Mark Morris: Socrates and Via Dolorosa

Members of the Mark Morris Dance Group perform in Socrates. Photo credit: Chris Hardy. Image source: San Francisco Chronicle

Those who truly grasp philosophy pursue the study of nothing else but dying and being dead.

—Socrates in Plato's Phaedo

Throughout his career Mark Morris has set dances to unusual music choices. In the months after founding his company in 1980 he created dances to Harry Partch's Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California (a dance actually made when he was 16, and reset on his new company seven years later), Conlon Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano, Vivaldi's sacred choral work Gloria, and traditional Romanian songs. In later years he choreographed pieces to music ranging from the Baroque to the 21st Century, and from pop to High Modernism.

The program Morris brought to Berkeley's Cal Performances (seen April 21) was a two-part meditation on death. The first work was Socrates (2010) to Erik Satie's Socrate for piano and voice (1917/18), which sets three texts from Plato: "Portrait de Socrate" (Portrait of Socrates) from Symposium, "Les bords de l'Ilissus" (The banks of the Ilissus) from Phaedrus, and "Mort de Socrate" (Death of Socrates) from Phaedo.

Members of the Mark Morris Dance Group perform in Socrates. Photo credit: Gene Schiavone. Image source: Time Out

In this performance, tenor Brian Giebler sang all the texts to Colin Fowler's piano accompaniment, although the first two sections are dialogues and the voice part was originally written for one or four female vocalists. The music is stately and formal, and the movement often places the dancers in geometric formations and frieze-like positions suggesting the ancient Greek vase paintings. The dancers are costumed by Martin Pakledinaz in tunics of yellow, red, pastel blue, gold, and brown, colors that, as Alice Miller Cotter has pointed out, echo those seen in Jacques Louis David's painting The Death of Socrates.

Jacques Louis David, The Death of Socrates, 1787. Image source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Socrates' raised finger gesture from this painting also makes repeated appearances:

Members of the Mark Morris Dance Group perform in Socrates. Image source: New York Times

No single dancer portrays Socrates; instead, both he and his students are embodied collectively by the group. In the moving final tableau dancers lie onstage, immobile—they are all Socrates, and by extension, we in the audience must reflect on whether there are ideas that we would die for. One dancer, though, escapes into the wings. In her New Yorker review of the premiere, dance critic Joan Acocella wrote that this dancer may represent "his ideas, which, unlike Socrates’ body, could not be put to death."

"Portrait de Socrate" sung by Barbara Hannigan, accompanied by pianist Reinbert de Leeuw:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ibFz8I47x4

