and death, like everything is. I decided to set them as a classical-style pas de deux, meaning a duet, a solo, a solo, and a coda—the seduction of a very young girl by a very old vampire.

I started work with two ballet dancers from Mormon Utah’s Ballet West and Winkie, my assistant, and then I learned it and did it with her. It was a difficult, virtuosic dance, based on baroque dance and early ballet in a delicate style rarely seen (or attempted) anymore, and very sexual, an intimate and ultimately awful dance with full bloodsucking orgasm. I sucked the lifeblood from her throat, then I slashed my wrist and fed it to her. Finally she became immortal, flying off my shoulder to eternal life, to the final “Alleluia!” Though structured precisely like a nineteenth-century pas de deux—the same basic story and identical in the tempi and the choreographic content—everything else was wrong in this tale of abduction, murder, and transformation.

No one could do it as well as Winkie and I, and though I danced One Charming Night with several other female partners, nobody ever danced the part of the vampire except me, so when I stopped dancing, it vanished from the repertoire. Until recently. I finally found someone I trusted to do it: Dallas McMurray. It’s a heavy-duty artistic responsibility to take on a piece like that, but he’d progressed to a point where he could handle it. I’ve never met anyone with his rhythmic accuracy. He’s as good as I was. He isn’t necessarily interested in choreography, nor does he seek big solo attention, but as a dancer he can do anything immediately. For him to learn it that rapidly and for Winkie (whom we’d brought in to set the dance) to drill it that hard was very challenging for both of them.

Although One Charming Night was about the orgasm of blood mingling, and despite the fact that it was at the time of AIDS, the dance wasn’t necessarily about AIDS. Not everything was until it later turned out to have been. The inspiration for Dido and Aeneas, however, certainly was.

I’D KNOWN PURCELL’S OPERA for many years, but the Lament kept coming around to me, particularly the still-chilling cover by Klaus Nomi, the German new-wave singer. (He also recorded the Cold Genius aria “What Power Art Thou” from Purcell’s King Arthur, which I later directed for the English National Opera.) I’d even given it as an assignment in the very first choreographic workshop I ever taught, at Harvard Summer Dance in the mid-1980s.

In the version of Virgil’s original story in The Aeneid that Nahum Tate (real name Teate) extrapolated for Henry Purcell, the story of Dido and Aeneas goes like this. There are only five scenes:

The Palace: The Trojan War is over. Aeneas’s destiny, as decreed by the gods, is to found Rome, but he has become obsessed with Dido, queen of Carthage. Her sister and confidante, Belinda, and other optimistic courtiers urge her to enjoy her good fortune, but the young widow Dido is anxious. Aeneas arrives to ask the Queen, again, to give herself to him. Belinda notices with relief that Dido seems to be capitulating. Dido and Aeneas leave together. Love triumphs.

The Cave: The evil Sorceress summons her colleagues to make big trouble in Carthage. Dido must be destroyed before sunset. Knowing of Aeneas’s destiny to sail to Italy, the Sorceress decides to send a spirit disguised as Mercury to tell him he must depart immediately. Since Dido and Aeneas and the rest are out on a hunt, the witches create a storm to spoil the lovers’ fun and send everyone back home.

The Grove: Dido and Aeneas make love. Another triumph for the hero. Dido senses the approaching storm. Belinda, ever practical, organizes the trip back to the palace. Aeneas is accosted by the false Mercury with this command: “Leave Carthage now.” He accepts his orders, then wonders how to break the news to Dido.

The Ships: Aeneas and the Trojans prepare for the journey. The Sorceress and her witches are pleased to see that their plot is working. Once Aeneas has sailed, they will conjure an ocean storm.

The Palace, again: Dido sees the Trojans preparing their ships. Aeneas tries to explain his predicament and offers to break his vow in order to stay with her. Dido is appalled by his hypocrisy. She sends him away and contemplates the inevitability of death. “Remember me but forget my fate.” Dido kills herself on a pyre made of all the possessions that he’s left behind.

Postscript: The next book of The Aeneid begins with Aeneas looking back on Carthage from his ship to see a ribbon of smoke rising from Dido’s immolation.

Tragedy.

MORTIER WAS THRILLED with the idea.

