Thirteen
Pepperland
My principal job and interest has always been choreographing for the Mark Morris Dance Group; after that, choreographing for a classical ballet company; then directing and choreographing operas. Actually, the priorities may have changed somewhat. Choreographing for ballet companies has become a problem. I don’t really do ballet commissions anymore. Times have changed; the dancers can’t do what I want.
In 1995, I choreographed Pacific for San Francisco Ballet to some wonderful music of Lou’s. I picked chamber music on purpose, just as I’d picked solo piano for Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes at ABT with Misha way back when, because I didn’t trust ballet orchestras. The fewer the players, the more you’ll be able to rehearse with them. A single pianist? Ideal. He learns the dance when the dancers do.
A lot of serious music people can’t bear to go to the ballet, not because it’s going to be recorded music and it’s going to be bad, but because it’s going to be live music and it’s going to be even worse. For decades New York City Ballet was known to have the worst band in town. It’s not necessarily the musicians’ fault. They have a huge repertory, scant rehearsal time, and a new combination of pieces every night. Often they don’t rehearse with the dancers, so they don’t know how the dances work. It’s a perpetual emergency trauma situation. Things have improved somewhat, but the music director for a ballet company remains something of an object of pity. If he could be conducting a symphony orchestra or an opera, he would be.
It turned out that the San Francisco Ballet orchestra was very good, though I hadn’t trusted that they would be, so when I finally did use them for Sandpaper Ballet in 1999, my apology and joke was to use the music of Leroy Anderson, a composer famous for writing novelty numbers, pieces of three or four minutes destined to be played as encores for the Boston Pops: for example, “Sandpaper Ballet,” where the percussionist plays a soft shoe with sandpaper blocks. (I didn’t use that particular piece, though I did like it for a title.) A lot of these pieces highlight one section of the orchestra: “The Typewriter,” for example, features a percussionist “playing the typewriter” with the keys and the return bell. An orchestra generally gets to play only one of these fun numbers right at the end, rather than a whole evening’s worth, so this was a complete gift, with not only “Sleigh Ride” as the overture, but “Syncopated Clock” as the finale.
But believe me when I say that my general distrust of ballet orchestras is entirely reasonable, which is why the first thing I’d choreographed for San Francisco Ballet, Pacific, was set to two movements of Lou’s piano trio, for nine dancers: a quartet of women, a trio of men, and then a male-female duet. They did this modest, romantic dance beautifully, though it was very much in the style of my own company rather than theirs.
Recently, however, I watched a performance of Pacific by a ballet company that Tina, whom I send as my representative to set my pieces, had taught them. It was not good: flirtatious, faux seductive, ballet naughty. My moves are meant to be performed without irony, and this was the antithesis of what I’d intended. It wasn’t a bit off, it was oppositional. My personal chamber-sized dance had become a cheap, crappy come-on, a parody of itself. Twenty-five years previously I’d had at my disposal five San Francisco ballerinas, powerful dancers with women’s personalities, skills, and intuition. Here I had flirtatious post-Balanchine coquettishness, the Coppertone girl with the dog pulling down her bikini bottom; the men, shirtless, pumped, and dominant—styles of sexuality I find repulsive.
I was mortified and couldn’t go backstage. It freaked me out. And not only me. My friends hated it too and left. I don’t want to see my work turn to shit while I’m alive and can still do something about it, so I decided to cancel my commission with that particular company; they’d done two pieces and they wanted a new piece from me. Nancy talked me out of it, so I made up a lovely new dance for them, the simplest dance in the world (though it looked complicated), and it nearly killed me.
At first I suspected it was all Tina’s fault. I’d trusted her to set it. I knew the dancers themselves weren’t to blame; they weren’t doing anything wrong. They were simply dancing in today’s ballet style. I felt, however, that I’d seen the glimmer of perhaps one of them doing it right, so as an experiment, I had Tina teach Pacific to my dancers, who don’t dance on pointe, aren’t classical ballet dancers, and are in many cases older. They were nervous, because though they all speak ballet, it’s not what we regularly perform (and in soft shoes we never use), but they learned it in a second and danced it perfectly. It looks a little different, since it isn’t on pointe, but it’s the precise same text. That was when I realized that I don’t need to work with ballet companies. My own company can do this now.
The fact is: I don’t want my work to live on after me if it’s going to look like that version of Pacific. I’d rather no one saw it at all. I’d rather it died. I’d basically—and this would be ideal—like to be paid a huge amount of money for my dances not to be done. But failing that, I would donate to a commission to prevent them being done badly. I would give you money to stop it all right now. Forever.
THE BACKGROUND IS THAT BALLET has reconservatized. It’s reverted to that post–World War II, 1950s, uptight Eisenhower sexuality, pre-feminist, pre-queer. Everyone gets along fine, but either the women are once again powerless while the men are charming and dashing or conversely there’s a unisex anodyne mediocrity. That’s not enough for me, and it never was. I see new ballet choreography and sometimes even like it, but it doesn’t mean much to me. It’s reverted and I haven’t.