PORTRAIT DE SOCRATE Alcibiade: Or, mes chers amis, afin de louer Socrate, J’aurai besoin de comparaisons: Lui croira peutêtre que je veux plaisanter; mais rien n’est plus sérieux, Je dis d’abord qu’il ressemble tout à fait à ces Silènes qu’on voit exposés dans les ateliers des sculpteurs et que les artistes représentent avec une flûte ou des pipeaux à la main, et dans l’intérieur desquels quand on les ouvre, en séparant les deux pièces dont ils se composent, on trouve renfermées des statues de divinités.	PORTRAIT OF SOCRATES Alcibiades: And now, my dear friends, in order to praise Socrates I will need to make comparisons, and yet I speak not in jest; nothing could be more serious, I say that he is exactly like the busts of Silenus, which are set up in the statuaries’ studios, which the artists represent holding a flute or pipes in hand, and which, when they are made to open in the middle and are separated into two pieces, have images of gods inside them.
Je prétends ensuite qu’il ressemble au satyre Marsyas. . . Et n’estu pas aussi joueur de flûte? Oui sans doute, Et bien plus étonnant que Marsyas. Celuici charmait les hommes par les belles choses que sa bouche tirait de ses instruments et autant en fait aujourd’hui quiconque répète ses airs; en effet ceux que jouait Olympos, je les attribue à Marsyas son maître,	I say also that he resembles Marsyas the satyr. . . And are you not also a flute-player? That you are, without doubt, and far more amazing than Marsyas. He indeed charmed the souls of men by the beautiful sounds his breath drew from his instruments, and the players of his music do so still; for the melodies of Olympus are derived from Marsyas who taught them.
La seule différence Socrate, qu’il y ait ici entre Marsyas et toi, c’est que sans instruments, avec de simples discours, tu fais la même chose. . . Pour moi, mes amis n’était la crainte de vous paraître totalement ivre, je vous attesterais avec serment l’effet extraordinaire que ses discours m’ont fait et me font encore.	That is the only difference, Socrates, between Marsyas and you. With the effect of your words alone, you produce the same result. . . For me, my friends, if I were not afraid that you would think me hopelessly drunk, I would have sworn to the extraordinary influence which they have always had and still have over me.
En l’écoutant, je sens palpiter mon cœur plus fortement que si j’étais agité de la manie dansante des corybantes, ses paroles font couler mes larmes et j’en vois un grand nombre d’autres ressentir les mêmes émotions. Tels sont les prestiges qu’exerce, et sur moi et sur bien d’autres, la flûte de ce satyre. . .	For when I hear them my heart leaps within me more than that of any Corybantian reveler in his dancing frenzy. His words cause my tears to flow, and I observe that many others are affected in the same manner. And this is power exercised over me and many others by the flute-playing of this satyr. . .
Socrate: Tu viens de faire mon éloge: c’est maintenant à moi de faire celui de monvoisin de droite. . .	Socrates: You praised me just a moment ago: It now falls to me in turn to praise the neighbor to my right. . .

In that same New Yorker review Acocella wrote, "With Jesus Christ, Plato was the most influential thinker in the history of the West." No surprise, then, that the second half of the program was about Jesus. Via Dolorosa (The street of sorrows, 2024) is Morris' interpretation of Jesus' Passion. Commissioned in part by Cal Performances, this was its world premiere.

Members of the Mark Morris Dance Group perform in Via Dolorosa. Photo credit: Chris Hardy. Image source: San Francisco Chronicle

Via Dolorosa is well-matched with Socrates in mood and theme, if not in choreographic inspiration. Both men were murdered by the state for asking uncomfortable questions, and Nico Muhly's score for Via Dolorosa, entitled The Street (14 Meditations on the Stations of the Cross) for solo harp, seems at times Satie-influenced. The excellent harpist was Parker Ramsay, and Morris' wise decision to omit the recitation of Alice Goodman's textual meditations on each Station (included in the program) enabled us to focus on the music.

Parker Ramsay performing Nico Muhly's The Street (14 Meditations on the Stations of the Cross) as accompaniment to Mark Morris' Via Dolorosa. Photo credit: Chris Hardy. Image source: San Francisco Chronicle

It's not clear what inspired Morris to choreograph the Passion, but as the piece developed I felt that Via Dolorosa increasingly demonstrated the limits of literalism. The dancers wear thin white or light brown robes, as though they are extras in The Last Temptation of Christ. In three of the 14 Stations Jesus falls, and of course, in each of these sections we see the dancers stumble and fall to the stage. In the Stations that mention the cross, dancers hold their arms straight out to the sides as though they portray or are nailed to a cross. When Jesus encounters his mother, we see him being born (sliding forward onstage between her legs as she squats above) and then as a toddler clutching her hand and walking beside her; the toddler Jesus is represented by dancers shuffling forward on their knees, an old vaudeville gag.

Members of the Mark Morris Dance Group perform in Via Dolorosa. Photo credit: Chris Hardy. Image source: San Francisco Chronicle

Via Dolorosa was not a disaster, but at times it skirted the bathetic, and for this viewer it fell far short of achieving the precision of effect, amplified through restraint, seen in its partner work. Socrates has taken its place among Morris' masterpieces; I suspect that Via Dolorosa, despite seeming to have been purposely designed as its companion piece, will not share the same fate.

But Morris' ear for striking, unusual music has not left him; Muhly's score is quietly compelling. Station VI, Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6hhcEkAyIY