Dido and Aeneas
Mark Morris has co-opted Western Civ. He’s subverted the Dead White Guys using one of them–Englishman Henry Purcell–and his classic early opera Dido and Aeneas. In his choreographed staging Morris plays the two female leads himself, and it doesn’t matter that men played the women’s roles in 1689–in our time it’s transgressive. Too bad the news about Morris is six years old: he first presented this work in 1989, when he was director of dance at Belgium’s Theatre Royal de la Monnaie. Thanks to Performing Arts Chicago, we finally saw it here.
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Morris never lets us forget the classical, neoclassical, and imperial-istic underpinnings of Dido and Aeneas. Robert Bordo’s set pieces consist of an upstage balustrade and, downstage, a bench supported by classical columns. Nahum Tate’s libretto is based on Virgil’s Aeneiad, which traces the adventures of the god/man who “founded” Rome. English writers of the Restoration, 1660-1700, often fancied themselves the reincarnators of Rome’s Augustan period, Virgil’s period–an era of stability, for which Englishmen longed after 20 years of civil war. And it was at the end of this period that England began her empire building, defeating Holland’s navy and beginning a series of wars against the French that eventually won the British their colonies in the East and West. To late-17th-century Britons, Aeneas must have seemed the precursor of English greatness.
Morris does not look like a woman and, except for gold-painted fingernails, has made no special effort to look like one. But he performs these “womanly” gestures of dependence and submission extremely well. Still, there’s something in his portrayal–as when he shimmies his shoulders to the vibrato of the mezzo-soprano singing Dido, Jennifer Lane–that smacks of the drag queen, the man determined to be more woman than any mere woman. That side of Morris’s Dido is fully expressed in the other female role he plays, that of the Sorceress who, jealous of Dido’s good fortune, sends a messenger posing as Mercury to order Aeneas on his way.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Tom Brazil.