Those legendary 1970s ballerinas were big stars, wonderful dancers, and fabulous feminists. Now the women are presented as demure, made up and hair sprayed, superfemme, like it used to be. Outside the studio they seem to be normal: they drive cars, have boyfriends, and talk on the phone like modern people, but when they come into the studio, they’re pastel kittens. The men, on the other hand, are big and butch. The concept of the Hotshot Male Dancer started with Nijinsky, then Nureyev, and Misha; men hadn’t been great dancers before. In early ballet, up through Balanchine, men carried the women around, did a single pirouette, and exited stage right. You needed a core of thirty-two identical women to do Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Giselle, La Sylphide—the classic nineteenth-century “white ballets,” as they’re called—and a couple of men who betray the ethereal, virginal women. Nowadays, most choreographers want an equal number of men and women in their work. The men are rewarded for having personalities: they want to dance a lot or they’ll leave. The women on the other hand are once again rewarded for having no personalities: they’re in purdah. So it’s back to what it used to be, infantilizing for women and aggrandizing for men. Women aren’t allowed to dance alone anymore because of the way partnering has developed. Once upon a time, they were the whole story. It’s why those classic ballets now seem obsolete.
This harsh gender divide is a symptom of the work itself. In that intervening quarter century, the requirements (as they should and must) have changed. Choreography has become more robotic, demanding a flexibility and virtuosity that leaves me cold. It’s ugly. I’d rather see Giselle. The tone of my work is less Balanchine and more Ashton or Bournonville, gentler and more feminine, and it feels out of place on a program full of pieces featuring impossible pyrotechnics: men tying women in knots and carrying them off.
When Misha was running ABT, this wasn’t the case. There was a nine-year moment of really interesting dances, some of which I didn’t like, but all of which were new and interesting, and some of which (I’m happy to say) were by me. Then there was a backlash, though it wasn’t necessarily against the work. It had to do with the economics and the distribution of money.
What has since developed I call the “International Style.” The marketplace is now global, and none of the choreographers have their own companies anymore. Once upon a time ballet companies were all run by women, like Ninette de Valois and Lucia Chase, who founded what became the Royal Ballet and ABT, respectively. Now everyone hires the same itinerant choreographers who apply a similar wash. Much like the chain store–filled downtowns of the world, there’s no difference between the Royal Ballet, New York City Ballet, the Mariinsky, and the Paris Opera. Why do we even have to travel anymore? Perhaps we can do away with that too.
One advantage to this is that there are now international dancers fluent in the International Style all over the world. They no longer have to learn how they do it in Paris or London. However, they don’t get to learn how to dance anymore, and there isn’t time to rehearse. That doesn’t mean it’s bad work, and it doesn’t mean they’re bad dancers, though some is and some are. But some of the work is beautiful. Alexei Ratmansky, who ran the Bolshoi for a number of years, is a choreographer with whom I identify. He’s done many pieces for New York City Ballet, is currently choreographer-in-residence at ABT, and works exclusively in the medium of classical ballet. He’s a strange cat, prolific, reticent but great; his work looks like ballet, it’s on pointe, it’s all girls and boys—all the assumptions of classical ballet I’ve sought to subvert—but it’s brilliantly historically informed. He’s a conservative in the good sense. He knows dance history.
I love classical ballet, and I speak the language fluently, but I’m somewhat out of fashion in the contemporary ballet world. I’m more trouble than I’m worth. The kick people get from my work (because it’s not like the other pieces on the program) isn’t perhaps a big enough payoff when balanced against my demands, financial, musical, and otherwise. I may be pricing myself out of the market. And there are stipulations: you can only buy a new dance if you’ve previously done two other pieces by me, so you’re pre-vetted. What you then get is my new dance. It’ll be me (an old, mean, curmudgeonly perfectionist) doing my best work, but there’s no actual guarantee that people, your audience or your critics, will like it. It may not fit as they wish. That’s what makes it so interesting. Put simply, it’s easier for that company to buy a dance that they saw another company do at that festival, that seven other companies are also doing. It’s a guaranteed success, the easiest way to participate in a prevailing esthetic with which I disagree. And that’s how it’s swung.
City Ballet has more money than any dance company in America. The dancers are great, but my taste doesn’t run in that direction; the audience is little girls dressed in pink and their dads waiting in the car. It’s precisely what my work—and far from only mine—has been protesting all these years. This has reestablished the old-time schism between downtown (Modern Dance: intellectual and artistic) and uptown (ballet: dainties for the bourgeoisie). So the very situation out of which my dance emerged is re-creating itself right now for someone else exactly like me. But much younger.
I’m not sure Big Ballet and I are on speaking terms.
SOMETIMES I’M NOT on speaking terms with anybody.
Recently, I had a late-arriving realization—an extremely important one—that my behavior toward my dancers in MMDG had to change, a conclusion I didn’t come to alone. Discourse that had been appropriate two generations previously when we began didn’t fit anymore; what made sense in the 1980s had ceased to, in the same way that my dancers were no longer comfortable with the naughty ass-swatting gesture in The Hard Nut. It was past its sell-by date.
It all came to a head in 2016, when I went a little crazy for a couple of months in the summer, a confluence of many things, but partly political. Everyone was so mortified after the election. I was desperately trying to be optimistic, at least professionally, with regard to my dancers—“We’ll get through this like we always do”—but it affected me far more than I knew. Although I genuinely believed that it was the perfect time, if only by way of antidote, for us to be making the most beautiful art we could, I found myself sinking too.
