A few days ago at the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn, nine dancers sat on the floor folding yellow notebook paper into fans, eyes lowered, fingers busy. It looked more like a convention of origami enthusiasts than a dance rehearsal.
The fans, it turned out, were props in Morris’s “Northwest,” a new dance set to selections from John Luther Adams’s “Five Yup’ik Dances” and “Five Athabascan Dances.” (The Yup’ik and Athabascans are Native peoples from Alaska.) “Northwest” will premiere during the second week of the Mark Morris Dance Group’s two-week run at the Joyce Theater (July 15-26). Another new dance, “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic,” set to rollicking piano compositions by the early 20th-century jazz pianist James P. Johnson, will premiere the first week, kicking off the company’s 45th anniversary season.
Morris has not choreographed to either composer’s music before. But after a half century of making dances, he is still driven by the same musical curiosity that has attracted him to works as wide-ranging as Schumann’s chamber music, country & western songs, and compositions by American modernists like Henry Cowell. All of these will be heard during the company’s engagement at the Joyce. (And all, except the country songs, will be played live.)
“I know about a lot of kinds of music because I’ve traveled a lot,” Morris said recently, “and because I’m interested.” As a child, he was a serious student of flamenco; later he took up Balkan folk dancing. And he makes frequent trips to India, a country whose centuries’ old music and dance traditions fascinate him. Music is, and has always been, at the heart of everything he does. The Joyce season reflects the eclecticism of his tastes, as well as his ability to tease surprising movement ideas from whatever music he chooses.
In “Northwest,” each dancer holds two paper fans. Morris comes up with endless ways for them to be used. The dancers stand with their arms crossed behind their backs, fluttering the fans at their sides like small wings, or fins. They hold them in the air as they run, as if flying kites. One entire section consists of dancers moving just their arms, so that the fans trace patterns that match the rhythms in the music.
Periodically they drop their fans to the ground so that, by the end, the space is littered with them — like a field of dead butterflies.
In many ways “Northwest” is an exemplary Morris dance, combining musical sensitivity with an element of surprise and a kind of plain-spokenness. “I don’t need to put every single thing I can think of in every piece,” he said. “Mostly I make up a whole bunch of stuff at the beginning of the creation process, and then gradually I get rid of it, because I don’t need it.” What is left is a sophisticated and yet unfussy reflection of the music.
“What I’m after is clarity,” Morris added. “I’m a minimalist, a post-minimalist, a classicist.”
Which is not to say that there isn’t a lot going on beneath the unfussy surface. In “Northwest,” the underlying layer includes memories from Morris’s past. “I used to watch Alaskan dancing in Seattle when I was a kid” in the 1960s, he said. “Seattle was a very multicultural city, and that was before the word multiculturalism had even been invented.”
Morris developed an interest in Native American dance early on, has attended performances in various parts of the country, and watched more online.
These memories, buttressed by research, have made their way into the choreography of “Northwest.” Traditional Yup’ik dancers use two fans, though theirs are not simple folded pieces of paper but rather objects made of wood, feathers and fur. In some traditional dances, the participants place themselves in two rows, some sitting while others stand, and move their upper bodies to the rhythm. This happens in Morris’s dance as well. But, as Morris said of “Northwest”: “It’s not a documentary. It’s a series of impressions.”
Adams’s music is more grounded in the specifics of geography and culture. He spent nearly four decades living in Alaska, attending celebrations and festivals held by Yup’ik and Athabascan groups, often by invitation. He transcribed songs by local elders, with their permission, and drew others from a collection of Yup’ik songs compiled by the linguist Tupou L. Pulu.
“I learned them directly from my Native friends, neighbors and collaborators,” Adams wrote in an email from Australia, where he has been traveling for the past year and a half. “And I hope that my settings of them convey my profound respect for their origins.” The originals are for voice and percussion; the version that will be heard at the Joyce is for harp and percussion.
