Ten
Grand Duo
MMDG started in 1980 but didn’t take until 1984, and five years later—merely five years—I had that fabulous gig in Brussels. Now we’d been gone three and a half years, from 1988 to 1991, and though we’d kept the home pump primed with a little touring, it was hard to tell quite what we were returning to. Happily, we found we’d been missed.
People had read the newspapers and magazines reporting how deliciously awful everything was, how flamboyant, controversial, and American I was, and we found ourselves in demand, a bigger and better attraction. It was as if people loved me now not just as a choreographer but as an American. The group, however, was no longer simply a tightly knit group of friends. We’d become an institution. The stakes were higher and life needed appropriate recalibration. It was in Brussels that I learned to be more guarded. I worked out that if I said something bad, people got pissed at me. Without question, I developed more of a filter. But it was also just growing up. You stop doing the things you don’t like or the things that don’t work. One thing was certain: without an administration to answer to anymore, I could now make up and put on dances whenever.
We’d always known we were coming back, but on our return, having experienced all that, we wondered why we didn’t have our own building. The answer was self-evident: “Because you’re a Modern Dance company, the pathetic runt of the arts (mostly for pretty good reason), and you don’t deserve it, because you’re naughty and you haven’t worked hard enough.”
We had no choice but to get back into the old routine of rented studios with dirty floors and no hot water, heat, or AC (uncomfortable year-round) in warehouse studios where the elevators stopped at five p.m. That was every single available option: sixty dollars an hour for a shithole, dispiriting for dancers and choreographers alike. Back then, artists lived in lofts—SoHo, then Tribeca, before the exodus to Brooklyn—where they had a studio and a cramped bedroom in the back, which is what everybody did. But pretty soon money moves in and the artists move out. It’s the natural order of events. We didn’t have even the luxury of a loft (though we did occasionally rent Lar’s studio, which was nice).
Our rehearsal schedule might be two to four-thirty somewhere in Midtown; the next day, ten a.m. to one p.m. in Chelsea, then six p.m. to eight p.m. on the Upper East Side. It was endlessly stressful. Eliot Feld wouldn’t let us use his studios at 890 Broadway, because he thought bare feet would ruin his floor, though, in fact, it would only have damaged our feet—the tacky rosin rips your soles open. We weren’t technically on the street, but it felt like it, living out of a bag, dirty because most of the places had no showers. And let’s put this in perspective: I was a successful choreographer.
That’s why residencies were so attractive and envy inducing. Jacob’s Pillow for a few weeks in the off-season was an unbelievable luxury, and there were magical and valuable residencies at Boston, Champaign-Urbana, and Berkeley. It’s also why the job at the University of Washington had been worthwhile: an excellent rehearsal space.
So we had the idea of our own building, a permanent home. And plenty of reasons to do it.
It just took ten years.
ONE WAY IN WHICH we’d kept America’s interest piqued during our absence had its origin in another of those late-night conversations that take place in murky Belgian bars.
If it wasn’t Le Cercueil, the Coffin, it was A la Mort Subite, the Sudden Death—you sense a theme—a famous old drinking hole where the ceiling, once Hapsburg yellow, was now tobacco brown. I always felt at home there, partly because the mean, fabulous barmaids somehow managed to treat you like family and like shit simultaneously, and partly because I’d choreographed a dance, long before, to some Poulenc for Boston Ballet (my first ever ballet commission) and called it Mort Subite. We’d generally go in a big mob, get smashed, and eat spaghetti Bolognese, the commonly acknowledged and ubiquitous hangover prevention, and my regular late-night snack until I found mouse turds in mine.
On this particular night, however, Misha and I were alone. He wasn’t quite finished dancing yet; he wanted his career to not be over. He couldn’t really do ballet anymore, but he could really dance. It’s a letdown for the audience to see a forty-year-old dancer in slacks even if he’s still dancing beautifully—you remember him as a ballet dancer, sexy in white tights—so it would have to be something else. His suggestion was “What would you think about a company of older people who are tired of dancing with other companies?” (He was maybe forty-two at the time, ancient for dance; I was a mere thirty-four.) It was that simple. We’d start a company together that did my work in the States while we were still in Brussels. I’d dance too. Great! Various dancers in the autumn of their careers sprang to mind: first and foremost Misha, but also Rob Besserer, for example, and Kate Johnson from Paul Taylor’s company, Misha’s suggestion. He’d already floated the idea with Rob, who’d encouraged him to talk to me: I was the choreographer with the dances, Misha had always liked my work, and the two of us were close.
He already had the backing of Howard Gilman (his benefactor for some while), the Gilman Foundation, and more generally Gilman Industries—everything Gilman—which had always supported both ballet and endangered species (by which I mean actual endangered wildlife species, not just dance, though the appeal of dance might have been its always imminent extinction). Gilman himself had fingers in a lot of pies, but his main thing was philanthropy in the shape of hospital wings, cardiology, not to mention a breeding center for those animals, insemination for cheetahs. All the money came from paper, mills, and forests. MMDG also had his very generous funding, and, as it happens, the dressing room at my building now is named for Howard. His picture is right by the showers, which is where he would have wanted to be. He wouldn’t have objected to seeing the male dancers naked for all eternity. He and Misha were very close—an older brother/platonic lover relationship—and he was a wonderful friend to both of us.
And so it came to pass that we became the White Oak Dance Project, for which Howard built a studio on his seven-thousand-acre plantation White Oak, in Florida, north of Jacksonville: astonishing, a movie set, a James Bond villain’s lair. You drove long, straight miles through forests until the road opened up onto a vast plantation, a corporate retreat for his company with a massive zoo area with its own staff who only looked after the animals.