I tend not to diagnose myself as “depressed”—I prefer country and western terminology, “sad” or “blue”—but I was depressed. I’d arrive at work each morning feeling I had nothing to offer, not even ideas (which is often true, though generally I manage to come up with something anyway). I was in a weakened state, both physically and emotionally, and suddenly things seemed bleak, though I was trying to keep things going against all odds. (Not long before, I’d experienced my first panic attack on a plane. “Join the club,” said Isaac, only somewhat sympathetically. “I’ve been on Xanax all my life and I’ve outlived seven therapists.” Everybody said it was nothing, but it was something. I became a little bit claustrophobic as a result.)
This malaise dovetailed with other pursuant postelection worries of a professional nature: for example, the certainty that the NEA was going to be shut down, and that, more generally, the basic tenets of our art and our lives were under attack. Art is no longer greatly valued in our culture, an anti-intellectualism that’s been setting in for some time, as criticism slowly disappears from the newspapers. It isn’t part of everyone’s life anymore. It’s not merely that I’m a dinosaur (which I may be; there aren’t many one-person Modern Dance companies left in the States) but that this way of working is endangered and the whole thing may be over. Money is an issue at the best of times. And that’s when the political becomes personal. Though I’m lucky to be—to have been—successful, everything was going south at the same time.
The long and the short of it: I was freaked out with mortal thoughts, and I began selfishly taking it out on my dancers, like when I’d been on crutches in Seattle. In a particular rehearsal, while trying to work something out, I vented my frustration by announcing, “We’re all working on the same problem! Let’s use one big mind instead of fifteen tiny little minds!” In another context, that would have blown over immediately, but given the general froideur, a dancer challenged me: “Excuse me! That’s really insulting. Can we take a break?”
In this instance, I hadn’t seen the remark as a particular violation or personal insult of any kind. Although I said it in entirely the wrong tone, I’d meant, “Let’s get together and think through this as one.” I was thinking of my own as one of the tiny minds that we should pool into one great consciousness. Be that as it may, the group was proud of that person for standing up to me.
Another example, and this one is bad: I have regularly and blithely used the phrase “Exit now and don’t forget to take your ass with you!” It’s a dumb joke, a turn of phrase, never aimed at anyone in particular more than anyone else. More recently, I said out loud of someone I didn’t know, who happened to be doing a turn at that moment, “Your ass looks like when a dog puts its face out of the back window of the car and the lips flop around.” That’s what popped out, something so wrong, so inappropriate, about the wrong person at precisely the wrong time. Jaws dropped, like the audience watching Springtime for Hitler. What I consider “humor” (in that case) or “frankness” (in others) is sometimes a cruelty. I feel terrible about that, while simultaneously recognizing another failing: that I’m not very good at going back and saying, “Remember when I said you were an asshole? You weren’t.”
When I was a young functioning adult with dances to make and a new company of friends, I told my dancers straight and they told me back. I once tried to throw Tina out of a rehearsal. Her reaction was “Fuck you, Mark, I’m staying!” And she did. The mutual relationship was more or less equal, and the repartee was, to put it mildly, lively. There was a “frank exchange of views.” That made it much easier for me. “Let’s take a break, Mark,” Winkie would say, “you’re getting a little bit crazy,” whereas Guillermo would simply yell, “Simmer down! Fuck you!” and demand we stop for the day. And we would stop. But today, I no longer have a company of friends and I am no longer my dancers’ contemporary. Their immediate artistic life is temporarily in my hands, and this relationship is potentially dangerous. This revelation caused a major recalibration of everything.
In fact, as time has gone by, I’ve generally become more straitlaced, more guarded in the way I talk—I wouldn’t boo Twyla anymore or open with “Je déteste Béjart”; it’s more trouble than it’s worth—but I’ve always been vulgar. The word “irreverent” doesn’t quite cover it. There’s always been a coarseness about me; it’s true that I like dirty, naughty, and profane. I’ve never liked the churchification of anything. I can be nice, but I can certainly be mean, and this could become abusive. In the old days, when Guillermo wanted a solo, I’d say, “Give me a hand job and I’ll see what I can do for you.” It was absolutely a joke, and he was the perfect demographic for that horrible joke, but that joke has ceased to be funny. Imagine “Give me a kiss and I’ll give you a big solo” nowadays, with me, forty years their senior, and their boss. Times have changed, and my role in the dance world has too. No one needs to have the workplace so sexualized.
When I was in high school, my friends were of all different stripes, sexualities, and races. It was a little rough-and-tumble for me personally, but I survived, and I learned to be tough, because I was a sissy. I loved queer culture; the secret part was the fun of it. Now everything’s been revealed, we’ve come out, we’re the people next door with no need of our own private language, and we can get married if we like (though as you know I don’t recommend even straight people should get married). The race thing went the opposite way. Back in those black power days, I imagined everybody would become everybody else’s best friend and look beautiful with similarly neutral toning. I thought it would be the same with religion; it would all be washed out. I believed in all that pie-in-the-sky utopian fantasy.
At early auditions in New York, I was thrilled to find coeducational dressing rooms in the Modern Dance world. There were no proper facilities—we were in somebody’s loft—and everybody changed, danced, and re-changed together. In the early days of MMDG, you got used to nakedness. It wasn’t a sex thing. We did have sex, occasionally with each other, but that wasn’t what it was about. Back then, the word for this would have been “liberated.” Now the word is “threatening.”
