The dance is not going away party: Mark Morris’ new Northwest

For his company’s second week at the Joyce Theater, musical omnivore Mark Morris unearthed three chamber works from the 80s and 90s set to Schumann (The Argument), Tcherepnin (Ten Suggestions), and Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys (Going Away Party). Nestled among them was the world premiere of Northwest, set to music by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer of soundscapes of the American wilderness, John Luther Adams. Throughout, Morris robustly matched choreography to every syncopated beat, mirroring texture and the development of musical motifs – an exhilarating technique yet unrelenting in its doggedness.

The strongest impressions of the evening were of the captivating live music (everything but the Texas Playboys who were heard on recording) and a handful of stirring solo turns, chief among them the mischievous and endearing Dallas McMurray in Ten Suggestions and Billy Smith’s lonely cowboy in Going Away Party.

And then there were the folded-paper fans brandished by the ensemble in Northwest – pleated bits of paper that the dancers had tucked away in the waistband of their shorts. They fluttered and twirled these modest implements, inspired by more elaborate feathered fans used in ritual dances by the Athabascan and Yup’ik Native peoples of Alaska.

Morris’ dancers snapped their fans like the reins of a horse and used them to tap fellow dancers on the head, like a ritual communication. In one of several lovely repetitive and hypnotic movements, they would sway to one side, reaching an arm in that direction and tucking the other behind their back, fans aflutter, before hopping like a bird on the other foot. Toward the end, they broke out of their tidy ranks and dashed around, sweeping their arms and flickering their fans as if manifesting a storm. They would periodically drop their fans on the stage, only to casually fish out another pair from under their T-shirts. The stage was soon littered with fans – recalling the insouciance with which Morris’ dancers tossed fistfuls of white confetti into the air in the ‘Snow’ scene of The Hard Nut, making their own weather.

Did those yellow paper fans represent birds and butterflies and other fauna in danger of extinction? Did they symbolize a people’s wishes and dreams? Had the dancers scribbled secrets on notepaper before folding them into fans?

These burning questions lingered, as did the haunting, ethereal sounds of harp and percussion – Adams’ interpretations of Yup’ik and Athabascan dance music and poetry – played by Deanna Cirielli and Colin Fowler, evoking Northwest as a mystical place rather than a region on a map.

Going Away Party on the other hand firmly nailed dance to geography, with its collection of Western swing songs mostly about heartbreak – like the one that equates the loss of a milk cow to the end of a romance. Perky dancers flaunted an aw-shucks, sometimes bawdy, humor.

Amid the corn, however, emerged the mysterious outsider figure of Billy Smith, whom party guests seemed not to see, even when he stumbled and fell to the ground at their feet. “It won’t be a loud party/dreams don’t make a noise when they die,” sang Leon Rausch in a bit of Texas Playboy poetry.

Romance had soured, too, for the three couples in The Argument. Yet the simmering Brandon Randolph made the old new – as did Fowler on piano and Andrew Janss on cello, companionably squeezed into the stalls in the intimate confines of the Joyce. Schumann absorbed the rhythms of folk music without reproducing it, making something distinctive and absorbing; this, too, is Morris’ wheelhouse.

In Ten Suggestions, originally danced by Morris, Dallas McMurray came across as a precocious youngster in his too-large pyjamas, embracing varied distractions, perhaps to avoid being sent to bed. He tangled with a hula hoop, a chair, a ribbon and an outsized pith helmet. The whimsical choreography was laden with challenges like off-kilter balances and multiple pirouettes which McMurray demolished with innocent glee. Yet shadows occasionally penetrated these blithe corridors: he sometimes gripped his hands tightly as if coerced into saying his prayers, looking dejected. Fowler, the company’s musical director and MVP of this program, played the mercurial score with panache.

The charms of Mark Morris downtown notwithstanding, I left longing for Mark Morris of the opera house: Dido and Aeneas, L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, Mozart Dances, Layla and Majnun, and others with their dazzling, multifarious imagery and ideas. An unfair desire, to be sure, in these times of hardship for dance in America, especially for smaller companies, hammered by pandemic and by a brutish administration. The only effective resistance is to make one big very loud party, so that dreams don’t die without noise.