When we first arrived, the studio wasn’t quite finished. They cut down trees and laid a beautiful floor for us. Voilà! We all had our own little quarters—mine were right by the courts, a one-room residence with a kitchenette (fridge fully stocked with vodka and my favorite cheese balls, handy in case I happened to find myself stoned) and three walls of glass, with white rhinos loitering freely in beautiful nature nearby, and out-of-control deer abounding. I’d feed the giraffes, which were fenced in but just walking around, eight of them with their long black tongues. We’d get high and tool around in golf carts, not to mention the two-lane bowling alley and the giant fishing boat. It was very heaven.
Portrait of Mikhail Baryshnikov and me by Annie Leibovitz, New York City, 1988.
But despite the temptations, we worked hard, stayed six weeks, and built a repertory. The agreement had been that it would be solely my choreography—some existing pieces, some new—but that after our return, White Oak would commission other work. The dancers—some of the great veterans—included Misha and Kate; Rob, Peggy Baker, and Nancy Colahan (who had all danced with me in Lar’s company); William Pizzuto and Denise Pons from Boston Ballet; and Jamie Bishton, who’d danced with Twyla—just these few people, to whom we added dancers from my own company for the first tour, with Peter Wing Healey as my assistant and Linda Dowdell our musical director. Everybody was an adult, in their late thirties or early forties, and still dancing very well, though dance may officially have considered them over the hill—a fascinating group. Annie Leibovitz, who came for a month, commemorated the company’s genesis in a handsome book.
Motorcade (a bold, brash dance to Saint-Saëns, from which there is a famous photo of Misha on Rob’s shoulders on a beach) served as the announcement of White Oak, on a bill of my dances at a glamorous benefit at the Wang Center in Boston, on October 24, 1990 (just three months before The Hard Nut premiere in Brussels). This piece was made specifically to showcase Mr. Baryshnikov, and the various talents of the specific White Oak dancers, all of whom I knew very well, and whose skills were in the direction of either ballet (for example, Billy Pizzuto) or Modern Dance (Kate). I’d choreographed the dances on both White Oak and my company, as I did with A Lake and Mosaic and United, and the pieces often ended up with a mix of performers from both. The rest of that first program featured Ten Suggestions (Misha doing what had originally been my solo), Pas de Poisson (danced by me, Misha, and Kate), and Going Away Party.
I’ve always thought Mosaic and United one of my best, a dance to music nobody knows, in this case the moving primitive modernism of Henry Cowell’s String Quartets nos. 3 and 4, for five dancers (partly because there are fives throughout the music). Dancers love Mosaic and United, and its particular quality is partly a result of my working with dancers I wasn’t used to working with. When I make up a ballet on a ballet company, it happens in the room—I don’t have it all in my head before I go in—and Mosaic and United was therefore a happy combination of the White Oak personnel in front of me and my own personal inspiration from the music right then. There’s a wonderful openness in Cowell’s music that doesn’t lead the listener to a particularly foreseeable place, and the dance, which is very varied between movements, does the same thing. To this day, Mosaic and United surprises even me.
On tour, the company traveled in an old private propeller plane of Gilman’s, together with all our musicians and the entire crew. We’d land in an airfield, where a van waited, engine idling; they’d have called ahead and kept a restaurant open for us, say a Benihana. Imagine the luxury: Benihana! On a day off in Nashville, we went to the Grand Ole Opry and got VIP seats right on the stage to see Porter Waggoner, then had to sprint on the tarmac to catch the plane, shopping bags full of newly purchased cowboy boots. Traveling with Misha offered a glimpse of a previously unexperienced level of fame. At the curtain call, women held up their babies so they could bask in Baryshnikov’s glorious glow. He’d whisper as we bowed, “I hope none of them are mine.” Perhaps these were the same women who, having paid someone off to find out on which secret runway our old plane was landing, waited to greet Misha in that obscure part of the airport with balloons and flowers.
White Oak lasted two seasons while we were in Brussels, but on our return it had become a repertory company commissioning work from many choreographers, and it didn’t make as much sense to compete with another company doing my work, though it had been a good way to maintain visibility while we were abroad, which was Nancy and Barry’s gift. In fact, White Oak lasted twelve years or more, until it no longer made sense.
I’ve since had retreats with my company at the White Oak plantation—we’d go on a day off in Florida—but it’s very much diminished now. Gone are all the endangered species, including Misha and me. I have no idea what they did with the animals. Maybe killed them, ate them, skinned them, and made coats of the pelts. Unlikely. Gilman was always a class act.
As for Misha, he credits me with extending his performing career, which is kind, and also true. I accept that responsibility. And then, after I extended it, he kept going some more! He’s still going. In fact, he’s outlasted everyone because he’s tireless, satisfied only when he gets to perform. That’s very unusual since most ex-dancers become massage therapists. He always had a wide variety of very interesting, creative friends, among whom he can continue to act, dance, and perform.
He still likes me to make up dances for him. “I’ll do a little dance,” he might mention, “if you have something.” Not long ago, I needed him as the Old Man character in the ensemble for my dance A Wooden Tree to some of Ivor Cutler’s unusually beautiful songs.
ONE OF THE FIRST MMDG dances on our return to the USA reacquainted me with the music and genius of Lou Harrison.
We’d first worked together in Seattle on Strict Songs with the men’s chorus, when my foot was broken, but we’d since become close friends, and I’d been visiting him and Bill in Aptos, California, for years. Whenever I played the Bay Area, he’d come to the show, and he was even at my mother’s eightieth birthday, because he happened to be in Seattle. They were the same age, and they sat and chatted. Old people have that way of getting along.
While living and working in New York in the 1950s, Lou had a breakdown and subsequently moved back west to Aptos, then just a wooded hilltop above Santa Cruz, into a little shack without water or electricity, which he then expanded into a house he built himself, planting a beautiful garden along a mythological theme—acacia, acanthus, and laurel. There was a big patch of forest on a steep incline down to the ocean. Back then the two-mile walk to the Pacific was desolate; now it’s completely filled in, basically a suburb, houses abutting one another. He painted the whole place himself too, and everything was decorated with weird details, like a museum, and far from fancy. With music too, he started from scratch, with new ears, looking west rather than east, writing music based on the Pacific Rim rather than Europe. Strict Songs had been one of the first pieces in his new style.
