Calvary and a Prison in Athens
Socrates and Via Dolorosa
Mark Morris Dance Group
Cal Performances
Berkeley, California
Western civilization. Two words that seem to enrage one half the world while blinding the other with a misguided sense of aggrieved loyalty. The so-called progressive left lays the blame for most, if not all of today’s evils at its doorstep. The alt-right and other so-called conservatives claim to be its sole defenders in a world gone mad with resentment and ingratitude.
“Slavery, capitalism, climate change, nuclear war, toxic synthetics, dying seas, the collapsing of wildlife and the sixth extinction,” the left claims, “including our own under the weight of a catastrophic success – these are the legacy of Western civilization.” “Freedom, unsurpassed prosperity, knowledge without equal, human creativity unleashed and human power without limit,” claims the right, “righteousness, grace and God: these are the gifts and the triumph of Western civilization.”
But today there is no longer such a thing as “Western civilization.” Long after Europe lost its empires and its political and economic dominance, its intellectual and spiritual domination of the world is complete. Now “Western civilization” is world civilization: free markets, the primacy of the individual, the sanctity of human rights and the political authority of the people (in theory when not in practice), the imperative of human creativity, technology, critical reason and the scientific method in addressing our problems – these Western definitions of the good are unchallenged by anyone – though the right seems hardly to understand them and the left pretends to forget them. The right defends a grotesque caricature of “the West” that has its roots in the barbarians that brought down an empire and sacked Rome – their founding fathers are Alaric and Attila, the Vandals and Ostrogoths who gaped at the cities they burned.
The left attacks an equally grotesque simulacrum: a “West” that began in 1619, or 1492, or 1605 – when the Atlantic slave trade began, or Columbus set foot on Hispaniola, or the first stock exchange was founded in Amsterdam and what had been an efficient series of trading markets across the continent turned into the many-headed Hydra that now feasts on the globe.
At the heart of our dominant civilization stand two figures whose shadows have been cast down the millennia; the greatest rebels and martyrs of their times – doubters, skeptics, revolutionists. Each stood for his (for they were both men) convictions regarding reality, truth and the good, and each paid the ultimate price: they were summarily killed by the people and powers of their time, with the assumption their ideas and influence would die with them. They did not. Those two individuals also stood for the two poles on which what was, eventually, called “the West” has revolved for centuries. Their names? Socrates and Jesus.
Socrates embedded the dialectics of doubt and reasoned argument into the heart of the West. Jesus embedded the imperative of faith and love. Both stood for truth – though their conceptions of it were not always congruent, and much of Western history has been a long-undecided conflict, sometimes war, between them, one essentially spiritual, the other material – “Hebraism” and “Hellenism,” as Matthew Arnold defined them two centuries ago.
Or, as we might say today, alt-right and progressive – neither side seeming to realize that both they and their opponents are Western to the core.
What civilization first placed its own self-criticism as one of its fundamental values? Western – and late Western at that. In most other cultures and civilizations, including earlier versions of Europe, the critic, dissident, rebel would have been imprisoned, executed or dismissed as mad.
What civilization places the idea of moral universals and absolutes at its beating heart? Again, Western. Most, if not all, other cultures enforced loyalty to their own and only their own; anyone outside “the tribe” was not considered entirely “human,” and certainly had no “rights.”
This is not to romanticize the West. Being human, it is imperfect – often floridly so. It has blood on its hands, as does every other culture and civilization since humanity broke off from its simian ancestors. And its virtues were not always intentional; they exist at least partly because there has been in fact no single “Western culture” but rather a cauldron of “Western cultures,” dozens of cultures, ethnicities, religions, races, in perpetual war with each other for millennia. But that discussion must be pursued elsewhere.
The Mark Morris Dance Group brought two dances, balancing these Western, and now world-dominating presences, one intellectual and heroic, the other spiritual and sanctified, to Berkeley’s Zellerbach Theater during a recent weekend; performances that could not help but stimulate these thoughts.
The first was a revival of Mark Morris’s celebrated “Socrates,” an intriguing work set to the music of Eric Satie and a libretto taken from three of Plato’s dialogues. Based on designs to be found in Grecian pottery, and at times curiously reminiscent of Nijinsky’s notorious choreography for Debussy’s “Prelude to ‘L’aprés-midi d’un faune,’” the dance moves in smoothly hieratic poses, sometimes childlike, sometimes serenely adolescent, across a landscape of classical purity and grace.
The dance has a libretto, performed gracefully by tenor Brian Giebler and accompanied by pianist Colin Fowler. The libretto’s first part is taken from The Symposium, the celebrated dialogue on the nature of love. Alicibiades describes Socrates as like a Selenus, a grotesque figurine containing, hiddenly, the figure of a god, and also like Marsyas, a satyr and flute player for the gods – though those who remember their mythology will remember his tragic end when he makes the mistake of challenging Apollo, god of the lyre, to a competition: he loses, predictably, and is skinned alive for his hubris.
The second part describes an idyllic passage in Phaedrus in which Socrates and his young eponymous friend seek a place on the banks of a lovely stream where they will conduct a conversation in search of the true, the beautiful, and the good.
The third is taken from Phaedo, narrating the last moments of Socrates’ life, surrounded by his mourning friends in an Athens prison, when he drinks the hemlock to which he has been condemned by the citizens of Athens for corrupting the youth of the city when, in truth, he was liberating them from the very illusions that led, ironically, tragically, to the greatest of ironist’s own martyrdom.
Eric Satie’s music, famously cool and detached, makes little attempt to express the libretto; Morris’s choreography spends almost all of its time following the music and ignoring the words: there is almost no attempt, for example, to express the pathos of the closing pages until the very end, when, one by one, each of the dancers slips gracefully to the floor, expressing the death, perhaps not only of Socrates, but of the Greek ideal itself.
The second half of the program was a world premiere, awaited with much anticipation: “Via Dolorosa,” set to the music of Nico Muhly, performed on solo harp, with formidable virtuosity, by Parker Ramsay. The dance follows the Stations of the Cross, from Jesus’ condemnation to his crucifixion, death and entombment. Interestingly, it distributes the role of Jesus to dancers of various genders, ethnicities and races, appropriate for the universal humanity of the Good Shepherd. Muhly’s music is, for the most part, as detached as Satie’s, though it occasionally gives way to the harrowing drama of the moment. The stunning stage set – a blowup of a searingly beautiful patch of abstract brushwork, whose colors changed depending on how they were lit – was by Howard Hodgkin.
For this dance, too, there’s a libretto, in this case somewhat overwrought, by Alice Goodman, though in this performance it was neither spoken nor sung (as, it seems, might occur at some performances). Which was just as well, as it is, to be frank, a poor substitute for the simple descriptions in the gospel.
The dance was a little disappointing. Though there were moments of genuine originality and the childlike grace and warm humanity one associates with Morris’s dances, there just was not enough inventiveness and too much reliance on mannerisms one has also come to expect. It seemed just a little tired. There was also a strange attempt to take the edge off the final moments of the entombment, at the very end of the dance, to anticipate the coming resurrection, that felt contrived and forced. After all, even in Giotto’s frescoes, the angels are allowed to weep and lament as if there will be no resurrection to come, not take what looked like a not very unconvincing victory lap.
It was perhaps a more thought-provoking evening than one that was entirely satisfying aesthetically, but it was certainly worth the visit. And the audience gave it a standing ovation.
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Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. His most recent books are the children’s books If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment of Biestia, the first two stories in the series “Otherwise.”