What Adams’s music and Morris’s dance have in common is that both are about place, though in Morris’s case, it is a place from his past: Seattle, the Northwest, where the dance festivals he saw as a kid filled him with curiosity about the larger world.
“It’s not autobiographical, obviously,” he said, “it’s more like, ‘Oh, that reminds me of. …’” “Northwest” began as one of Mark Morris’s “Dances for the Future,” a compilation of pieces that are meant to give his company something to perform in the years after his death.
Adams and Morris have been friends for more than a decade. The two bonded over their mutual admiration for the Portland-born composer Lou Harrison. “Both of us were part of the expansive circle of younger artists that Lou called ‘my kids,’” Adams said. Morris has made several dances to Harrison’s music, and Adams composed a quartet in his memory, “For Lou Harrison,” in 2003.
Morris’s friendship with Ethan Iverson, who arranged the music for “You’ve Got to be Modernistic,” the James P. Johnson dance, is also based on musical affinity. Iverson, a jazz pianist and composer (and a founding member of the jazz band the Bad Plus), was music director for the Mark Morris Dance Group in the ’90s. Over the years he has created scores for Morris based on the music of Stravinsky, the Beatles and Burt Bacharach.
“When I met him he was a super shy dance nerd,” Morris said, “and I broke him into Baroque and early classical music.”
Now Iverson has returned the favor, bringing Johnson’s music to Morris’s attention. Johnson was a pioneer of stride piano, a transitional style that bridged ragtime and what we think of as jazz. “It’s more swinging than ragtime, and faster,” Iverson said, “and it had a certain amount of improvisation, but not as much as would happen later.” It’s also notoriously difficult to play. Iverson, who transcribed the pieces from old recordings, will play them at the Joyce.
Like Adams, Iverson has been quite faithful to the originals. With one exception. Johnson’s most well-known piece, “Charleston,” has a steady 4/4 beat, like all stride piano music. But Iverson has set it in the weirder meter of 5/4, adding an extra beat to each measure. “I thought, because that piece is so famous, there was room to do something different,” Iverson said after rehearsal. “I gave it the avant-garde treatment.”
That extra beat gives the dance an uneven feel, like the lopsided steps in a three-legged race. “The audience won’t necessarily know what’s going on,” Morris said. “They’ll recognize the step, but they’ll feel like something’s off, something’s wrong. That makes it more interesting.”
In the choreography, Morris has used what looks like every possible permutation of the Charleston step: slow motion; double-time; exuberantly executed with giant kicks into the air, or kept low to the ground, feet sliding against the floor.
“You’ve Got to be Modernistic” is also filled with typically funny Morris touches: a long line of dancers that snakes around the stage like a train; coordinated movements that look like synchronized swimming; a stiff rendition of the turkey trot couples dance.
During a rehearsal, sitting at the front of the studio, Morris slapped out rhythms on his thighs, did a soft-shoe, conducted. His final bit of advice to the dancers was to “make it breezy and swingy and roaring,” with an emphasis on “roaring.”
Morris’s dance impulse is still very much alive. “We’re far from that time, 40 years ago, when it was a group of my peers,” Morris said. “But my way of working hasn’t changed that much.”
Even so, Morris said that the past few years, since the start of the pandemic, had not been easy for him or the company. It took a while for him to feel comfortable going back to the studio or traveling. Touring opportunities are not what they once were. Funding sources have turned their attention toward pressing social causes.
And with the end of the Lincoln Center Festival, the White Light Festival and Mostly Mozart, the company’s regular New York summer engagements at Lincoln Center disappeared. This led the group to move to the more modestly sized Joyce Theater, where it first appeared in 2023. The company has adjusted, offering programs with fewer dancers and musicians.
And so has Morris. “You know, I’m 68, and I like what I’m doing,” he said. “I’m not looking to revolutionize anything. It all just kind of happened. And I’m happy with it.”
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