With several of the audience leaving the building lustily pummelling their midriffs in imitation of the Mark Morris Company’s rousing finale, Polka, a vintage piece from 1992, the New York-based choreographer can justifiably claim to be big in Aberdeen.
Cannily invited by the northern Dance Live festival (nabbing the sole UK performance and the European premiere of Morris’s latest piece, Words), the touring group of eight charismatic dancers and two outstanding musicians (piano and violin), breeze through five perfect pieces.
Words is classic Morris: interlaced with a beautifully natural balance, it is comfortable in its wit and never lets us go. Dressed in loose shorts, all happy-reds (tangerine, violet, plum), the dancers clinch in and out of sync in ones, twos, threes. A pair, like magician’s assistants, carry a silk curtain to screen the others on and off stage. Now you see me, now you don’t. Guided by Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, Morris embodies the missing words, unspoken perhaps but clearly articulated. Up pops a Scottish birl next to a kooky hieroglyphic pose: all with a silent-movie undercurrent of searching eyes and pointing fingers.
Despite a less than full auditorium, the programme, including Polka, continues to transmit this joyful fluency to an appreciative audience. Ivor Cutler’s surreal poetry cheerily eggs on 14 narrative scenes in A Wooden Tree (2012): a rattling rollercoaster of childhood imagination, in buoyant balance with the poignant absurdity of clever, grownup thinking. The romantic conversation, Jenn and Spencer (2013), creates a dynamic flowchart for a couple forever in a tug of love, against a Henry Cowell score. Italian Concerto (2007), a precursor of Words, sculpts with Bach a grammar of cocked elbows, clenched fists and hops. The Morris lexicon remains effusively open to interpretation by all.
