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Reviewed by:
  • Mark Morris: Musician-Choreographer by Stephanie Jordan
  • Marion Kant
Mark Morris: Musician-Choreographer
by Stephanie Jordan. 2015. Binstead: Dance Books. 543 pp., 34 illustrations, notes, chronology of works, index, references to the Mark Morris Dance Group website. £50 cloth. ISBN: 978-1-85273-175-5.

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Mark Morris: Musician-Choreographer by Stephanie Jordan is unusual in many ways, and there are hardly any volumes to which it can be compared. That alone sets this study apart from other recent titles on choreographers and their works. Jordan’s book was published by Dance Books; yet, it is about music more than anything else—a choreographer’s relationship to music, his formation and evolution as a dancer and dancemaker through music, the exploration of music through dance, and eventually Mark Morris’s arrival in music as a conductor.

The first sentence of the introduction is a quotation that defines the whole study: “Choreographer Mark Morris . . . has done more to revive interest in, to dignify and illuminate classical music to a broad audience than any conductor or musician in the last twenty years” (1).1 This remarkable statement concerns a fundamental musical relationship. Jordan takes it very seriously and, from the first page on, explores movement only in the context of music. Dance Studies, following modernist choreography and performance conceptions, carries a heavy burden and has taken great pains to define itself against all other fields, particularly musicology. Jordan’s book concerns itself with an artist who defies such predominant relationships and turns them back: dance is music or about music.

Jordan became interested in Morris’s perception of music when she interviewed him for her book Stravinsky Dances. She places him in the company of George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton and notes that Morris’s approach to music has much more in common with ballet than with modern dance: he cherishes music and does not see it as some kind of recorded afterthought to a piece of choreography. Nor does music represent the element that has to submit to movement, never determining the way a dance work evolves. Morris defies conventions as a choreographer of modern dance with a modern dance ensemble in that he has been integrated into and acknowledged by the music establishment, opera houses, music festivals, and radio. He has made about eighteen ballets as well as operatic works. There is no other modern choreographer who has paid so much attention to operatic and balletic stage works.

Jordan is well-known for her analysis of the music-dance partnership. In this study, she manages to be dance historian, dance theoretician, and musicologist. That combination has become quite unusual, yet it is necessary to address Morris’s work. Again, owing to the modernist legacy, the music-movement dynamics have become much more questionable than, say, the literature-movement interaction. Today, few choreographers would deem a literary source or literary theory something that shackles movement; yet, music has suffered that fate.

Jordan’s extensive investigation is structured into three parts. Part 1 investigates “Context.” It provides insights into Morris’s career, his approach to performance as process and practice, and the classification of his works. Here Jordan also uses the term “choreomusical” in conjunction with “concepts,” “mobility,” “motifs,” “tactics,” and the formulation of “music visualisation” (75–83). Part 2 establishes her own framework of analysis through watching dance and listening to the music. Part 3 analyzes Morris and his choreographies and establishes three periods—the 1980s, the early 1990s, and the years up to 2014. Every decade, argues Jordan, brings about some new and significant insight and performance approach. [End Page 104]

In part 1, Jordan proceeds from a historical overview that places the life of Morris into the cultural fabric of the United States: he emerged from the West Coast of the United States and moved into the larger world. Some of the insights from his earlier life are revealing. As an adolescent, Morris learned Spanish, Hawaiian, jazz, ballroom and Russian dancing as well as fencing. Is this the expression of a democratic cultural attitude? Can all the different strands of traditions be merged into something artistically new? These are important questions in regard to Morris...

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