The heat wave across the USA on its 250th birthday didn’t spare North Carolina. Though a holiday, there was a sizable audience at the Duke Campus to see the perennial performance by Mark Morris Dance Group. Appropriately the theme of the matinee was Dances to American Music.
It was a slimmed down sampler of their larger program at The Joyce — jazz (including a stride piano finale), country western, a selection from Gottschalk’s Grand Tarantella that gives the dancers some fun with tambourines, and Three Preludes for Piano that seems to shout the music is from Gershwin with just the first blue note.
Longtime troupe member Dallas McMurray did a memorable and flawless solo to the Three Preludes, sporting oversized white gloves as part of his Isaac Mizrahi designed costume, that you can imagine Mizrahi himself wearing when he performed in Chicago.
Except for the Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys recording for the Country music dance— Going Away Party— pianist Chris McCarthy performed all the music. In this reviewer’s opinion McCarthy’s performance goes a long way to capturing the light spirit of this Americana compilation.
American Dance Festival Audience Includes Many Mark Morris Dance Group Fans
If you’ve seen Mark Morris choreography before you know the dancers are going to always be smiling. They move as smooth as the satin pants they sport in the finale dance. As they smile, they gracefully glide, but rarely do they seem challenged to do virtuoso athletic moves, or perhaps they are so smooth they are scaling the heights of Mt Everest but making it seem effortless. The choreography hews very closely to every note of music.
Lite as meringue on holiday lemon pie, they regale us with evanescent vignettes that float by in what feels like the well-honed Mark Morris signature. Some in the audience might find the choreography clever by half. The audience was chock full of many who seemed to be frequent fliers for Morris style dance. If you missed them this year, you will likely find them in future ADF performances.
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About the Author: Amy Munice
Amy Munice is Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher of Picture This Post. She covers books, dance, film, theater, music, museums and travel. Prior to founding Picture This Post, Amy was a freelance writer and global PR specialist for decades—writing and ghostwriting thousands of articles and promotional communications on a wide range of technical and not-so-technical topics.
