Reimagining Modern Classics

Dance, a sequential art form that uses the passage of time to unfold its structure and its aesthetic and emotional mysteries, also finds itself used by time. Dancers, companies, choreographers, and dances themselves all change over years and decades. Some changes occur evolutionarily: older dancers retire and younger ones take up the torch, and new casts and years of small alterations make a beloved ballet look familiar yet strange. Other changes appear more sudden: a dance gets radically revised; a bold new dancer arrives; a company suddenly revives after a long hiatus; a much-heralded performer explores new territory. Summer 2013 offered some changes to established classics, all on view in the Berkshires, where summer can seem to suspend time and promise that warm days will never cease. Casting changes gave new depth to Mark Morris’s exquisite Dido and Aeneas; the Dance Theatre of Harlem returned, after eight years’ hibernation, with a happy revision of one dance classic and a disappointing rendering of another; and a great ballerina, Wendy Whelan, began reimagining herself as a modern dancer.

With the 1989 Dido and Aeneas approaching its silver birthday, the Mark Morris Dance Group revived it in an early celebration on July 31, 2013, at Tanglewood, which the company briefly visits annually. This brilliantly strange, through-danced production of Purcell’s 1689 opera, sung and played by the Tanglewood Music Center Vocal Fellows and Orchestra, who perched in a loft high over the stage at Seiji Ozawa Hall, keeps evolving and disclosing new pleasures with every revival.

Dido’s fluidity of gender and casting derives from the dance’s sexual politics, a modern take on attitudes implicit in the opera. Morris, famous for gender-bending, feminizes everyone. The entire cast dances in long black sarongs bunched at the waist and, except for barechested Aeneas (Spencer Ramirez), black sleeveless tops. All the corps members, female and male, wear gold earrings. This makes perfect sense for Dido’s feminine empire, which admits Aeneas, who dances with grand, archaic arm gestures, as a virile exotic. His penetration of Carthage becomes literal when he lies atop Dido, her legs spread, but Morris prevents their love-making from dwindling into softcore literal-mindedness by keeping it short and perfunctory. When Aeneas hears his call to action, we know his true siren song is duty, and he abandons the queen, “One night enjoy’d, the next forsook” for his Italian mission. Their embrace’s brevity (absent, of course, from Nahum Tate’s libretto) jokes on cultural stereotypes of what guys and gals expect from sex, then turns the joke inside-out when Dido’s despair torques the action from comedy (the opera, after all, has two laughing choruses) into tragedy.

Until 2000, Morris danced the two central roles, both women. Dido initially resists Aeneas’s love, then enjoys brief happiness with him, only to despair and commit suicide when he departs; the Sorceress, Dido’s enemy, tricks Aeneas into believing Mercury (actually a countertenor spirit) has ordered him back onto the Mediterranean. When Morris retired from the dual role, it went to two dancers, a woman, Amber Star Merkens as Dido, and a man, Bradon McDonald, as the Sorceress. Each dancer sometimes performed both roles, with Morris insisting that “their gender matters not at all.”

In the Tanglewood revival Laurel Lynch also dances both roles and gives the Sorceress an erotic charge that I don’t recall from Morris’s performance in Barbara Willis Sweete’s 1995 film of the ballet; her sexuality radically contrasts Dido’s formal severity. Further, although Morris’s performance carefully resists turning travesty into camp, gender does seem to matter. Despite Dido’s severe formalism, Morris the male dancer never entirely disappears into the role or into the sexier Sorceress. Somewhere—and this might signal my own limitation as a gendered viewer—I am always aware of Morris as a man impersonating a woman. Lynch, on the other hand, makes the roles sufficiently her own that we don’t need to make as large an imaginative leap. Not needing to dance Dido and the Sorceress as a female female-impersonator, she brings each...