How close am I to being done, either with this book or making up dances?
Well, I have amazing news: this is the last chapter, but even after my death, there will still be new Mark Morris dances.
There is currently much attention given to the fact that choreographers are dying. Apparently, everyone was surprised when Pina Bausch died. No one seemed to see it coming, despite the fact that she looked like she’d already died once previously. Merce Cunningham died in 2007, Trisha Brown in 2017, Paul Taylor even more recently. The industry is decimated. How did these choreographers do it, and how will the dances be preserved? It’s a particularly pressing problem that those increasingly rare companies led by a single choreographer—for example, my company—are having to deal with.
We started a capital campaign called Above and Beyond to deal with, among other things, the preservation of my dances and, more vaguely, my legacy. The grant-giving bodies won’t give money just to put on a show anymore, but will give money for education or legacy, which is how we’ve been able to hire people full-time to digitize the archives over three years. My old dancers go down there, sift through the past, and sob.
But I don’t just want to preserve the dances I’ve done, say L’Allegro and The Hard Nut, and then have them danced forever (or until they’ve bored people) as museum pieces. And I certainly don’t want people to mess them up like Pacific. I’ve always said that the school will be my legacy, and of course I want to keep my company working, and the building full and fully operational, and it therefore occurred to me that I should keep making up dances while I’m alive and alert enough to do so. So rather than just filming my existing dances and notating them, the new plan is to keep on making up dances just as I’ve always made up dances: one a year that no one will see until I’m dead.
Specifically, the idea came from Nancy, her inspiration being an article concerning the author Margaret Atwood, the first contributor to a public artwork called Future Library: a story of hers would be stored away and remain unseen for a century. The project, conceived by artist Katie Paterson, began with the planting of a forest’s worth of trees in 2014, trees that will be cut down in 2114 to make the pulp for the paper on which the one hundred new pieces of fiction (one a year by different writers) will be printed, and then read. A future library for a future society!
Nancy, sensing a scheme, asked if I’d be interested in a similar arrangement, and I said, “That’s the grisliest, most horrible, morbid thing I’ve ever heard of in my life. Yes!”
Atwood said that wild horses couldn’t drag any details of the story from her, but we announced the idea in the New York Times in April of 2018 and revealed that the first of the series (and as I write, the only one finished) would be to the keyboard music of Scarlatti. And by “finished,” I mean fully finished: the order of the music known, fully choreographed, documented at every stage of its development, and notated, designed, and lit. The dance, for twelve people, is half an hour long, and quite as arduous as every other dance of mine. But these ten dancers won’t dance forever, so at some point they’ll have to teach it to someone else. We’ll put the dance in its casket and revisit it whenever a dancer leaves and we hire new people, who’ll then learn this piece as we would just as if we were going to perform it next week. And one day, it will be about to be performed next week, but I won’t be around to see it. I’ll be dead. What will I care?
I hope to develop a posthumous repertoire of fifteen or twenty dances. If someone gave me a million bucks toward the project, I might let him watch a rehearsal. But that eventuality aside, it’s locked away. It’s a perfect situation for a workaholic like me (can you really be addicted to workahol?), because it means I can keep making up dances, even beyond the capacity of the world to digest them. I’m keeping myself busy just as Verla kept me busy fifty years ago.
AND THERE ARE so many ways. To celebrate our twenty-fifth anniversary, back in 2006, we did a series of programs of dances new and old, old being Gloria. My first reaction was, I admit, “Do we have to do that again?” Nancy said, “You should conduct it.” It was all her idea.
At first, I demurred, thinking it presumptuous. People who have a lot of book-larnin’ see me as an autodidact and think that because I didn’t go to school, I must have wacky ideas. I may or I may not, but I do know a lot about music, and finally I thought: why not? I’ve always worked closely with my conductors and I always coach the musicians. Years before, James Levine, for forty years the musical director at the Met, had told me I should conduct when he found out that I’d coached a show he’d seen at Tanglewood that included Brahms’s Love Song Waltzes. (I thanked him for the compliment and told him I’d been conducting for years . . . electricity.) So I studied with Craig Smith, learned the Vivaldi Gloria, how to beat it, how to run a rehearsal, and then I practiced on the musicians on the road with me. It went well. At least, we all hit the Amen at the same time.