Of course, “young people today” aren’t the way our earlier generations were. No member of any succeeding generation ever has been (except a has-been). I’m now dealing with people two generations younger than I. I’m sixty-two—that’s a grandparent’s age, not even a parent’s—and they’re in their twenties. At its dawn, and for some time, my company was me and my friends, some of whom were older than I. Twenty years on, it was people twenty years younger, though our mutual relationship was still perfectly viable inasmuch as they weren’t offended if I mentioned that I’d had sex. You can believe your parents had sex—you exist!—but your grandparents? Gross.
Nowadays, the prevailing atmosphere reminds me of the genius of Sidney Lumet’s movie Network: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” It has much to do with the president we elected in 2016. Not only do I fully applaud the new activism, I also feel part of it. I’ve always felt that way. I don’t feel, and have never felt, like the statue of Lenin being torn down in the square. I feel like the person tearing it down, even if most of my demolition work was done some time ago. But having to monitor everything one says and does is a little eggshelly for me. I’m less good under scrutiny. Interviewers often say sarcastically, referring to some supposedly outrageous opinion of mine, “Tell us what you really think!” (I don’t then point out that that was already the watered-down version in order to keep things civil.) I’m from a long line of nihilists and Seattle Noir humorists. I tend to the dark joke, the Charles Burns and Charles Addams aspect. Later on the very night that my mother died, Guillermo asked, “Is your mother still dead?”
But this has led to some pretty bad recent situations in class and rehearsal. I’ve recognized the potential problems. For the last few years, I’ve always started rehearsals with a ballet company with the opening remarks “I will touch you as needed, in the interests of teaching you. I use adult language and I am likely to say ‘goddammit,’ so if you’re uncomfortable, cover your ears. Anybody who doesn’t want to be in this dance for any reason—the music, my methods, you’re tired, I’ve asked you to dance with someone you just broke up with—please take this opportunity to withdraw yourself.”
I found myself coming into class at MMDG in the morning, telling whatever ghastly story I had to tell, to find them rolling their eyes, leaving me to wonder why everyone was so lifeless. I persisted, because that’s what I do, and they stopped responding. Around this time, some of the dancers approached Nancy to tell her I was freaking them out, that I’d said something terrible, and that they were scared to talk to me directly, fearing my response would be a chilly “And?” Occasionally, dancers have asked me why I’m mean or impatient with them: I can be both. If they threatened to walk out, my response might be “Okay!” And nobody wants to hear that. Nancy confronted me: “Mark, everyone’s scared to talk to you. You’ve got to do something.” I’d occasionally tried to argue my corner, but not in this instance. Life will throw many hurdles and obstacles at these dancers, all of which they’ll have to jump and avoid, or they won’t get anywhere—they’ll need to be tough, and I will always demand perfection—but I mustn’t myself be an impediment.
The dancers staged a power coup, an organized boycott, presented to us by the company. The message was that I was mean and insulting, that they didn’t want to hear my shit anymore. They were annoyed not that I was treating them like slaves, which I wasn’t, but that I’d gone too far, assuming a different familiarity, an overfamiliarity, with them. I know I can be a bully, but I was honestly surprised to hear how much it upset them. I’d like to think that it’s not constant, but rather part of a broader repertoire of behaviors that makes up a more attractive whole. (Of course, I’d like to think that!) The boards of companies all across America have drawn up new policies to deal with such things, policies that have already been in play at universities for years, and so MMDG did too. Nancy wisely suggested, among other outlets for expression, an anonymous suggestion box so people could comfortably submit their grievances, knowing they’d be heard. That thing filled up quickly.
I’ve generally had good personal relationships with my dancers: some very close, others not so much—I’ve worked with people for fifteen years yet never eaten in a restaurant with them—but I finally realized, with Nancy’s help, that it’s okay, even desirable, to become less personally invested, to be someone who doesn’t talk to everyone freely and openly all the time. Though I like to gossip, to know about things, boyfriends and families, I would no longer intrude on my dancers’ private stories; that in itself is inappropriate.
In collaboration with my company, I’ve somewhat let go. It turns out that this hasn’t had a negative effect on the teaching. The dancers haven’t lost their confidence either in my capacity to make up great dances or in my fundamental kindness, even if it’s sometimes obscured beneath a pile of horror. They love my work, and they want to work with me or they wouldn’t. They know I love them.
Or do they?
Nancy has been telling me for years, generally in reply to some random remark of mine that a particular dancer is fabulous, “Have you told him?” To which my response used to be “No need. He knows.”
Finally I understand that he didn’t necessarily know, because he doesn’t attend the question-and-answer sessions I do after the shows, when I say just that. Nancy has always said I’m not complimentary or praiseful enough of my dancers and musicians. She’s right. I don’t overpraise; I don’t feel that way. I don’t really do group hugs. It doesn’t mean I don’t love the people I work with. I’m not physically affectionate; I’m physical in my actions.
If I say “Good show,” that means it was fabulous. But a fabulous show is our job. That’s the level at which we work. You may or may not like the shows themselves, but there isn’t a wrinkle in the backdrop: Johan wouldn’t allow it. The floor is clean. The sound is perfect. The dancers must meet the surrounding perfection. We work at a high level of expectation and competence.
If you’re not a good dancer or a good musician, what are you doing here?
BUT SITUATIONS SOMETIMES combine to prevent your doing the best show possible. That is a prime source of frustration. And it’s never my dancers who are to blame.