You could tell he’d been in that house for years. There were multiple carpets in the Middle Eastern way, a carpet and then a smaller carpet on top; you were ankle deep in beautiful kilims. The bathroom was called the Tchaikovsky Room, featuring a life-sized painting of the composer naked on the back of the door.
Lou was still teaching at Mills College and gave all the classes at his house, so the place was like a music shop, with instruments lying around, a gamelan room (of course), a harp (because Lou would become proficient enough on any instrument to be able to write for it), and a small living area, including a kitchen with a pot of soup perpetually simmering on the stove: he and Bill just kept adding to and eating from it for weeks. He even had Charles Ives’s piano up there. Lou had more or less made Ives known, edited his music and championed him, though Ives subsequently didn’t talk to him for years after finding out Lou was queer.
We’d pile into Lou’s pickup and he’d drive us down the hill to this Mexican cafeteria, where he’d set the table, serve the food, and pay for everyone (maybe ten dollars). His boyfriend Bill was a little older and shorter than Lou, with a Rasputin beard, and he’d stand between Guillermo and me, posing for a photo, and grab our asses. You’d be talking to Lou (who naturally had a crush on Guillermo), and Bill would dart across the room naked behind him for the amusement of the guests. He had long been a guide for the Sierra Club, disappearing into the woods for a month at a time, and he carried with him the aroma of the forest. He died chopping wood on the path down to the ocean, a few years before Lou. Toward the end of his life, Lou stopped wearing shoes because his feet hurt, so he just wore galoshes with no shoes inside.
THE NEXT DANCE TO LOU’S MUSIC after Strict Songs, on our return from Belgium, was “Polka.” I’d heard Lou’s Grand Duo for Violin and Piano, and instantly decided to choreograph the fifth movement. The dance is four or five minutes, and can be done by any even number of people. Don’t get me wrong. It wouldn’t really be interesting with as few as two or as many as ten thousand. There’s a sweet spot: about fourteen.
I told Lou that I was choreographing “Polka.” He laughed and said, “Oh, that little rumba!” It’s very hard to play, featuring among other complications an octave banger—a piece of wood, like the damper for the strings of a piano, padded and felted—which enables you to play a full octave cluster of notes on the black or white keys. Bill manufactured bangers; in fact he invented them. We used to order them directly from him, and he’d craft them by hand. (It turns out this was a courtesy. Now that Bill’s dead, Johan makes them in about five minutes.)
“Polka” turned into something of a signature for us, and became the finale on every program we did for at least six months, a party piece resembling a five-minute scramble. (After some years’ experience, we can actually manage polka tempo.) The costumes were a part of it. I’d seen a nightgown in the window of a Montreal department store, maybe Hudson’s Bay, a woman’s canary-yellow silk slip, and I bought it for a lot of money (maybe one hundred Canadian dollars, a foolish extravagance). These, more or less, were the costumes, the men’s belted, the women’s beltless. I don’t like thongs on women (nor do they—thongs make dancing extremely uncomfortable), so the women wore briefs under their dresses while the men wore dance belts, ballet’s version of an athletic supporter that makes the ass very distinct, even as the front package is “Ken dolled,” reading only as a mound rather than a penis. Buttocks were therefore glimpsed in the performance, and for some reason this was scandalous, but it was a scandal only because the asses were male. If it had been women’s asses, no one would have said a thing.
We’d been offered a desirable off-season residency at Jacob’s Pillow, early fall, two weeks in unwinterized cabins in the Berkshires. And that’s where I retro-constructed “Polka,” picking out the movement themes and developing them backward, with the idea that it would now be the last movement of the entirety of Lou’s Grand Duo, from which it was excerpted: why not do the whole thing? I had the costume designer, Susan Ruddie, do the same. We retrofitted them from the last dance backward, adding longer pants and shirts to the earlier movements, so the dancers started off more or less fully clothed and those clothes disappeared as the dance went on, until they’re scantily clad by “Polka.” But I didn’t have that in mind at all when I made up “Polka.” Grand Duo was art from the end first, extrapolated backward.
People talk about Grand Duo’s tribalism, its commune-ism, its primitivity. What they want to say is its Rite of Springishness, whatever people think that means. It’s all true; I’d just never describe my work that way. “Polka” is how I imagine cavemen used to dance for fun around the fire.
In fact, I didn’t set Lou’s entire score, only 80 percent. There’s another movement, his favorite, a long, contemplative largo that would have ruined a dance that was already nearly half an hour without it. So I cut that out, which he didn’t like, but allowed. There was to be payback for this.
AN INVITATION TO the Adelaide Festival of 1994 exposed me to an overwhelming amount of Eastern culture. My mind was thrown open to things I simply hadn’t seen before, while the trip also affirmed some things I already knew but my dancers didn’t, so it was valuable for everybody. It was also a breakthrough for my own work.
We were there three weeks, the only Western act aside from William Forsythe’s great Frankfurt Ballet. Everything else was Asian or Australian, including aboriginal. Adelaide was Presbyterian and one might even say a little uptight, white glove, xenophobic, and a bit Belgian. The newspapers rejected this beautiful festival; one reviewer said it had too much “soy sauce.” The genius behind it all, Christopher Hunt—the very same man who’d introduced me to Peter Sellars—invited us to do three different bills over thirteen performances in two different theaters: Dido, L’Allegro, and a repertory show featuring the newer Grand Duo, Mosaic and United, A Spell, and Bedtime.
There were all kinds of events—outside, inside—of which I went to two or three a day, whenever we weren’t performing. I nearly lost my mind at my first Javanese wayang kulit puppet show all-nighter, dusk till dawn, those leather puppets rear-projected on a screen to the soundtrack of a big gamelan, all live. The narratives were all from the Ramayana, but the shows cited everything from local politics, sex, and current events right up to what had happened that day at the festival. There was an unbearably sublime Bunraku puppet show from Osaka, and some Vietnamese water puppets, for which the action happened on the surface, and the puppeteers operated the puppets from underwater. Sensational!