I still only conduct a few pieces. I know my strengths. I’m communicative and I’m physical, I know the music, I have a good time, and the singers and players are supportive, including Stephanie Blythe, who’s too great a star to have to humor me. At some point, I felt brave enough to do Dido. Then I wondered whether I might conduct The Hard Nut, so at Tanglewood (where my company had been every summer as the only dance company on the program for the last fifteen years, and where everybody’s time is very precious) we assembled a string quartet and a pianist in order to allow me to conduct The Nutcracker from the score from beginning to end, both acts, ninety minutes. It was an extremely intense experience, and . . . I wasn’t ready. Colin took it on. And when I conduct, he gives me notes. It’s a perpetual learning situation.
I don’t do it merely to satisfy my ego, and I’m no Danny Kaye, guest-conducting symphonies for the Pops evening. At first I was terrified; it still makes me nervous. And I didn’t realize I had a bald spot until I started conducting, but I saw pictures of me in action, from behind, and, lo! There it is!
Conducting is not a slow exit from dancing. It’s a new viewpoint. It involves me with the music and the production in a different way. Plus, and don’t think these things aren’t important, I’m cheaper than everybody else.
I even recently sang with my company (in public) for the first time—a medley of songs from the 1920s and ’30s first sung by Gertrude Lawrence and Jack Buchanan—because I couldn’t find a singer to sing them just right. Nancy insisted I audition for her, then gave me the job under one very reasonable condition: “You can do it if you practice.”
I still love watching people dance, and though dancing itself became tiresome for me, I admit that I am still intrigued by the idea of making a film of just my face and hands dancing. My last dance Serenade to Lou’s music was already heading in that direction.
I’M SIXTY-TWO and I feel guilty if I’m not working, so I work all the time: I love it. (Apparently, I even want it to look like I’m still working after I die.) It’s a Protestant work ethic as opposed to Judeo-Catholic guilt. I want to be involved, active rather than busy, which seems to me like filler. I’m also an expert procrastinator.
I am a working-class boy, skeptical and distrustful of danciness, and I agree with people who find ballet to be effete and elitist. The dances I choreographed for ballet companies in the 1980s addressed the things that I didn’t like about ballet: the hierarchy, the star system, the gender politics. My critique of ballet is in those ballets, but they weren’t anti-ballet, they were fully based in the world of ballet.
Nobody talked about being gay then, so I said it a lot. That was a battle that I wanted. Now ballet is back to being just as uptight and esoteric as it was before. We don’t need to play the gay card anymore, so I don’t do it because I no longer care. I was strong willed, and I still am, but there are certain battles that either I have won or no longer concern me. I got my way. I don’t have to get it again. I don’t expect people to agree with me, or care if they do, but if they don’t, they should at least have an argument.
Part of the reason that people dance to better music and live music a lot more nowadays is because of me, part of the reason that a lot of choreographers and dancers are out as queer is because of me, and part of the reason that dancers nowadays look like real people is because of me. It wasn’t me single-handed; it was a movement of the time. Bill T. Jones always used dancers who didn’t look like dancers, and Yvonne Rainer before us.
People have often said of my company, “They don’t look like dancers”—well, they’re dancing, aren’t they? What do dancers look like? They look like people! As though it was wrong, as though it could have been any dog from the kennel, any stranger off the Greyhound. It’s not true, but it is true that I didn’t want identical duplicates of people. It wasn’t the Boys from Brazil dance company; I didn’t need a long line of identical swans for Swan Lake. But I didn’t pick people with big asses or glasses, African Americans or homosexuals or balding people or Christians or short people, to make it a circus, or “a girls’ basketball team,” as someone once called them. I did it because they were great dancers. It’s somewhat contrarian, sure. But the combination of contrarianism and conservatism is precisely why I am, or was, called an enfant terrible (what?!): it’s also very American. I’m gay; I’m a little “fuck you,” but I’m also very polite; I try to be kind, but I know I’m terribly demanding of my dancers; I have good manners; and I’m impatient. I’ve been rude. I’m interested in a lot of things, and it bothers me when people aren’t. I have a fully blessed life.
I DO ENDINGS well in my dances, partly because I don’t make up the ending first. Another thing Doris Humphrey advised, “Don’t leave the end to the end,” but I do. I also don’t end dances until it’s time to. I see what happens. I make up way too much stuff, and when I’ve satisfied myself? Done. Dancers, I love you.
Time to get back to work.