Whenever I saw Yo-Yo in the intervening years, he’d say, “I’m waiting for you to have a dream like you did for Falling Down Stairs” (see above: I’d corrected him a few times). His next big idea was Silkroad, a humanitarian umbrella organization under which wonderful artists could do whatever their hearts desired, inspired by the ideas and traditions along the historical Silk Road from China to Italy, all with the idea of the advancement of global understanding through the arts. Yo-Yo is quite sincere when he says he wants to heal the world through music. It’s deeply admirable, but I’m here to say you can’t, but that clean water would help. That, and a blanket.
Yo-Yo was being Marco Polo, collecting artists he loved and adding others from obscurer cultures—Chinese noodles meet New World tomatoes and let’s make spaghetti marinara! Of course I was a shoo-in with my love of the world of music. It was a beautiful idea, the only caveat being that it might turn into airport gift shop “world music,” where everyone and everything is of equal value. (In fact, everyone is of equal value as a citizen, but everyone isn’t of equal value as an artist.) His stated intent was to model Silkroad on MMDG, his concept of which was that everyone contributed. (That may be true, but I’m the boss, and that’s how I like it. Otherwise I’d join a commune.) He asked Nancy’s and my advice, but the truth is that the “rules” of MMDG can’t really be applied elsewhere. It’s not, nor can it be, a model for anything.
One of his suggestions was Uzeyir Hajibeyli’s 1908 music for the first Muslim opera, Layla and Majnun, the seventh-century Arabian love story of Qais ibn Al-Mulawwah and Layla, whom Byron inaccurately called the “Romeo and Juliet of the East.” I thought about it for a long time, ten years, in fact, because, though I loved it, I feared it wasn’t necessarily good for a show, a little bit too sad, too slow, and not quite enough. So I rejected it more than once, and every time I saw Yo-Yo, he’d remind me about it. Meanwhile, Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen (both violinists with the Silkroad Ensemble), in collaboration with Azerbaijani singer Alim Qasimov, had rearranged and reworked the music further. There was a lot of anti-Muslim feeling around at the time, which has only worsened, and I finally decided to do it, which led to its premiere at Cal Performances in Berkeley in 2016, after a further year making the dance up. Yo-Yo was fully behind the project, but the moment I agreed was the precise end of our collaboration.
I basically hired the Silkroad Ensemble as a band of eight musicians (two violins, viola, cello, bass, pipa, percussion, shakuhachi). I’d said from the very beginning, as I always do, “If you can’t play all the rehearsals and the performances, I don’t want you in the band.” That’s the way I work with my own musicians, and it’s a firm rule. (And that’s why Falling Down Stairs had worked so well with Yo-Yo in the first place, because we rehearsed it together.) They said, “Well, the bass player can’t make it to the first week of rehearsal, but he’ll be there the rest of the time and for the whole tour.” I made that one exception, because I knew him to be reliable. Then another of the musicians needed to teach for seven days in the middle of the run; suddenly only these players could do this city and those could do that.
“Okay,” I said, backpedaling slightly after my first failed ultimatum, “but I won’t work with people who haven’t rehearsed with me.” If it’s a big Broadway show, you might agree to do it for a lot of money, then phone it in or, as often happens with orchestras, send your students to play. Such cavalier behavior is quite common, but I don’t work that way. We were compelled to pay for fourteen musicians for the rehearsal week (and two more were added once we were on tour), and I felt duped. Johnny Gandelsman, who did most of the arrangement, played the first gig and departed; so Colin Fowler, my music director, the singers, and I found ourselves in charge of the music. What was consistent at every performance was the six Azerbaijani artists. It was the eight musicians of the Silkroad Ensemble who changed at almost every stop, except for the bass player, who never missed a show. The musicians themselves were innocent, but you can’t just drop in as a guest artist when you’re playing second violin. How is that going to be good? It felt as if the musicians were the only people on that stage who didn’t know the music. And the truth is that the music for Layla wasn’t even that difficult. I might as well have used the MMDG Music Ensemble. And I would have. I was furious.
When we were just about to open in Berkeley, I complained seriously and intensely to Yo-Yo. His argument was that the musicians were young players, there wasn’t much work, and they had families. All perfectly true. But of course my dancers were paid much less than the musicians, and they’re also young and there’s even less work.
This was right when Howard Hodgkin, the show’s designer, and I shared our only tense moment. There had been slight miscommunication from the beginning.
Come to think of it, Howard had also taken us back to the drawing board when he designed the sets for Mozart Dances, a big project that premiered in 2006. We visited London, told him the music we were going to use—he was accidentally listening to the wrong concerto for a while; didn’t matter!—and gave him a basic outline. In return, he gave us five very interesting, colorful, and complicated sketches to take home, to use however we liked, assuring us he could do them again if necessary. We left with them, Nancy carrying this priceless art around under her arm.
After we’d brought them back to the States, he unexpectedly contacted us: “Send those back, they’re wrong; I’ve been thinking more about it and I don’t like them.” So we returned them and received a different five. Again, he didn’t specify precisely how to use them beyond “use only these ones, not the first ones.” I could change sets fifteen times if I wanted, like we had with the drops and scrims in L’Allegro, or use just one, rather as Lou had let me do what I wanted with the music for Rhymes with Silver. In the end, I used three to go with the three pieces of music and the three dances. Howard had wanted to do the costumes too, but I didn’t let him (which is why he got to do them for Layla), though he insisted that Marty’s costumes be monotone—black, white, gray, exclusively—in front of his beautiful painted backdrops in black, white, and red.