The solo version would have probably been a good dance, but the simple reason I didn’t do it was that I realized how hard it would be, in purely visual terms, to make out with myself. There’s that joke move where you stand with your back to the audience and put your arms around yourself, which of course I tried. That’s pretty good but I thought . . . maybe not.

So I decided to make it for multiple dancers, as the show ended up, with me as Dido—good part—and the Sorceress. I had previously intended to be both the man and the woman, to symbolically fuck myself to death, but now I was a man playing a woman (two women, in fact), which was, as far as some people were concerned, equally insane and complicated. The Belgians even mistook it for misogyny.

My immediate impulse was to choreograph from background to foreground. Think of it like a painting. The first thing you do is the background, the mountains and the sky, then you do the trees and the deer, and last you put in the Mormon family having a picnic by the stream. So I started with the back and moved forward. First the corps or the frame (the chorus), the eight to ten people in the back; then, in front of them, the costars, Belinda and the second woman; and then, closest to the audience, the principals, Dido and Aeneas.

It’s set in Carthage (now Tunisia), but I wanted it to have an Orientalist look, a Western idea of Eastern exotica. I based the moves on Indian and Indonesian classical dance—that’s the language of Dido, both of the hands and the feet and of the stage grammar. All of this demanded a certain flatness of dimensions. People say, “It looks like it came off a Greek vase.” No. The images on those vases are dancers being represented two-dimensionally. Nobody stood like that; it’s just how the artists managed perspective on a circular surface, to show those dancers painted flat. So it wasn’t “come to life,” it was kept dead.

The cast was finalized at twelve people, everyone in full view all the time. I wanted full ceremony, where no one, including me, was off duty for one second. We never left the scene. For one hour, each dancer was either watching the ceremony or participating in it. Everybody dyed his or her hair black. The makeup was black kohl eyeliner, early Martha Graham: pale powder, scarlet lipstick, either red, black, or gold nail polish, and golden earrings. Beautiful. The dance could only be done in sarongs—designed with Christine Van Loon—because that was what I had choreographed it for. We had to rehearse the whole thing in them, and develop a particular Javanese-inspired “sarong walk” to keep from tripping on our skirts. There was no shortcut to putting them on either, long pieces of fabric that hardly stretched and had to be tied. No new technology was allowed. Even my hair (often described as “glorious” or “flowing,” by the way) had just a chopstick stuck through it, no barrette. It was uncomfortable, ceremonial in a way I associate with South Asia, not punitive but a ritual ordeal. There was so much time sitting still, watching from the side of the stage in a strictly formal pose, that you thought you might pass out, sweat dropping rhythmically off the tip of your nose. You couldn’t have a drink of water, fix your hair, or go to the dressing room. The actual dancing came as a relief.

The performance space was the Théâtre Varia, a big empty room where we built the stage from nothing. The set featured a ramp up each side, with a vertical square at the front that framed the audience’s view. Robert Bordo, who’d been recently working on cartographic images, designed the décor. The band was on the floor (i.e., there wasn’t a pit), and the court dances were highly formal. (If you don’t like my work, you’d call it “schematic”; otherwise it’s “formal.”) Every move was text related, nearly every word of the text acted out, gestures matched directly to words to clearly illustrate the story. A lot of the gestures derived from American Sign Language, but a lot of it I concocted, so as far as a hearing-impaired person is concerned, Dido makes either perfect sense or none at all.

*Dido and Aeneas* film shoot, Toronto, 1996. (Cylla von Tiedemann)

That may need a little more explanation.

I’ve always maintained, and it’s not so original, that one communicates with one’s hands. Nondancers hardly notice or care about fifth position of the feet but understand a lot through the dancers’ hand gestures. In everyday communication, hands and faces communicate the truth, and can be the tell for a lie. It was something I started to take note of when I was stuck in Seattle, studying sign language (so something good came out of breaking my foot after all).

There were so many words in Dido and so many of them repeated—L’Allegro is the same way—that I’d started to develop explanatory signals. In L’Allegro, for example, every time anyone sang “come,” the dancers did the ASL gesture for “come.” When the word “here” is sung in Dido and Aeneas, the dancers pointed to the ground. Some gestures were therefore strictly ASL, others were adaptations, while still others—for example, the gesture for “fate,” which appears many times in Dido—I made up entirely. That particular gesture, with strongly splayed fingers, was hard to do, but very good for tendonitis (both causing and relieving it).

