When you first got your driver’s license, did you take your parents’ car out? Perhaps tentatively at first, and then with more confidence each time? And yet, it was always your parents’ car, and always would be, but you got used to it, and maybe they got used to the idea of you in it. Well Mark Morris has had the proverbial keys to the parents’ car—Lincoln Center—for several years now. Even so, given his puckish nature, he’ll always seem like the teenager in the Buick Roadmaster. And that’s not a bad thing.
Lincoln Center, where Mark Morris Dance Group has performed regularly in recent years—with more frequency than even BAM, near his headquarters—dominates Manhattan’s culturescape in the genres of classical ballet, music and opera. Morris is no neophyte, with his company nearly 30 (!) years old. His modern style is straightforward, rhythmically attentive, often joyous. And yet he structures his dances with the great care of a classicist, from the full-length works to the shorter ones. It’s earthbound and exalted all at once. read more
The hot ticket this past weekend was John Adams’ latest opera, A Flowering Tree. Walking into the lobby on Sunday afternoon there was a queue of at least 50 people hoping for cancellations. Inside the theater was a starry crowd gathered for the Mostly Mozart event—in the seats just around me were opera singers (Renée Fleming) ballet dancers (Wendy Whelan) rock stars (David Byrne) movie stars (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and even a Nobel Laureate (Toni Morrison).
All of us at Rose Hall were treated to some of John Adams’ best vocal writing to date—and one his finest collaborations with the indefatigable Peter Sellars. A Flowering Tree (which debuted in Vienna back in 2006) was written to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth by paying homage to the composer’s final opera, The Magic Flute. The two operas share exotic settings and plots that involve magic, marriage and a little mayhem (though this is the case with many musical dramas). Regardless of its inspiration, A Flowering Tree works on its own merits. read more
What happens when unfamiliar cultural elements are set within an all-too familiar framework? The result can be a kind of cultural slide show where the structure takes over and the content becomes secondary, as with Lemi Ponifasio’s Requiem. The director says Mozart’s same-titled work inspired him, yet it is not part of his theater piece, presented in the Rose Theater by Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival.
This is not the only source of disconnect about Requiem, originally created for the 2006 New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna. For this work about loss – cultural, environmental, or otherwise – Ponifasio pieced together songs, chants and rituals from his native Samoa, where he is a high chief. The program contained a libretto with the text, but apart from that, there was little onstage to give the audience some sort of grip on the various acts’ meanings. So the martial arts arm gestures, thigh slaps, shuffling gaits, and songs became more decorative and superficial than meaningful.
And yet the structure places it firmly within the anthology of contemporary performance art created recently in either Europe or the US and presented at venues such as Lincoln Center. read more
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