In The Megalopolis with Mark Morris’ “The Forest”
Monday, May 23rd, 2016The premiere of Mark Morris’s “A Forest” (seen May 21) took place at his home, the Mark Morris Dance Center in downtown Brooklyn, which is now in a construction zone where multiple glass skyscrapers are dwarfing the once prominent, white dance building. As if in response, Morris’s choreography for “Forest” to Haydn’s elegant rhythms and sonorities, from Piano Trio No. 44 n E Major, is often treated with small dance responses. For example, when MMDG Music Ensemble pianist Colin Fowler, violinist Georgy Valtchev, and cellist Wolfram Koessel introduced Hayden’s primary theme, and later repeated it, the nine dancers became Pavlovians, dutifully repeating the same dance phrase. Part of their dance phrase involved hopping three times in three clumps, and in time with the musicians’ strident triple bowing and fingering. They brought to mind excited kids at a candy store.
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