In the Sailor’s Dance in Dido, and many times after, the word “never” is accompanied by the ASL version, the top of a question mark on a diagonal. The dancers make that gesture in sailorish fashion every time that word pops up, and their facial expressions make sense of it whether you immediately understand it or not. The gesture for “mortal wounds”—one of the most memorable—became akin to “ripping your guts open and their spilling out,” though this was faux Graham rather than ASL. I’ve always personified Cupid in my work by the gesture of taking an arrow from a quiver and shooting it with a bow—it’s funny and accurate—so this “sign language” is part of how I communicate generally, but in Dido, it’s more than that.

Peter Sellars does it too. He calls it “Peter Sellars’s School of Dance”; I call it hand jive. If you assign a gesture to a word, and the chorus is singing in counterpoint onstage and does that gesture at the right moment, it makes an interesting visual composition. So in Gloria, in those soprano, alto, tenor, bass sections, when everyone is doing the move with the text or the rhythm—they don’t necessarily have to be illustrating the text, but their move accompanies a particular word—it makes it automatically as contrapuntal to look at as it is to listen to or to read.

When I later staged Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare, my “sign language” was taken from a great early Italian book called Gesture in Medieval Art and Antiquity, a treasure trove of fascinating drawings of the various fuck-yous of yore—stronza, malocchio, elbow biting. That was the source, with variations, of the aggressive confrontations for the various crowd scenes. And for Layla and Majnun, more recently, I studied Azerbaijani and Georgian folk dance, in which the women always hold their hands in a certain way. There’s a similar hand position in ballet, as if you’re holding on to a piece of paper with two fingers, the idea being that it doesn’t betray any sign of strain. But I’ve always liked to see the physical work, the strain.

I like what hands mean.

I DANCED Dido and the Sorceress. The Sorceress is as chaotic and horrifying as possible. I would almost use the word “camp.” It’s meant to be cruel: she’s an evil woman who wants Dido dead.

While I set the Sorceress on Jon, I made up Dido on Ruth. Having made the change of focus from all the parts being myself, I no longer wanted it to only be about me. I’d gone from “This is how I feel, I’m going to die” to “I’m not even in it as I make it up.” And then I put myself in the part, into those moves I’d choreographed on Ruth and Jon, and that’s why it worked, because it wasn’t just me feeling sorry for myself anymore. And that’s basically good, because . . . no one’s interested.

But Dido was very hard, probably the most demanding thing I’ve ever asked of myself. Every dance I’ve ever made up is difficult, but this was by far the most difficult, and I used to kill myself on a nightly basis. Dido itself is one of the great roles, and I felt an amazing sense of puissance performing it well, alone. Before I started the Lament, I always paused for a few seconds, an eternity of silence in a theater, as if to say, “Stop everything! Watch and listen.” I had the audience’s rapt attention in a tiny point of focus, something every child is familiar with.

Another big element of course was the ancient, worldwide theatrical tradition of men playing women’s roles. It didn’t mean I was a woman inside or I wanted to be a woman. In fact, when you’re a man doing a woman’s role, what you have to avoid is any type of caricature, and generally therefore you don’t do much different. You make yourself feel different, and if you have command over your interpretative abilities, it’s not a problem. But it was for the Belgians. They interpreted my Dido as my insult to all women (and presumably all men too). The press called it “a hideous spectacle.” One of the headlines was ALL OF BELGIUM STANDS SPEECHLESS BEFORE THIS DISASTER! They couldn’t work out the tone: pathos or parody? It was a violation of decorum, a “bad transvestite act,” tasteless, debased. Another review referred to me as “une Didon dodue,” a chubby Dido. Why, thank you! The august English dance critic Clement Crisp once said I had “the delicacy of a Duchess fording a trout stream.” I think that was about me generally, rather than particularly as Dido. I took it as a compliment.