Christopher had had the brilliant idea of a performers-only lounge, so the festival participants had a place to go at night to congregate over drinks and food, and this made for a terrific sense of community among the performers. That’s where we all became friends: drummers, dancing Cook Islanders, percussionists and singers from Sumatra, the Papuan theater company doing a show about being in a doctor’s waiting room with a broken leg and VD. Everybody was selling crafts, sculptures, and puppets, wooden carvings from Papua New Guinea, like a flea market. It was twenty-four-hours-a-day fun, as though there was no language barrier. We put on talent shows in the theater, just for our fellow performers, sending up each other’s work. My big number was “Go Tell Aunt Rhody (the Old Grey Goose Is Dead),” which I played on water glasses with a spoon, with accompaniment from Linda Dowdell (who was my first ever music director) on the piano; everyone was flirting and who doesn’t want that?
ANOTHER GREAT NEW COLLABORATOR of this period, and ever since—the most collaborative of all the collaborators—was Yo-Yo Erneste Ma (that’s his middle name, born in France to Chinese parents). He was already a big star when I met him, though the exact time or day or season of that first meeting is lost to memory. He courted me professionally, suggesting the project that turned into the filmed dance Falling Down Stairs, our first collaboration, in 1995.
Completely out of the blue, he sent me a book titled Baroque Dance Forms, a rather awkward volume for a choreographer to receive, a little like me sending him How to Play the Cello by Mark Morris. The accompanying letter explained that he was involved in a project with the six cello suites of Bach, unaccompanied études, great pieces of music never intended to be performed for an audience, that had been introduced into the repertory by Pau Casals, the great Catalonian cellist. Yo-Yo, being Yo-Yo, wanted there to be a different collaborator for each suite: the ice skaters Torvill and Dean, the great kabuki actor Bandō Tamasaburō, the director Atom Egoyan, the dead architectural artist Piranesi, me, and . . . you name it. Yo-Yo was in cahoots with a Canadian film and television production company. Was I interested?
In the film of this collaboration, I wasn’t lying when I told him that I hadn’t initially wanted to do it, that I worried about committing a crime against the music. It seemed too obvious, a little like choreographing “Happy Birthday.” But he explained the music’s fundamental appeal to cellists. In short, he persuaded me.
The third suite in C major was the one I knew best (from Page in Seattle), so I started on that. Yo-Yo mistakenly says that I had a dream about falling down stairs. This is how he remembers it, but in fact it was Ruth Davidson’s dream. She dreamed that she fell downstairs at my mother’s house, she took a horrible spill, and blood trickled from the side of her mouth, and I’d thought of it as the perfect visual for Bach’s descending scale from C down to the C below it, and then an arpeggio to the C below that.
That was the theme. Yo-Yo began FedExing me cassette recordings of his performance the previous night on tour. I’d choreograph to these recordings in rehearsal studios all over town, and then we’d get together, for a couple of days every few months, because he wanted to be affected by the dancers around him as he played. Because of this, what I was doing started to subtly change too, and as I coached him, he played differently, which subsequently affected my choreography. It was genuinely collaborative.
With Yo-Yo Ma, during filming of Falling Down Stairs, circa 1994. (Cylla von Tiedemann)
We filmed it at Jacob’s Pillow. It was the first part of the series of six, and the camera’s view was 360 degrees (there’s no proscenium), so everything—monitors, cameras, and dancers—had to be fully choreographed. Not easy. Isaac Mizrahi designed the costumes beautifully, one of the first things he did for me. Everybody wore a different tone of silk velvet, loosely based on guild costumes from the Middle Ages, almost like costumes for Die Meistersinger.
The movie is good—and won an Emmy—despite committing the cardinal sin of making it seem like the dancing was Yo-Yo’s vision, a bizarre faux hologram of his imagination as he played: “Here’s the dance I see in my head!” The rosin you see flying off the cello strings is talcum powder, because he was finger-synching to a recording of himself. It was stunt rosin.
We had prerecorded the music in a quiet church with ideal acoustics in Lee, Massachusetts, near Jacob’s Pillow. For this, Guillermo and I sat directly in front of Yo-Yo, miming the dance so he knew the right tempi and phrasing. It was an important recording, in that it would be commercially released (rather than one we’d simply use as playback for the film), so the vestry was teeming with Sony sound technicians surrounded by equipment. Barry, everybody’s handler (a job he did very well for years), was there too and, crucially to the story, so was Johan, my technical director.
We’d just started the rehearsal when the cello—a Guarneri or a Stradivarius worth a billion dollars and a thousand years old—started making an awful buzzing sound. It couldn’t possibly be played, let alone recorded. The nearest capable luthier was three hours away in Boston; it would have meant a helicopter, three days of blocking and gluing, and no recording at all. A disaster.
Johan picked the cello up, shook it, put his ear to it, tapped it, and diagnosed a crack at some precise point on the soundboard. He tore off a piece of duct tape and patched this priceless instrument, the varnish of which was probably the reason for its perfect sound. This silenced the buzz, Yo-Yo recorded, we mimed the dance, it sounded beautiful, and the duct tape stayed on there for years.
WE REARRANGED Falling Down Stairs for the stage—more straightforward than I’d imagined it would be, given the complexity of the TV version; we simply faced it to the front and Yo-Yo played in the downstage right corner—and premiered it in 1997, the same year as my not-quite-next collaboration with Lou, Rhymes with Silver, which he wrote for me. This was partly payback for my having cut that lengthy largo from Grand Duo. (There was also Pacific for the San Francisco Ballet in between, but we’ll come back to that.)
On one of my trips to Aptos, Lou eyed me suspiciously and asked, “What do you want? You look like you want something.”
He was right. I told him I wanted him to write a piece of music for me. I only later learned that he was done with the music industry, that he was only writing music for himself and his friends.
