Morris, Merce, Music, Movement

In summer, like many other city-dwellers, dance repairs to the country. For companies at the top of their form, however, such bucolic retreats provide not rest and relaxation, but athletic vigor and emotional intensity. Summer 2009 brought the Mark Morris Dance Group to upstate New York's Saratoga Performing Arts Center and to Tanglewood in the Berkshires, and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to Jacob's Pillow, the Berkshires dance mecca, offering pleasures both visceral and philosophical. Our two best modern dance troupes both gave thrilling performances, crash courses on the emotional heights Morris's dances attain in expressing their music, and the surprisingly deep satisfactions Cunningham's provide while barely minding the music at all.

Morris became famous for turning traditional narrative and gender upside down. His 1991 The Hard Nut, for example, parodies Tschaikovsky's Nutcracker by setting Act I at a 1960s American Christmas house party, with drunken party guests and TV-addicted brats. Its "Waltz of the Snowflakes" pokes fun at George Balanchine's New York City Ballet production, with both men and women in silver tutus and Dairy Queen soft-serve wigs, flinging fistfuls of fake snow. At the same time, for all its gender silliness, its smart, graceful choreography pays loving homage to Balanchine, while immediately before, a pas de deux for Drosselmeyer and his bewitched nephew soars with gorgeous lifts at Act I's musical climax, a homoerotic apotheosis that nevertheless demonstrates how Morris reveres the music he sets.

All nine dances Morris showed July 21 and 22 at Saratoga, and August 5 and 6 at Tanglewood, explored the expressive symbiosis of choreography and music, his precise, beautiful dancers perfectly enacting his designs. If anyone missed his notorious comic antics, these infinitely various confirmations of his status as the world's most musical choreographer since Balanchine more than made up for it, with works that look inevitable and surprising at the same time.

Morris's wit and humor, however, had not gone on vacation. The world premiere of Empire Garden justly made the biggest splash at Tanglewood, not only because it featured Colin Jacobsen, Emanuel Ax, and Yo-Yo Ma playing Charles Ives's Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano. This work for fifteen dancers brilliantly embodies in its variety of movement and mini-episodes Ives's palimpsest of American melodies woven into a darkly harmonious musical fabric. Elizabeth Kurtzman's eye-popping costumes, each unique, echo the musical interweaving by suggesting a tapestry of archaic national archetypes without literally representing them. We think of bandleaders, jockeys, ambassadors in operettas, bellhops, six-day cyclists, minstrel performers, sideshow musclemen, generals, magicians, and other citizens of Americana.

In the opening movement, the dancers' slow calisthenics (out of some bygone, patriotic physical culture movement) mature into dazzling whirls, with arms and legs suddenly pulled in or extended, jazzy and classical at once. Dancers turn their backs on us to extend their arms to the moon, rotate on one foot, then strenuously stretch toward us, as if inviting us into their democratic project. At the movement's end, as seven parallel couples curve in a sinuous S like a strigil-patterned frieze, this parti-colored, polyglot crew becomes assimilated into the dance's melting pot.

In the hectic central movement, when Ives's trio has three or even four melodies intersecting, Morris hears them and marshals his dancers accordingly, changing a step or motif as quickly as Ives transforms a rhythm or tune. While a trio dances to a folk violin melody, others start tromping to a march for the cello, and still others sway to the piano's lurching "Old Folks at Home." The layers of music keep unfolding and the dancers shift on a dime. Some roll ecstatically on the floor while others eagerly leap around a suddenly elevated tent preacher; then ever-varying groups rattle off a goofy bit of sailor's hornpipe, some vaudeville hoofing, boxers' sparring, a softshoe, brief ballroom partnering, and high music hall kicks punctuating "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay." Yet Morris has integrated these materials elegantly, overlapping his moves in Ives fashion, so instead of a hodgepodge...