Later on, when I stopped performing the role myself, it was great to see a woman dance the part of Dido, though when I first brought it back, I split the part between Amber Star Merkens and Brady McDonald because I didn’t necessarily think either of them could handle it. I was just being protective, both of myself, because I was so exceptionally close to the role, and of them—it’s a racking part, physically demanding, emotionally distressing, and you’re dead in every way by the end. Both Amber and Brady took it over on their own, and recently, Laurel Lynch—who’s big, a little butch, and a great artist—danced the part. I don’t see me in it at all anymore. I don’t even care. I was only worried, because I was a good performer, that the people who followed me wouldn’t be able to pull it off. But they could. And that makes it a good piece of art that can be replicated without nostalgia. It still works.

And when the Belgians saw my Dido, they heard the passionate voice of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. It was a real collaboration between the two of us, a dancer and a singer creating a single character. (She alternated the role with another wonderful mezzo, Mary Westbrook-Geha.) When I’d first met Lorraine, she wasn’t even a singer, she was a violist; then she was a soprano, then a mezzo-soprano, then a giant superstar mezzo. Her spirituality at the time was very angel-crystal-unicorn—I’m sure you’ve intuited that mine is not—and I loved her.

I have two terrible stories. She gave an unbearably great recital at Carnegie Hall—Handel and Haydn arias with Philharmonia Baroque. When it was over, I waved to her from the audience and swiftly made my exit into the corridor. But just as the door locked behind me, she sang another encore as I was trapped listening outside! How dare I leave too early? The final time I saw her perform was Les Troyens at the Met, one three-act opera that seems three evenings long. The production was boring, so I left before the last act, before the whole Dido finale, no less. Tragically that was the last time she performed it. She died not long after of breast cancer. I wish I’d stayed.

She was to have been the star of my version of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice at the Met in 2007 if she hadn’t died. That was going too far! She could have just said she didn’t want to. (People have told me never to say that again, but she’d have laughed. Besides, now it’s down in print, so I’ve said it forever.)

AMID ALL THIS FUROR over Dido, we tried to cheer ourselves up in any way we could. An anonymous notice appeared on the call-board.

We are currently in negotiation with Touchstone Pictures . . . for a feature film to be based on the company and its experiences in Brussels. This casting list is tentative. If you have serious objections to the actor assigned to your part, please write a list of 3 actors who you think should play the part . . .

Here are the highlights so you can better picture people depicted in this book:

YOUNG MARK MORRIS	Ricky Schroder
TEENAGE MARK MORRIS	Robby Benson (I corrected this to “Dweezil Zappa”)
MARK MORRIS	Roy Scheider
BARRY ALTERMAN	Judd Hirsch
NANCY UMANOFF	Cher
GERARD MORTIER	Jackie Mason
MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV	Rob Lowe
RUTH DAVIDSON	Belinda Carlisle & The Go-Go’s
TINA FEHLANDT	Linda Evans
PENNY HUTCHINSON	Shirley MacLaine
HANS-GEORG LENHART	Matthew Broderick
ERIN MATTHIESSEN	Kirk Douglas (Matthew Modine)
JON MENSINGER	Michael J. Fox
KRAIG PATTERSON	Diana Ross
YOUNG GUILLERMO RESTO	Prince
GUILLERMO RESTO	Omar Sharif
YOUNG KEITH SABADO	Sabu
KEITH SABADO	Toshiro Mifune (Linda Hunt)
DONALD MOUTON	Phil Donahue
LINDA DOWDELL	Carole King (Tom Hulce)
MAXINE MORRIS	Maureen Stapleton
MAUREEN MORRIS	Julie Kavner

When it came to Show Number Three, Mythologies, developed from Championship Wrestling at BAM, Le Soir ran the headline MARK MORRIS GO HOME, in English, of course, on the assumption that I couldn’t possibly understand it in French. (The Flemish-language paper predictably responded with MARK MORRIS PLEASE STAY.)