There had been two bad situations. The first bad situation was Keith Jarrett, the jazz pianist. Lou had heard Jarrett perform, improvising presumably, and told Keith that he should write a concerto for himself. Keith instead asked Lou to write one for him. One can only imagine the long-distance communication and labor involved in this, because Lou had a specific tuning in mind for the concerto, of course, and Keith was far away, in Germany or New Jersey, wherever. They both retuned their pianos, and Lou would send what he was writing to Keith to find out whether it was playable.
The result was a great piano concerto, which Jarrett premiered and then toured to acclaim—something of a comeback for Lou—but when Lou wrote to Jarrett’s manager, asking if he’d be getting a check, the manager replied, according to Lou’s biography, “There was no contract, was there?” In other words, the honor of composing for Jarrett should be payment enough. And that was that. Lou had been shafted—they didn’t compensate him appropriately—and he was furious. He said it felt like a castration. Keith Jarrett: famously an asshole, and I suppose this is another instance.
Another debacle was the attempted Lincoln Center staging of Lou’s opera Young Caesar, originally written as a puppet opera just as Haydn and Mozart had written for puppets, and an early example of Lou’s new Eastern style. It’s a presentation of the gay Young Caesar, his boyfriend, and fellow soldiers—Peking opera in style—and I was to stage it. I courteously mentioned that there wasn’t quite enough music, and asked, “Could I get another couple of numbers?” He wrote three more arias at my request.
As things progressed, however, I decided to withdraw, very carefully, from the project. I didn’t think it could be done well enough, and Lincoln Center wasn’t much help. The new arias were great, but I wasn’t sold on Robert Gordon’s libretto, and I wanted to do more editing than I tactfully felt able to. In order to offend no one, particularly Lou, I blamed my departure on my schedule. No problem. My replacement was Bill T. Jones, a renowned choreographer, because that’s how things go, but the problems with the libretto remained, so the libretto was revised without Lou’s or Robert’s permission, and presented to Lou as a fait accompli. I can only imagine his reaction. The project was dropped. Luckily, I was off the hook by then.
There’s an excellent 2011 documentary, Lou Harrison: A World of Music, that contains a scene where Nigel Redden, who ran the Lincoln Center Festival, is at a meeting about Young Caesar with Dennis Russell Davies, the conductor, in which they’re talking about my participation at the dawn of the project:
“Oh, we got Mark Morris! He’s in!”
At that very moment, a framed picture crashes to the floor and the glass breaks.
Cut.
AS A RESULT of these and other disappointments, Lou, unbeknownst to me, had in effect stopped composing. I, in my innocence, was asking him to write again.
He started in immediately. “How long is it?”
I said, “I don’t know; you haven’t written it yet. I’m just asking if you’d consider it. However long you want, fifteen minutes, forty-five . . .”
“What’s the orchestration?”
“Whatever you want. A boys’ choir and five harps if you like. I’d like a piano part for Linda Dowdell and a cello part for Yo-Yo. Other than that . . .”
“Is there text? Is it sung?”
“It’s up to you.”
“How about cor anglais?”
“Great idea.”
“Is it to go on tour?”
“Ideally, yes.”
“So chamber music might be better. Do you want to make up the dance and I’ll write the music to it? That’s what I’m used to doing.”
“Well, I guess I could . . . but I’ve never worked that way.”
“Oh, you want the music first and then you make up the dance to it.”
“Yes. If you want that.”
After a long pause he said, “I’ll write a piece of music for you. But never ask me about it again.”
And that was it. We had lunch. I was dismissed.
As for when it would be ready, or what it was going to be: nothing.
TWO WEEKS LATER I received a big manila envelope marked “MM1,” full of music. It was a kit, a compositional technique invented by Henry Cowell, used especially during the years he was imprisoned (for homosexuality, in San Quentin in 1936—Ives disavowed him, the composer Percy Grainger defended him), when he wrote parts for whoever could play an instrument, the point being that the parts could be played in any combination with any number of players.
This first music Lou sent me (and I had no idea how much more he’d be sending or what form it might take—for all I knew, this was all of it) was that kind of kit, including a piano part and a percussion part. The accompanying note gave some instructions:
Each line can be repeated any number of times or omitted.
The lines can be played in any sequence.
It can be played in any octave.
The tempo is basically fixed.
When you finish, hit the home key of G. That’s the end.
Those were the Cageian parameters. The piece of music could either go on perpetually or not exist at all. My immediate thought was that this was punishment for my editing Grand Duo, that he was basically dropping it in my lap. “Here’s some music: you piece it together. Best wishes.”
But that was just MM1!
Then I got MM2, MM3, and so on. These followed every week or so, some through-composed, some in kit form. There was a very difficult part for solo cello, some of which he’d already sent to Yo-Yo to ascertain its playability with an accompanying note:
I am sending off to you a piece which I have composed as a part of my commission from Mark Morris for a ballet. . . . In order to continue I would be very grateful if you would kindly look over the rhapsody to let me know how it fits. Please tell me “no no”s and “yes yes”es if you find them. You would do a great kindness to an old composer.
Yo-Yo replied:
Yes, yes, I like it very much. I find it not only very expressive but eminently playable. . . . I am sure that the idea of a Kit will be a lot of fun to work with. You and I know that Mark will definitely have an opinion on that.
No kidding.
THE COMPOSITION KEPT ARRIVING. There were some pieces he’d reworked from older music of his, a gigue from the 1940s written for clavichord rearranged for strings and percussion; and wonderful little dances including a Turkish-styled piece in eleven beat phrases. One of the pieces was a strange waltz for strings and piano. By the time of its arrival, I had the courage to send it back with the remark that it seemed incomplete, as though it didn’t finish itself. I heard nothing; then a week later I got the slightly rewritten piece. Surprisingly, it wasn’t longer but shorter by seven bars and it was complete—he’d heard it and reduced it to perfection. Then he decided to add a percussion part to Yo-Yo’s cello kit, so he sent another. “Play it or not” was the idea, “repeat it or not.”