For Layla, from the very beginning, I’d wanted his central painting, the magnificent backdrop, to be a letterbox rectangle shape, because of the Muslim association, the horizontality of old Islamic architecture. I was particularly thinking of the bilateral symmetry of the university in Samarkand, where everything is low and wide, and only the minaret rises above it all. I wanted that look, so we’d already decided the dimensions and position of the drop.
I first saw Howard’s painting Love and Death, just after he’d finished it, in his condo in Mumbai.
“I think this is it, Mark,” he said. “You look at it and tell me if it’s not.”
He sat in his wheelchair as I went into the studio alone, the painting wet on the wall in front of me. It was very profound. And quite the wrong dimensions.
Antony Peattie, Howard’s husband and manager, and Andy Barker, Howard’s close friend and studio assistant, explained, “Howard, you know Mark wants this to be a slice of that.”
Andy made a frame that he’d hold over different parts of the painting. So the finished backdrop, in all its beauty, is actually a detail of that original painting.
That all turned out fine, but the point of tension in Berkeley was that Howard wanted the risers (as opposed to the tread) of the stairs painted a painfully bright acid green, so that if you were looking from the front at that precise level, you wouldn’t see the black treads, just the green block. It was not pretty. It ruined the whole look.
Howard arrived at the theater, having seen nothing of the set previously except perhaps the most rudimentary mock-up. And there was this hideous green. He looked at it.
“Howard,” I said, “we have to decide today, because the paint has to dry before we can dance on it, and I have a real problem with this green.”
James Ingalls demonstrated the effect of lights on it. If you threw green light on it, it disappeared into gray; if you put red on it, it turned brown. It was beyond his help. We were all being semi-diplomatic, waiting on Howard’s word as he scrutinized it.
“I can’t tell under these lights!” he barked. “It looks fine to me.”
“Hey, Johan,” I said. “Will you tell Howard what you told me?”
“Howard,” said Johan firmly. “I hate this green.”
“Well, it’s decided then,” said Howard. “Get rid of it.”
He couldn’t have been more English. We painted it black and everything was fine, but it was tense. He’d never seen his idea full scale under the right lights, and that’s a different consideration entirely.
The fact is Layla was a beautiful show that improved night by night, though it would have been consistently better if the same band had played in each venue.
With Yo-Yo Ma and Howard Hodgkin on opening night of Layla and Majnun, Graduate Hotel, Berkeley, 2016. (Nancy Umanoff)
Silkroad is itself a wonderful organization. It has developed and changed meaning over the years, but it’s hung around doing good work like White Oak did. Yo-Yo is more an eminent representative now, and Silkroad is to world music what TED is to talks and Aspen is to ideas.
EVEN MORE RECENTLY, we premiered a show in Liverpool called Pepperland.
I don’t worship the Beatles. It’s not like I never loved them, but put it this way: I choreographed Yoko Ono’s music over thirty years before I got around to her husband’s band. They were certainly important to me in many ways: the foldout poster with the White Album had that photograph of Paul McCartney holding a towel. It implied dick. I, too young to masturbate, simply didn’t know how to handle the feelings engendered within me. Paul, being so cute, had been my favorite, but I soon grew to prefer John intellectually, not only his music but also the drawings and the writing. In fact, Paul’s cuter songs—“Michelle,” “Yesterday”—were the first to cloy, and I felt a little swindled as my musical taste developed.
I listened to Sgt. Pepper straight through for the first time in thirty years and I loved it. Not only that, but I knew everything about it, even the precise length of the gaps between the tracks, indelibly imprinted on me since I was twelve. I’m re-appreciating it now partly because the music and melodies are wonderful, and partly because, for Pepperland, they have been rearranged and recomplicated for me by the composer Ethan Iverson, my immediate choice for the project. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t like it, of course, but I also wouldn’t do it if it were just the Beatles. There’d be no reason.
The ambitious commission came from Seán Doran, who throws a good festival. This one was specifically to celebrate “Sgt. Pepper at 50.” Apparently, the original idea had been to commission different artists to do treatments of different songs, but I’d either misheard or misthought, and I presumed I was supposed to do the whole album. So we went ahead with a treatment of six of the Pepper songs, interspersed with original music by Ethan that linked them in fascinating and suggestive ways.
Once that was all straightened out, I started work at the beginning of February 2017 for a May premiere. That may seem a long time, but with all the company’s other commitments—touring, teaching, out-of-town workshops, and so on—it was a very fast turnaround, perhaps the quickest ever for a long piece. I shoehorned the Pepperland work in as I could, but I found myself increasingly haunted by visions of the relentless sands of time in a completely imaginary hourglass as the deadline approached. This was complicated by the fact that Ethan was writing the music as I was making up the dance, even as Nancy was obtaining the global performance rights from a thousand different organizations.
Making up the dance itself was sometimes a nightmare. For weeks I worked on a piece Ethan wrote called Magna Carta, his thesis being that “the Beatles are sacred; everyone worships them; we should do that as a proclamation.” So he wrote a Gregorian fanfare that starts with the end of the first song, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” as they introduce “the one and only Billy Shears.” Ethan’s idea was to then introduce various characters pictured on the iconic album cover. It was to be an introduction to the cast, the concept, and the cover.