Mythologies was the turning point: “How dare you use Roland Barthes as source material? You’re American!” This show earned us the headline THE PATHETIC FRAUDS OF MARK MORRIS: ENOUGH! I understood the cultural background and the depth of the negative reaction, the context of the booing, but I hadn’t been plotting to offend; it wasn’t “proactive,” as people now say. I never once thought, as they imagined I did, “I dare you to like this”; I only ever thought, “I like this and I hope you do too.” I’m always trying to do something I’ve never done before. It’s as simple as that. I may naturally be an agitator, but Mortier hired me to be me, and I wasn’t doing anything freakier because we were out there. However, a lot of the booing was directed at me personally. Bear in mind that I was also naked, completely naked, in Mythologies and that my nakedness wasn’t meant to be sexy. If anyone expected the nudity to be erotic, they were sorely disappointed. It was just nakedness, unglamorized exposure, the facts—unashamed, unembarrassed, and uninteresting.

It was then I started to push back.

Belgium is bizarre. The French Belgians are more French than the French, and their papers were more conservative. They hated me most. The more intellectual and progressive papers were actually the Flemish-language ones, and although the Flemish didn’t like me much either, they at least defended my right to exist. So it was basically the French and the Flemish fighting each other via me. I found myself cannon fodder between the two halves of Belgium: MOMMY! DADDY! YOU’RE TEARING THIS FAMILY APART! The Flemish spoke Flemish, French, English, and maybe German, whereas the French spoke French and couldn’t be bothered to speak anything else, like in Quebec. (On a side note, I later did two ballets for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. I decided to give them non-English titles, so they couldn’t be translated into French. Why? Because, despite being vive la France! in every possible way, I am French resistant when it comes to Quebec. I called one piece Paukenschlag, the actual German name of Haydn’s Surprise Symphony; the other ballet was a beautiful piece for strings by Donizetti, choreographed in shapes of five. I called it, in Latin, Quincunx, because I love a quincunx, that beautiful geometric pattern like the number five on a die. When I saw the printed program, they’d renamed it, to my horror, Quinconce, the French spelling. Thank you, everyone in Quebec!)

Of course it hurts one’s feelings to be booed at curtain calls; it upset me personally because I wished they’d liked the show. I don’t gain power from being booed, so I bowed as though I was having roses thrown at me. It’s a point of dignity and I tried not to do it sarcastically. I accepted it. In that situation, “Fuck you!” isn’t in my nature.

However, I did resort to “fuck you” once at a big fashion gala evening at the Monnaie. It was a luxurious environment, 20,000-franc tickets. Nobody cared about us, the show started late, and everyone was drunk and laughing during the performance, perhaps a little derisively. For the curtain call, I came out in Bermuda shorts and zori with fake money that I’d found in the prop room and I threw money on my company: a joke. That was me trying to survive within a very tight system.

BRUSSELS—WHICH I ONCE HEARD described as “a city habitually underrated by tourists”—was a rainy, depressed, dog-shit-all-over-the-streets kind of city, always monochrome, light or dark gray. We were uncomfortable, and every weekend, if we could afford it, we’d leave for Paris or Amsterdam, where we’d check into a cheap hotel, go to cafés and smoke pot, then eat delicious Indonesian food, walk around, or go for a bike ride. Then we’d come back to work and stay in our cute apartments, go to the fabulous market, eat out, associate with each other, and that was it. We went shopping at the PX on the army base, because some of the women in the company needed cranberry juice for their bladder infections; that’s where we bought peanut butter, Advil, and other American necessities.

I never really translated the money I was making into dollars. It was Belgian francs at the time, and I’d just take out money and spend it. I’m not generally an overextravagant person, but I was extravagant in Brussels, because the food was great and I didn’t notice how much I was spending—a lot, all the time. Mortier’s largesse was incredible: fifteen people for a lunch meeting three hours long with five bottles of great wine at the best restaurant in town. In light of that experience, we’d think, “I loved that restaurant Mortier took us to! Let’s go there every night!” One particular Belgian beer was 12 percent alcohol. After several weeks of people vomiting in cabs on the way home, we switched to Stella.

I was vegetarian until I moved there, but now we found ourselves in Brussels, with its beautiful old-school French cuisine, where the restaurants had a table on the street outside displaying their wares, a beautiful Netherlandish still life: a dead pheasant, a fish, some pomegranates, a lobster, and a haunch of venison. That’s when I embraced actual food again, at places like Chez Richard, with its simple plank tables—a delicious green salad, a kilo of moules frites, followed by an incredible steak topped with a piece of Roquefort. Every night dinner was fabulous fresh food, be it a great Lebanese restaurant or the fancy creepy French restaurant Comme Chez Soi. I still tell people to go to L’Ogenblik—“The Blink”—a brasserie with sawdust-covered floors, where we ate twice a week. And Aux Armes de Bruxelles, where everything was served with ham and endive (Belgium’s other great export besides Béjart, as I apparently once claimed in an interview).