With Lou Harrison and Yo-Yo Ma backstage, Berkeley, California, 1997. (June Omura)
Lou’s letters were always typed in a beautiful, ornate medieval font of his own design, often with the sign-off line “Have good health and a rising bank account!” After I’d asked him (against his specific instructions) how everything was going, he wrote (on December 1, 1996):
I’m much working on music for you although I’ve no idea what may eventuate as to scenario. When we briefly met in Berkeley you recommended Slavitt’s new Metamorphoses, which I’ve been reading with pleasure. Had some part of the work interested you as dance, and that you would like me to consider? If so, please tell me. . . . Please dear wonderful one, if you have any dance-desire that you might want me to try for, please let me know by letter, by fax, or by phone. Otherwise I’ll just keep composing, composing, in the hope of pleasing you!!
My reply:
I’m so happy and a little daunted to be working on this new piece of y/ours. It is beautiful & searing & varied & hard as hell. I’ve felt like I wanted more of the waltz. . . . I’ve pretty much set the Allegro kit (with 18 systems), the Gigue/Musette (which I’ll slow down a little), the waltz (in its current form), the foxtrot—somewhat (which speeding up makes more of a rag—I’m treating it as a sort of Turkey Trot) & The Prince Kantemir’s number (which looks 1,000 years old).
And then that was it: for five players—violin, viola, cello, piano, and percussion. No cor anglais. No boys’ choir. I even considered the possibility of two different dances that could be done either interleaved or separately, one for the solo cello section, and another for the other four instruments.
Linda and I, along with a percussionist, went through each of the pieces and played each kit at every octave or in multiple octaves. All the lines were the same rhythmic sequence, of course, in that they matched, so they could fit with any other part, and therefore we recorded all the parts on cassettes and from these I assembled the performance edition that I choreographed.
As a tribute to Lou, I called it Rhymes with Silver because his middle name, his mother’s maiden name, was Silver (and because nothing rhymes with “silver”). It was the last big piece he wrote. It could have been almost any length, but the version I chose to choreograph was about forty-five minutes long, a big dance.
I commissioned the set from the great British painter Howard Hodgkin. It was our first collaboration. When I’d first met Howard, we hit it off immediately, though he was a rather stereotypical—to an American—cranky, harrumphing Englishman, whose look seemed designed to put people off. He wasn’t dirty or scary, precisely, but he was rumpled, as though he’d fallen asleep on a park bench. This may have been partly self-protection. Later he was in a wheelchair, a bit of a sitting duck, and he neither wanted to make new friends nor have to explain his work to anyone. He seemed ancient at the time (fifteen years younger than Lou), but he was only the age I am now—funny how that happens!—and he’d just been to South India to receive Ayurvedic treatment for his arthritis, which is why I eventually started going. He became a darling, intimate friend. Rhymes with Silver brought his work together with Lou’s, and with both of those older masters my attitude was the same: I love your work; do your work.
When he’d first allowed me access to his London studio, Howard might say, “Take a look at my new painting.” He’d turn his back, and I’d go in, look at it for fifteen minutes, and then we’d go out to lunch. I wouldn’t say anything except, “Howard, thank you for letting me look at your painting.” I might go as far as “I love that red one.” That would be it. Done. We’d talk about music. Neither of us needed an art analysis session about why I did or didn’t like it.
Lou was much the same. That waltz didn’t work, so I sent it back and he revised it, made it shorter. When someone like that says, “If you don’t want this, send it back and I’ll do something else,” they mean it. When John Adams asked me of a piece of his music for me, “Is this danceable?” I told him, “Of course not: why would I be interested in music that was danceable?” Howard’s attitude was “Take it or leave it. And if you don’t like it, I’ll throw it out and do something else.”
I liken this to the friends I’ve made in India. They’re my friends because I am not seeking enlightenment. I’m not going to India to bow at the feet of the great sages (and the yoga racket), thinking that everything an Indian says is a profound utterance of eternal importance. And I didn’t want enlightenment from Howard or Lou either.
I wanted what they did.
In the case of Rhymes with Silver, the process was lovely. I simply told Howard, “Listen to this music; design a set for me, please.” What Howard gave me—wavy lines in watermelon tones of green and red—was like one of his drawings or earlier paintings; some didn’t like it because it wasn’t the signature Hodgkin brushstroke, but I thought it was quite perfect.
That same year, I was asked to choreograph a piece for Sesame Street’s twentieth anniversary, for which I again picked Lou’s music, along with a piece by Cowell himself. I was asked for only one minute’s worth of choreography, so the pieces were very short: one an early pre–breakdown Lou piano piece, Waltz in C, and Henry Cowell’s Anger Dance, written when he’d broken his leg. I could relate.
Cowell’s doctor had told him that he’d have to have the leg amputated, and when he discovered this was a misdiagnosis (and I could relate to that too), Cowell was so furious—so relieved—that he played a phrase on the piano over and over, louder and louder, until he was worn out, which is how the piece is meant to be played, over and over until the pianist can’t take it anymore because he’s so angry and exhausted. Children should be allowed to feel anger too: that was my Sesame Street–appropriate idea, presented as a fight between me and some feathered puppets (each of which had two operators wearing black behind them, one moving the feet, the other the torso) that I choreographed on all of us.
I’D WANTED TO GO BACK to India ever since that magical time when Erin and I were falling in love. But I never had the money, and when I had the money, I didn’t have the time. Eventually, Nancy applied for a large grant, of the research and development variety, that allowed Guillermo and me to go there for a month or more. All I had to do to justify this generosity was claim that it had somehow influenced a dance.