I worked on this for weeks, driving the dancers hard during that period of strife, hating everything I came with up and everything they did, which is what I’d told them to do. We’d come back to it every few days, but I couldn’t find a way for it to make sense; we’d start from scratch, but it was all so complicated and stupid, and none of it worked. And then a few days later we’d get back to it: “Oh shit! This again!” Finally, I found something usable: the dancer came on as herself—“we’d like to introduce to you . . .”—acknowledged the audience as if she were in a fashion show, turned around, put on reflective shades, then turned around again as . . . “Marlene Dietrich!” Ta-da! So we went with that, each celebrity with the appropriate gesture: Albert Einstein sticks his tongue out; Fred Astaire does a suave dance move. We’d picked the celebrities whom an English and an American audience would recognize by name and gesture. I’d solved the Magna Carta. And then it was time to introduce “the Beatles.”
As we were working, Johan heard some of Ethan’s music. In short, he hated it. Under no circumstances would Johan let such feelings affect the quality of his work, but it meant something to me to know his opinion, because Ethan and I weren’t overly happy with the music either. Our subsequent decision was to change the instrumentation. The mezzo voice was too close in timbre to the theremin—the overall effect was too “haunted house”—so we listened to four singers, three women and Colin’s suggestion, a man with whom I’d just worked in Britten’s Curlew River. We hadn’t been planning to use a male singer, but Clinton Curtis’s baritone was the unanimous choice. Instrumentally, what we’d had originally—trombone, soprano sax, theremin—was too washy rhythmically (it was hard to find a beat: there was nothing aside from the keyboards that had much inherent rhythmic vitality). We needed a little kick to give us a stronger dance rhythm, so we added drums, and suddenly the music began swinging in much more interesting ways. The harpsichord also helped. Pop music of that period had so much harpsichord.
This was all decided just a few weeks before we opened, and we didn’t rehearse with the band until about the week before we left. As for the set, Johan had opened the conversation with “There’s no budget, either for a set or for freight.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
A few weeks later, he added, “Well, I’ve been thinking about it . . .”
That’s how he works. I’d said I wanted something very reflective and shiny. Partly this was because of that druggy phrase “kaleidoscope eyes” from “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” but also I knew I wanted to keep psychedelic cliché—for example, oil and water overhead projection—at arm’s length. I also remembered the first off-Broadway production of A Chorus Line at the Public Theater. I’d joined Eliot Feld’s company just after that play had moved to Broadway; we rehearsed at the Public, and the original mirrors (nothing more than frames covered in Mylar) from that relatively cheap production were still in the studio. They weighed nothing, the reflections were distorted, and nothing could have looked cheaper, and I liked them.
Johan ordered some possible material to replicate that effect—once he starts on something, he’s going to see it through—and hung some panels in the studio. They looked irredeemably terrible, not even good bad. Then he had the great idea to bring in some of those hypothermic survival blankets for marathon runners who are about to die venting off too much heat after a race—“Heatsheets” is the trademarked name (Mylar coated in a thin veneer of aluminum)—which come in a tiny package and unfold to human proportions. Johan built a mountain range out of cardboard and covered them in this material. It looked like titanium, picking up the light in scintillating ways. He called the set Pepperhorn, because of its resemblance to a Toblerone package.
Then came the mirrored reflective sunglasses, the “kaleidoscope eyes,” because I wanted something even scarier, something a little North Korean. The saturated mod colors of Liz Kurtzman’s costumes were textbook and looked sensational in front of Pepperhorn, but despite its origins in Sgt. Pepper, the dance doesn’t necessarily take place in 1968.
Opening night was drawing ever closer. There were so many moving parts, and we didn’t get to do an out-of-town tryout of the show (not that these are common anymore), so the attitude was very much: “Here we go, Liverpool! Hope you like it!”
WE BOARDED THE PLANE to the United Kingdom hours after the terrorist bombing at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester Arena on May 22. Colin flew the next day, his plane packed with every available American TV news team.
Pepperland was to kick off the City of Liverpool festival. The venue was the Royal Court, set up like a casino—tables, drinks, cabaret seating in tiers—with a small, square stage. Ethan was revising the music right up to the day of the show, and even into the very last rehearsal, I was asking the keyboards to move up and down an octave, or the drummer to leave out a fill here or there; we were still balancing not just the sound but the entire composition.
Nor was the music—a beautiful, weird adaptation, loud and quite extreme—particularly easy to play; there was plenty to worry about. We’d been working so hard, so last minute, that even Nancy hadn’t seen the show until opening night, which is almost unheard of in the history of the company. There was just no time. It was a gamble, but we were going into the premiere secure in the knowledge that if we could just drag ourselves over this particular hurdle, we wouldn’t perform it again for six months afterward and that, if it didn’t pan out, we had that interval in which to fix it.
The first-night audience was fascinating. Of course, all the festival people themselves were there, the producers, the lord mayor with his big necklace, and the lordress mayoress too, not to mention all the co-commissioners. (Just as my work finishes, at the first performance, Nancy goes into overdrive. She’ll greet every single person from Boston, Seattle, and Toronto, where we’ll later be doing the show, even as she’s hoping that someone comes from Japan who’ll take it there.) However, the most interesting aspect of that audience was a group of semi-unaccompanied kids upstairs, the kind of group that start laughing and wolf whistling as soon as the lights go out. From the downbeat the entire upstairs was clapping along like crazy, singing and shouting the lyrics as though it were three in the morning. I was in the front row, exchanging glances with Colin and the cats in the band, who were thinking, “What the fuck is going on?” It was noisy, and the atmosphere was fantastic. It boded well. Plus, with the cabaret seating, you could drink during the show, and there’s nothing better than that. Pepperland, one hour with no intermission, was a two-glasses-of-wine show. I started the second glass halfway through. Perfect.