After rehearsal at rue Bara, we’d often go to a place at the station called Au Relais, which served my favorite dish, un portion mixte, toothpicks of cubes of sausage and cubes of cheese with celery salt. One evening, a whole gang of us was sitting at one of the long tables, Misha right next to me. This very drunk Belgian guy came up, said something like “Mark Morris, you are shit” in English, and poured an entire beer into my lap. I was almost certainly drunk too, but at the moment I realized exactly what he was going to do, I remember thinking, “Okay. Go ahead then.” Why did he do it? I was speaking English and I was gay with long hair. That may have been enough. I don’t know whether this was really linked to any huge offense my dance caused, though Nancy remembers that was precisely what it was about. I just thanked him.

I was tired of being on display, tired of being harassed, so I started hiding out in my house, cooking and eating at home. I’m told Belgium is now less homophobic, xenophobic, misogynist, and intolerant, but back then it was like the Eisenhower 1950s. I should put that in perspective: it wasn’t like Spain under Franco. In Belgium, they just didn’t like you and made your life as difficult as possible. The cops were thugs. If you were black or brown, you were stopped every three days, if not daily, and it happened to Guillermo, being among the more memorable in appearance, all the time. Invariably, a cop would stop Guillermo and then be surprised on finding that he was working for the Monnaie (and probably earning more money). The cop would have a computer record of every previous time Guillermo had been stopped, all without subsequent arrest. One cop asked why it happened so often. “Why do you think?” said Guillermo with a shrug. “And next time I’ll have been stopped that many times, plus one.” If you were a woman out at ten at night waiting for a bus, the car would cruise by and ask you to show identification. They’d make you empty your bags onto the hood of the car or onto the street. It was constant, and that’s when I stopped walking to work (and it was only a fifteen-minute walk). I started taking taxis because I didn’t want to be harassed. It was horrible. They hated everybody: Muslims, Americans, Africans. Nancy used to leave her apartment and cross the street diagonally, so she didn’t have to walk all the way around a traffic circle. The police would stop her, then escort her around the right way, purely to humiliate. Dancers would show up at rehearsal in tears.

The nearest I ever got to jail was when I was busted for possession of marijuana. I’d come back from Amsterdam with a little nugget of pot in my pocket that I’d forgotten about because I was high. When we arrived at the train station, we were greeted by dogs, policemen, sirens, everything except handcuffs. I had to agree to let them search my apartment, where they found a pipe and some pot. Barry and I were thrown in a holding tank for three or four hours. They even took our shoelaces and our belts as if we were planning on suicide. It was ridiculous. They taunted us with the phone call: “In America, we know you get a phone call when you get arrested. Well, you don’t get that here.” The officer on duty typed up the report purposefully slowly. I was incensed. But I was also nervous. The arrest would have been a giant scandal. The newspapers had already told me to go home; then I get arrested for pot and I’m in jail? I was probably very close to losing the job. In fact, they let us out and there was never a whisper. Whatever Mortier did, it was all very hush-hush. However, it left me somewhat paranoid for the rest of our stay, particularly because the cops now had the right to enter my apartment whenever they liked without a warrant, and even more particularly because Guillermo was living with me, providing hash (which he’d buy in the Moroccan quarter) to some of the dancers.

The arrest was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I gave up at that point. And by giving up I mean I went right back to work.

MY OLDER DANCERS, the original company, had always had an option to stay for one season and then go home. Several of them did. It was a big deal. Some of the dancers would have preferred to be one of twelve, rather than one of twenty-four. We’d doubled in number, and the mood wasn’t particularly good. There was a division between the old and the new dancers.

