Dancing to the Music of Time: Choreographer Mark Morris’s new memoir

[...]as we learn from choreographer Mark Morris’s brash, candid, often caustic, and totally delightful memoir Out Loud, you don’t ask this country’s most vital modern-dance dynamo since Martha Graham—sorry, Twyla Tharp fans—to describe his philosophy of dance. “Every kind of dance is a variety of ‘f...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Bookforum - Artforum 2019-12, Vol.26 (4)
Main Author: Carson, Tom
Format: Magazinearticle
Language:English
Subjects:
Dancers & choreographers
Musical performances
Philosophy
Tharp, Twyla
Theater directors & producers
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:[...]as we learn from choreographer Mark Morris’s brash, candid, often caustic, and totally delightful memoir Out Loud, you don’t ask this country’s most vital modern-dance dynamo since Martha Graham—sorry, Twyla Tharp fans—to describe his philosophy of dance. “Every kind of dance is a variety of ‘folk dance,’” he tells us, and perhaps his work’s most abiding constant is its quizzical interrogation of the nature of community: what its purpose is, how it mutates and adapts, who’s excluded. (Another constant is his wit; there may be no other modern-dance maven whose visual jokes and sheer effrontery are so likely to provoke delighted laughter.) Eager to create his own dances instead of serving other choreographers’ conceptions, he formed the MMDG in 1980. [...]he’s opinionated about both the dance world’s sanctified elders—Merce Cunningham’s work, though he later changed his mind about it, was “as pleasurable as cod-liver oil,” and Paul Taylor had a “tin ear”—and his own trendier rivals. Morris may disdain the pomposity of having a “philosophy” of dance, but in some of the most stimulating passages of Out Loud, he’s happy to explain his aesthetic choices and values—which, after all, aren’t quite the same thing.
ISSN:1098-3376