I’d made up some of the dance almost in real time. When I’m Sixty-Four danced is a kick line, a vaudeville number. At first it’s one person, then three, then nine, so it multiplies and the line gets longer. The dance is simple, but then there’s a three-part canon with twelve people, which looks like total chaos, and the music—although it’s always the same beat and someone’s always playing the tune—is in 4, then 6, then in 5, but the dancers stay in 4. Everyone upstairs was clapping along, and then, suddenly, because of the new time signature, they couldn’t anymore. The music perhaps sounds wrong and broken, but it’s meticulously right, just a wonderfully weird idea. It breaks down and then comes back together. (My friend Nora saw the show and thought this movement was the perfect metaphor for aging. We’re all about sixty-four now.) The teenagers were screaming and clapping, but it was very hard to keep the rhythm, so it turned into rolling applause.
There is, however, one poignant and musically uncomplicated moment, an original piece that Ethan wrote for organ, theremin, and interjections by soprano sax and trombone, an adagio, part soap opera, part church. I was going to do it as a romantic pas de deux with three couples, all doing the exact same material, at different rhythms, slow and circling. The dancers were completely exhausted at the end of a particular rehearsal, so I asked them to slow dance, nothing more. While the other couples are dancing, one couple comes in late, slow dances for a little while, and then leaves. It’s nothing more than that, unchoreographed and natural.
Pepperland ends with one phrase repeating, improvising, getting louder and faster—what Ethan calls the “disco coda”—under the words “sorry but it’s time to go,” which loops in an exhilarating groove, a sequential canon leading to incredible chaos, that ends as you never should (as Doris Humphrey warned many times), exactly as you began: another rule made to be broken. Perhaps there are no rules. The music starts with a chord that lasts thirty seconds, and the dance starts in a spiral and then unspirals, and the very end is the identical chord, like a time lapse of a rose blooming. It’s the most obvious device in the world, and here it felt perfect.
I’d wondered whether Pepperland might be shot down, particularly in Liverpool. Some of the beats are in the wrong place, shockingly wrong sounding, and I thought people might not like it, given their investment in the songs, but the final note was met only with pure, beautiful enthusiasm in a screaming standing ovation.
One afternoon I was walking back from the theater to my hotel after the matinee. It was hot and sunny, perfectly lovely, and everybody was drinking in the middle of the afternoon. Three sunburned middle-aged women sitting at an outside table yelled, “Hey, Mark Morris! We love you!” They beckoned me over, just as they’d stopped every single dancer who’d come by. They remembered every detail of the matinee they’d just seen. They were Liverpudlians, they thought Clinton sounded like John Lennon, and they were so truly touched by the show that they asked me to autograph their arms. That made me so happy. My favorite review said Pepperland “wasn’t nostalgic.”
The Ariana Grande concert was one bookend to the trip; the Tower Bridge incident in London on June 3 was the other, the day we got back to America.
THE LIVERPOOL TRIP was only a few weeks after Howard Hodgkin’s death.
Antony Peattie, Howard’s husband, came to the Pepperland opening but was too moved by the whole situation to join us backstage. We’d spent a lot of time together during Layla and Majnun, Howard’s last big project. After the Pepperland premiere, I made a sojourn to London to visit Antony and Andy Barker in the house near the British Museum where Antony and Howard had lived together for many years. They’d never hired anybody to help out, even as Howard became more fragile and less ambulatory—he’d had health problems for years, a whole bunch of conditions and their resultant surgeries. He didn’t want strangers around. My theory is that he was incorporeal. He lived in his brain—painted from his eyes, his brain, and his hand—and that therefore the rest of his body wasn’t important.
We sat for a while in Howard’s brightly sunlit all-white studio, the floor splattered with the accumulation of all his paintings. I’d known him for years before I was ever allowed in there. In fact, I hadn’t even known there was a studio in the place. Unfinished paintings faced the wall; he’d then turn them around and work on them, either finish them or turn them around again. So he had all these projects going on simultaneously in his home in London, his house in Normandy near Rouen, and also in Mumbai, India, where he wintered every year for many years (and a wheelchair in India is tricky).
It was very hot in the studio, and the last dozen paintings Howard had finished were hung on the walls around us, facing out. Different pictures would draw attention to themselves as their palettes were activated by the changing light of day. It was a very serene and enviable place to be, as we remembered Howard. I asked about his last days, when he’d stopped painting, and I finally got to the inevitable question: “What do you do with the paintings he didn’t finish or didn’t want released?” The answer was that Howard had wanted them all destroyed without trace, burned, to avoid any future misuse. He’d felt very strongly about it.
Antony, in tears for the first time that day, showed me a video on his phone of the bonfire that they had built in France. They’d piled up all the unfinished paintings on the lawn, doused them in kerosene, lit a match, and watched them burn, no sound but the crackling fire. Howard had always painted in oils on the backs or fronts of old frames, so the thick smoke billowed black as they incinerated at least a hundred paintings, if not more. My first thought was of the cremation fires of Varanasi or Dido’s funeral pyre. It was karmic: those paintings would no longer exist in the same form; now they existed as smoke and carbon, wherever that went.
The same place my dances will go.