Barry’s theory, when things started to go wrong, was that we’d come to Belgium purely to destroy the company. But people didn’t leave morosely; it was more like “This isn’t for me.” Some were near the end of their performing careers; some just missed home; some had or wanted to start families. Susan Hadley’s husband had accompanied her but couldn’t find work, so they left; Winkie went home to her husband, Kenny, to get pregnant. Tina decided to stay on the basis that she wasn’t going back to anything, and remembers the second year as the best ever for her, personally and in dancing terms. I could have gone home after a year, but I didn’t want to. But no one said, “We quit. Fuck you!” It was organic but it did change things.

At one point, Nancy started posting the number of days remaining on the call-board so we could count down, because everyone was so looking forward to the whole experience being over.

THE FIRST PIECE was L’Allegro and the last was The Hard Nut, also a hit. It was the three years in between that were rocky.

There was Mythologies and the semi-joke horror show dance that was Wonderland, with a ninety-five-piece orchestra that had to rehearse for weeks because of the density of the Schoenberg music, Five Orchestral Pieces and Music for a Motion Picture. My idea had been to make up a piece for five people (to include Mr. Baryshnikov), based on stock Hitchcockian noirish types, that had nearly no dancing, just great impenetrable music. I wouldn’t claim it all made linear sense, but it was scenic: venetian blind lighting, fedoras, shadows, all the things that are happening in my head as I listen to the marvelous Bernard Herrmann’s scary, jagged strings on Hitchcock soundtracks. But the music was Schoenberg, which is even scarier.

It’s a beautiful dance, but we only ever did it once more (at BAM in 1990, to a recording), because the whole point—a joke, funny only to me perhaps—was to see how much money we could possibly spend on the orchestra and how little dancing we could get away with. The style in Europe at that time—Tanztheater (a word you can only translate into English literally) at the hands of Pina Bausch and her protégés—was violent, high impact, and precious little dancing. She was a brilliant artist, but the work of her protégés held no interest for me, and that’s what I was parodying with this dance of few steps and maximum angst. I was supposed to dance in Wonderland, but I got plantar fasciitis and Keith replaced me, so I actually never once got to do the piece, which almost made it perfect. The logical conclusion of “as little dance as possible”: no dance at all.

We followed the sublimely huge with the ridiculously silent. I choreographed Behemoth with no music, because I wanted to see whether I could. Trisha didn’t use music at all for many years—a lot of people didn’t back then—and though that wasn’t my prime interest (because I’m so reliant on music to engage me), I thought I’d try. It turned out that I could.

The evening’s program was called Loud Music—the joke being that Behemoth had no music at all—for which I made up two new dances (the second being Going Away Party, to recordings of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys). Normally I have a score “in hand” so I can fake making something up, if only to kick-start myself, but for Behemoth there was nothing, not even a diagram. I worked for a few weeks until I had what turned out to be about an hour’s worth of “material” (as we in the business call “moves”), all of which was very rhythmic and very organized. There was no particular story being told, but there were sections that I reordered, editing as I would normally do, ending up with a forty-five-minute piece for maybe a dozen people, called Behemoth for its length and weight. We did it at the Halles de Schaerbeek, a covered market around which all the streets were shut down for noise. Every night on the dot an ice cream truck went by, broadcasting “Whistle while You Work” into the silence. All the dancers were counting to themselves, trying desperately not to trigger each other into laughter. It is a tense, weird dance. A critic suggested it was about mental disorders, because there was some repetition and some shaking. It wasn’t.

There was nothing unsatisfying about that experience, though it’s true that I’ve never done silence again. I like music so much; I can only just do without it. Music complicates things for choreographers, most of whom are just choreographing to a beat or to an atmosphere anyway, as opposed to the actual music as it is composed. We once programmed Behemoth between the two Liebeslieder Walzer, beautiful Brahms split in half by a forty-five-minute silent intermission.

MEANWHILE (AND NOT DIRECTLY because of Wonderland and Behemoth), things had been getting very bad with Mortier and my management.

He and Barry had learned to hate each other. They loved taunting each other. They tortured each other. Barry refused to learn French, and didn’t understand a word, whereas Nancy took the Flemish route because of her husband-to-be. Once Mortier was walking down the corridor in our office, tap-tap-tapping his way, presumably to see Nancy. He was so nervous to be in the corridor that he walked into Barry’s office by mistake, let out a shriek, and fled. They were no longer on speaking terms. At the end of the first year, while we were on tour, he’d refused to renew their contracts, and Nancy tells me that at the very tense meeting where he finally agreed to compromise, he signed the contracts, then immediately ripped them up to show how little he cared. I don’t remember, but that’s a fabulous thing to do.

