Layla and Majnun, a 12th-century Persian narrative poem based on the story of a poet and the girl he loves and loses, was described by Lord Byron as “the Romeo and Juliet of the east”. In 1908, an opera telling the story of Layla and Majnun had its premiere in Baku, Azerbaijan, and in 2007 this work was adapted as a chamber piece by the Silkroad Ensemble, under the directorship of the cellist Yo-Yo Ma. In 2016, the American choreographer Mark Morris created a choreographic text to accompany Silkroad’s adaptation. The resultant production unites the dancers of Morris’s company with the celebrated Azerbaijani vocalists Alim Qasimov and Fargana Qasimova, who are father and daughter, and the dozen-strong Silkroad Ensemble.
This is, to say the least, a rich and grand work. The dancers’ costumes – sky blue for the men, dawn pink for the women – were realised from designs by the British artist Howard Hodgkin, who died in March last year, and the stage is dominated by a huge reproduction of a Hodgkin painting. The 1908 Azerbaijani opera, composed by Uzeyir Hajibeyli, is an acknowledged masterpiece of the mugham musical form, which has been described as “a poetic-musical communication between performers and initiated listeners”. To this uninitiated spectator, the score is as passionately intense as it is strange. For the musically eclectic Morris, as Simon Broughton reports in Songlines magazine, “it grew on me. It’s an incredibly gorgeous piece of music and the piece is terribly moving.”
The story is as straightforward as it is melancholy. Qays, a young poet, and Layla, his childhood sweetheart, are forcibly separated, and she marries another. Heartbroken, Qays becomes a wanderer in the desert, and is called “Majnun” (crazy) by his tribe. Finally, their passion unconsummated, the pair are united in death. For such an inherently dramatic work, Morris’s production is oddly lacking in tension. We join the tale when the couple are already separated. There’s no backstory to involve us, just the unfolding and unwavering misery of their apartness and eventual demise.
Morris has a reputation for giving music boldly visible life. In the course of a choreographic career spanning four decades, he has addressed a vast range of scores, both classical and contemporary. Many of his best-loved works are set to masterpieces of the baroque canon. Layla and Majnun, however, finds him on subdued form. While the music suggests the agony of the lovers’ longing and the restless winds of the desert in which Majnun wanders, and Hodgkin’s painting conjures a multiplicity of images – blood-spray, plumes, a cascading waterfall – Morris’s dances remain scrupulously polite.
There are jumps, hops, sways and dips. There are runs and swirls, and decorous lifts of the women by the men. But with the singers and musicians centre stage, the performance space looks limited and constrained, and the dances fail to add a significant dimension to the production. Technically, all is scrupulously correct. With regard to musical phrasing, all is impeccable. But no one ever cuts loose. The tragedy of the lovers’ situation, so vehemently expressed by Qasimov and Qasimova, is never matched by choreography that too often wafts ineffectually over the music’s surface. For all its profound unfamiliarity to me, I found the Silkroad score and the mugham singing more involving than the other elements. Like Morris’s choreography, Hodgkin’s painting implies significance without actually bestowing it. We could have done without either of them.
