NEW YORK, NY.- To make a dance to some of Handels Water Music and title it simply Water is just the kind of joke you would expect from Mark Morris. So is staging that work in Brooklyn Bridge Park with New York Harbor as the backdrop, putting Water right up against the water.
The title helps set the tone: a little impudent in its unfussy plain-spokenness. And despite the downsides of the location a concrete promenade for a stage, which forced the dancers to protect their usually bare feet with sneakers, and recorded music (a rare concession for this troupe) that tone is part of what made the work particularly suited for a free, outdoor show.
For 45 minutes Saturday, the neighborly Mark Morris Dance Group presented high-class choreography on a lovely day to people who sat on the sloping grass, passed by with strollers and pets or simply soaked up the sun, like the man wearing nothing but what could be described as a codpiece.
Water, which closed the program, is short, about 10 minutes long. Tape outlines a quadrangle on the floor and the full company walks that perimeter, framing couples who take turns in lyric flights through the center, one dancer often carrying another who is upside down. As different groupings of dancers come and go, marking the hornpipe music with some maritime motions, rumpling Baroque grace with hip bumps and air kisses, other dancers pass in front or behind. Its a delightful, teeming world that leaves you wanting more.
This was preceded by a Samuel Beckett play. In 2019, Morris was invited to stage three Beckett works for Happy Days: Enniskillen International Beckett Festival in Northern Ireland. On Saturday, Morris company offered the United States premiere of his staging of Quad, a wordless television play that Beckett wrote in 1981.
As its one-word title indicates, Quad is also organized by quadrangle. A figure in a hooded robe stalks the perimeter and cuts across the diagonal. When another hooded figure joins in and a third and a fourth they have to dodge one another in the center.
That swerve is a twist as typical of Beckett as it is of Morris. The addition and later subtraction of performers is a playing out of permutations; as soon as you figure out the pattern, you start wondering when its going to end.
But in Becketts instructions, as in the original German production, the crossing performers avoid a small square area in the middle, an absurdist hole. In Morris version, the dancers dont avoid a charged space; they sidestep a collision. Its a social act, civil choreography.
And where in the original production the cowled figures scuttled through their ritual quickly, like rats in a maze, Morris performers walk on a beat provided by other members of the group, who bang drums, pans and a propane tank. Without diverging from the metronomic pacing, the swerve puts a little skip in between steps, a lift thats like a higher note. Morris turns Becketts dark slapstick into a kind of folk dance.
Theres an aspect of folk dance in most of what this company does. That includes the opener of this program, which is set to some of Mendelssohns Songs Without Words and is titled, of course, just Words.
For Words, the music was live, played on keyboard by the ever-excellent Colin Fowler. Its use of space dancers appearing for just a moment on the edge of the dancing area marks the 2014 work as clearly one conceived for the proscenium stage. Here, the only wings were those of gulls.
A stage is where these dancers belong, and heres hoping they can return inside soon. But at Brooklyn Bridge Park, where some of their high-armed gestures inadvertently mirrored Lady Libertys pose behind them, they werent at all out of place.
The program will be repeated at Queens Botanical Garden on Oct. 3.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.