Things got even worse after an interview in the London Times in which I described Belgium as racist, sexist, homophobic, highly conservative (much as I have done above), and, in short, somewhat fascist. The headline in Le Soir the next day was the French for MARK MORRIS SPITS IN THE SOUP AGAIN! (MARK MORRIS CONTINUE À CRACHER DANS LA SOUPE!) I received the following letter, originally in French, from Robert Wangermée, the president of the Monnaie/De Munt, on March 29, 1990:

Dear Sir,

In a meeting that took place on March 28th, the Board of Directors became aware—much to its members’ surprise and dismay—of certain remarks you made about Belgium, which appeared in an interview with the British newspaper The Times dated March 23rd.

The Board of Directors has charged me with determining whether you actually made those remarks and, barring any denial on your part, I’m to convey the Board’s extreme dissatisfaction.

I should add that if you have such contempt for the country that welcomes you, the Board would not object to your prematurely terminating your contract with the T.R.M.

I look forward to hearing from you regarding the issues raised in this letter.

Respectfully yours,

The President

I counted to ten in French and chose my words as carefully as I could:

Dear Mr. Wangermée,

Thank you for your letter of 29 March.

First let me say that I am sorry if I caused anyone to take offense because of remarks attributed to me in The Times. It is never my intention to sow discord and I sincerely regret any discomfort caused by The Times article.

It is unfortunate of course that The Times writer chose to excerpt out of context these brief remarks from a wide-ranging two-hour interview. The societal ills to which I made reference (racism, sexism, etc.) are present in every Western democracy (not just Belgium as the article infers) and I think any honest and justice-seeking person would agree. And I have been repeatedly quoted on the record as criticizing these same problems in the United States.

I am a choreographer, however, not a speechmaker, and that is how I must be judged. Since coming here in the fall of 1988 at the invitation of De Munt/La Monnaie, I have created many works which have won widespread international acclaim and praise for Belgium, its national opera, and its director M. Mortier.

I am most grateful to Belgium, my adopted country, for affording me the opportunity to work freely, independent of financial and political interference. I will continue until the conclusion of my contract in June 1991 to make dances to the best of my ability and serve the cause of art.

Sincerely,

Mark Morris

It was a close one. I stayed.

NANCY RECENTLY FOUND an MMDG Communiqué from the latter part of the Brussels period. The tone sums it all up:

We have come to a critical juncture. A mountain has erupted in the middle of the road. New paths must be created.

The move to Brussels was attempted to satisfy certain specific needs:

1. A permanent studio facility.

2. Higher production values (i.e. live music).

3. A better financial package for the dancers.

4. An end to the American Modern Dance conundrum of scanty rehearsal–long tour.

5. A home.

All of these were realized to a greater or lesser extent. And they remain valid goals. Of course, every action, no matter how small, unleashes a myriad of unforeseen consequences. And moving to Europe was no small action.

Barry then listed the positives—the dances, the meeting of new people, the lifting of the perception of MMDG to a higher level—before moving on to the negatives:

A. The yielding of final power and control over our finances and futures to an institution which does not and cannot understand what we are and what we need. (We are everything to us; we are only the annoying and troublesome Dance Division to the Monnaie.) . . .

B. The hiring of some wrong people and the lack of mechanism to part ways with them. . . . This has contributed to a malaise which, while not pervasive, is undeniably present.

C. Lack of flexibility. This is ironic, as a prime goal . . . was greater latitude in the choosing of projects and venues. . . .

This current situation is bankrupt and cannot be salvaged, there is no fight to be had in this situation, only dissolution and construction. Contexts must change, and the task here is to identify the ideal and realize it as closely as resources and circumstances allow.

There then followed much speculation about the identity of the ideal: how many dancers, where to base the dance company in the future (London was an early idea). The communiqué ends:

I’m running out of ribbon so I can’t write anymore. Mao: Great disorder under Heaven: the situation is excellent.