How many times is she going to fawn over him, covering his choreography and dance company to the exclusion of everybody else?
How many times is she going to pack his lunchbox before he heads off to the studio?
Is there no other living choreographer left on the planet worth a look-in and write-up? Or has she decided that her dance column in The New Yorker is now dedicated solely to Curly Locks?
That makes for an awfully restricted beat, as if theater critic John Lahr only bestirred himself when Sarah Ruhl floated her latest paper airplane out the window.
The special pleading on behalf of Morris would make a nun blush.
Explaining the fleshy candor of the Morris approach, she writes:
This accounts, in part, for the very strong feeling of intimacy you get from the Mark Morris Dance Group. Morris shows you the armpits, the inner thighs, the bumpy muscles in the back." He makes men and women do the same steps. (Women, on average, can point their feet better than men.) At times he seems almost to embarrass his dancers, and therefore he puts us on their side.
That "therefore" is sure carrying a load of unexamined freight! It's an "ergo" pulled out of of the air, or her ass.
I mean, is Mark Morris deliberately trying to embarrass his dancers? What kind of choreographer and director would embarrass his own dancers other than a sadist? You would never watch a piece by Paul Taylor and come away thinking he had embarrassed his company dancers. They might dance embarrassing situations or emotions, or make embarrassing gestures, but they would be depicting embarrassment--the dancers themselves are never be embarrassed as dancers on stage. Embarrassing dancers is a form of cruelty.
And what does it mean, "puts us on their side"? Is Morris intentionally embarrassing his dancers so that they can earn our sympathy? What would be the aesthetic point of that? I've seen plays where I felt sympathy for the actors who were working so hard to overcome the weaknesses of the script and/or direction, and it didn't make for a pleasurable, illuminating experience. I also didn't leave the theater believing that the writer or director had embraced human imperfection and was asking us to embrace it too. Choreography that makes the dancers look bad is bad choreography, either a product of free-floating contempt or incompetence, excusing Morris is making excuses that would never be made for Taylor or any other choreographer, apart from maybe Twyla Tharp (whose aggression is right out there in the open, no hyphenated "passive" preceding it).
In fairness, Morris couldn't possibly embarrass his dancers as much as Acocella embarrasses herself:
By now, Morris is the most popular choreographer in New York--maybe the most popular in the country--and a lot of people just want to see what he's been up to lately. It's like Mother making dinner. Maybe all she came up with tonight was meat loaf. It's always nice to have dinner, though.
When did Joan Acocella's brain turn into a doily?
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/03/honest-to-fuck-joan-acocella.html
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