It was 1996, and I had some long-distance introductions. Sali Ann Kriegsman, the wonderful woman who was then running Jacob’s Pillow told me about Nrityagram, both a dance ensemble and a community set up in the form of a village devoted to nothing but dance by Protima Gauri Bedi in 1990. I also wanted to seek out a famous dancer, Lakshmi Knight, daughter of the great bharatanatyam (South Indian classical) dancer T. Balasaraswati (though we didn’t get along). Guy Trebay, a writer for the New York Times, had a photographer friend, Dayanita Singh, and she in turn recommended that I meet Lakshmi Viswanathan, a great dancer and scholar, both of whom are close friends to this day. That’s the wonderful thing about my Indian friends. They never go away. They show up and there they are, forever.
We met up with Dayanita in Delhi, then went to Chennai (Madras) to meet the two Lakshmis, Knight and Viswanathan. We also met the influential music and dance critic S. Kalidas. He took us to our first house concert, which consisted of three musicians, a singer, a drummer, and someone on the veena (a plucked string instrument), playing for an inordinately long time, perhaps two or three hours (all Indian concerts are epic by Western standards), followed by a sumptuous buffet in the living room—as far from a potluck as you can possibly imagine—where not one grain of rice goes uneaten, like a three-day wedding where the host has to feed everyone who shows up, endlessly.
Guillermo and I also went to a public concert in a big ugly cement hall, a thousand degrees under a hundred ceiling fans. The moment the music began—heavily amplified as usual—the audience turned to each other, immediately acknowledging which mode the music was in, and then started to keep a strict rhythm, strong beats and weak beats, by clapping softly. Generally, at the climax, every single member of the audience arrives at the same resolution at the same moment as the musicians. If you don’t know the music, it’s quite amazing. But in this case, in the middle of the performance, the power went out: everything. The fans stopped so abruptly that there was immediately a cloud of mosquitoes, and though the deafening music suddenly disappeared—you could hardly hear it—everyone kept the beat with their clapping. The power finally came back on, you could hear the music again, but the show had never stopped.
On another trip, Kalidas joined a group of my friends at a fancy dinner. I overheard my painter friend David Deutsch, my best friend Shawn’s husband, and Kalidas discussing classical music.
“It’s like Monteverdi . . . ,” David said.
“Monteverdi?” Kalidas was a little nonplussed. “Oh, you mean Western classical music.”
They’d both been talking about “classical” music, but different classical musics with completely different rules. The truth is Western classical music simply isn’t that interesting to many Indians. They might hear the opening chords of Beethoven’s Fifth, and think, “When’s the music going to start?” It’s the reverse with Western chauvinists hearing Indian music for the first time; they have no idea what’s happening.
OUR NEXT STOP WAS NRITYAGRAM, the dance community near Bangalore, to meet its founder, Protima. We immediately hit it off. Though she’d never set foot in the United States, I felt sure I’d met her at some SoHo party ten years previously, and she felt she knew me too. It was karmic. Protima was an unusual Indian woman, an outgoing adventuress who’d enjoyed London’s swinging sixties and returned to her own country a cosmopolitan feminist. She wore her hair short—rare—and looked like a model (which she’d been), spoke elegant English, and had a glamorous and notorious history, including having been India’s first streaker at some Mumbai beach party, not to mention her marriage to the famous actor Kabir Bedi (more universally known as the villain in Octopussy). She was, as far as India was concerned, unusually feminist, unusually Western, and, if you like, a loudmouth; I loved her instantly.
At the age of twenty-six, having seen a life-changing Odissi dance recital, Protima offered herself as a disciple of the guru Kelucharan Mohapatra. She showed up on his doorstep, knowing hardly anything about dancing, and devoted herself to his instruction. Despite not really getting going until she was thirty—and traditionally if you don’t start by the age of nine, you’ll never become a dancer, which is more or less true anywhere in the world—she became as great a dancer as she had been a celebrity. She stayed with the guru for years and founded this gurukul, a residential school or commune, on farmland in Nowheresville that she’d finagled through her Bollywood connections.
I was there with her for only a few days. We went for a walk to the local village, Hessaraghatta, she in a long skirt rather than a sari. The farmers, dressed in loincloths with their oxen, prostrated themselves before her, lying down to touch her feet. “Please don’t,” she’d say as she blessed them.
We sat together in the ruins of a tiny old temple, and she quizzed me on the rudiments of how a dance company tours, how one raises money. She was so worldly seeming and yet completely naive. It turned out she didn’t know anything except the one thing she did know. She was as wonderful as she sounds.
Two years later, when I was about to go back to India, partly to spend time with Protima, a writer, Dr. Sunil Kothari, interviewing me for the Hindu newspaper, showed up with a copy of that day’s New York Times open to Protima’s obituary. She had died dramatically in a mudslide in the Himalayas on a pilgrimage to a particular sacred site to pay tribute to her son, Siddharth Bedi, who had committed suicide a year or two previously. I only had that one chance to meet her. The Nrityagram dancers refer to her as Gaudiji, an honorific. She’s the guiding spirit behind everything they do.
Surupa Sen, the great dancer and choreographer, runs Nrityagram now. There wasn’t a resident choreographer before her. Their shows are always great. The music is live, a compilation of various pieces, some of it especially composed, and the lineup generally comprises a singer who plays harmonium, a drummer playing a two-headed drum, a flautist, a violinist, and someone who plays bells or cymbals. The dances vary in personnel from solos to five or six women, but Nrityagram is best known for the duets between Surupa and Bijayini Satpathy.
For the shows, the dancers iron their own saris, cut fresh flowers for garlands, and put on gorgeous makeup. Before the dance, they place an oil lamp in front of the figure of the god Jagannatha that stands like a scarecrow in the corner, and then the dancers thank in turn the floor, the musicians, and the gods. They thank everything. Even before their own rehearsals, which take place undercover but basically in open air, in ninety-nine-degree heat, they thank me, they thank my feet, and they thank the floor; then they touch each instrument, thanking the wood that made the flute. It’s so beautiful. The shows are always narrative, because there’s no other kind of dance, and the stories are generally mythological (if you consider the Mahabharata mythological—some people take it literarily, like the Bible). I brought the company to New York for Sounds of India, a mini-festival within the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center in 2016. They were six dancers (all female) in total and six musicians (all male) stage right. (Nrityagram, the place, is like that too. The gardeners and security guards may be male, but that’s it.)
A while ago, they performed at the Joyce in Manhattan. I found their performance so moving that when I went backstage afterward, I wanted to touch Surupa’s feet in reverence, as you might give someone a garland. When I arrive at Nrityagram, they line up to greet me that way, a little embarrassing to a westerner but a great compliment: the dancers first, then their manager, Lynne Fernandez, who embraces me, and then Surupa and Bijayini (the greatest dancers of all time, by the way—and if I happen to have said that about more than one person in this book, it’s all true). They take their shoes off, kneel, touch my feet, and give pranam. Then I’ll invite them to stand up, embrace them, and thank them. And that’s it. Once each trip each way—hello and goodbye. So I thought I’d repay the honor.
Surupa is normally rather composed, but she completely freaked out. “No! You can’t! You can’t do that! Please don’t!” It almost brought her to tears. I had only wanted to say, “I loved that performance so much,” but the gesture was in total violation of a position I didn’t realize I held.
Sometime later, we did a talk together at which we took questions. I brought this awkwardness up, and she explained, “Well, you are our guru.” I was, whether I wanted to be or not, because of my age and my experience, and because I’d been a peer of Protima’s. In Surupa’s eyes, it belittled me to touch her feet, and it was therefore embarrassing in front of other Indians. Then of course she was also upset that she might have hurt my feelings. She wasn’t offended, just gobsmacked. I could lay a garland upon her, but I couldn’t touch her feet.
INDIA-WISE, I hit pay dirt (lifelong friends and immediate major discoveries) on my first real visit. A few visits later, I went again for five weeks, to the Chennai music festival and to Kerala for Ayurvedic treatment.
There I had one of the most surprising experiences of my life. I had a full sexual awakening at fifty. I didn’t even know that was possible, but you don’t know what it’s like to ride a bike unless you can ride a bike, and sexually speaking, I was born again. It had something to do with the Ayurvedic treatments.
During a massage in the second week of these two-massage days, when I was worn down and accustomed to the schedule, I had a spontaneous ejaculation. The massages were in no way “feel-good” erotic (or likely to have a happy ending)—there was no specific genital contact—but they were intense. I was outside, covered in hot oil, wearing a little loincloth, which was removed when I was facedown. Sometimes two men would be working on me, chatting away in Malayalam, and if my dick got in the way, they’d just slap it away—it was of no importance, causing no offense. But the orgasm had nothing to do with sex. There was friction, of course—there’s no other kind of massage—but I suddenly had this full-body tantric orgasm experience within three seconds, from nothing to full erection, to ejaculation, and then de-erection. As you can imagine, I was shocked, and I apologized, then I went back to my room and wept.
The Ayurvedic doctor, to whom I later mentioned my embarrassment, said, “Please don’t worry, it happens all the time. It’s just like a sneeze.”
THE INCREDIBLE ANNUAL winter music festival in Chennai has been going on for about seventy-five years, runs for about six weeks, and takes place in the Tamil month of Mārkazhi (mid-December to mid-January). It’s much like the Edinburgh Festival or Adelaide but even more intense—hundreds of concerts all the time in hundreds of venues, from stars who play thousand-seat halls to duets of teenagers playing saxes for their families. I would sometimes squeeze in three shows a day.
Chennai itself is a city of perhaps five million people, a somewhat conservative Boston-like city, the headquarters of the Classical Music Police. The festival occasionally presents a Western concert or a jazz-fusion concert, some Hindustani (North Indian) music, or guest artists from Singapore, but the focus is almost exclusively on Carnatic (South Indian) music, including ragas for that particular time of day—the eight a.m. or eleven p.m. raga—or music devoted to that particular day’s deity or the phase of the moon. The music is generally two hundred or three hundred years old (for example, that of Sri Tyagaraja, the saint who wrote the music I choreographed for O Rangasayee, sung by M. S. Subbalakshmi) and incredibly sophisticated. To think it’s from the same time as Beethoven!
The concerts themselves are fabulous and free (though you wouldn’t go if you didn’t belong). The seats toward the front look empty from behind, but only because they’re occupied by tiny old women with iron-colored plaits in their hair, wearing saris, cashmere cardigans, and running shoes. And they’re all experts on the music, every single one. The VIPs are ushered right to the front row, no matter what (it’s acceptable to walk in in the middle, and in fact it’s considered a little chic to arrive late and leave early), and the musicians greet you even while they’re playing. Politicians and other celebrities walk across the front row even in the middle of the show, shaking hands as they go, giving out their business cards. It’s shocking, perhaps even a little vulgar, but much less precious than the Western equivalent. When the drum solos begin (toward the end of every concert), the older men (and their enlarged prostates) all leave to pee, then bring the car around, ready for their getaway. In 2018, I had the honor of being the Chief Guest—an actual title—to open the dance festival portion at the Music Academy, the headquarters, and to present an award to my friend Lakshmi Viswanathan.
There is no better music in the world. It’s the most rocking, syncopated, thrillingly exquisite music, more interesting (in my opinion) than ravishing Hindustani music, which is Persian influenced, where Carnatic music is not. I’ve been going to the festival every two years for twenty years now. I love it, though it’s a pain in the ass to get there. I always swear I’ll never go again, and then I go right back.
On a trip in 2004, I found out on my arrival in Chennai that the beloved M. S. Subbalakshmi had died: a national treasure had “dropped her body.” On the front page of every newspaper in the country were photos of her corpse lying on a pallet, heaped with marigolds, prepared for cremation, surrounded by music pandits and government notables. Appropriate adoration, respect, love, and honor for a revered, cherished artist.
We can still hear her voice, and her spirit, in the inheritors of her art, the profound Carnatic vocal artistes of today.