The Early Years Of Mark Morris -- From The Start, Special Rhythm Inspired His Every Move

Where does creative genius come from? Are some children simply born with irrepressible imaginations, and others not? Or is creativity something many of us start out with and somehow lose along the way to adulthood?

Seattle native Mark Morris, widely hailed as the leading choreographer of his generation, clearly is one who lost none of his creative power - his "weirdness," as cartoonist Lynda Barry, a former classmate, calls it - as he matured. Now 37, he is the subject of the forthcoming biography and critical study, "Mark Morris" (Farrar Straus Giroux, $27.50), due in Seattle-area stores in mid-December.

In these excerpts from the chapter entitled "Childhood," author Joan Acocella shows us the unusual child Mark was - and the many ways in which the boy growing up in Mount Baker was so much like the man the world knows today.

Mark Morris was born in 1956, in Seattle, to William Morris, a high-school teacher, and Maxine Crittendon Morris, who stayed home with the children. Their ancestry was Northern European, their religion Presbyterian. They lived in a six-room house, white with blue trim, on a quiet street in the Mount Baker section of Seattle. Their block was mostly Italian-American and Jewish, mostly working-class. "A couple of the fathers sold insurance," says Morris' sister Maureen. "One was a jeweler, one was a garbage collector, one was a mortician. One ran a brothel, but it was called a hotel."

In most respects the Morrises were an ordinary middle-class household - they watched Lawrence Welk, they went to McDonald's, they taped their Christmas cards up over the mantel - but there were at least two unusual things about them. One was the extraordinary rate of amateur art-making in the house. No one in the immediate or extended family had ever been a professional artist, and only one became an artist, but they were constantly producing art, simply by way of amusing themselves. Bill had a large double organ in the living room, and playing it was his joy and relaxation, so there was always music in the house. Mark danced before he could walk, pulling himself up by the edge of the coffee table and yanking himself around to whatever tune was playing in the living room. The children sang for their father while he played. He taught them his favorites: "Sweet Sue," "Sentimental Journey."

At home the children supplied their own entertainment. Mark built cascades with piles of dishes in the kitchen sink. He organized the neighbor children into shows. When he and Maureen got bored, they mashed flowers in clay pots in the garage and dyed their clothes. "We had the feeling that we could do just about anything we wanted," says Maureen. "We had much more freedom than the other kids on the block."

The second remarkable thing about the Morris family was its ethical emphasis. They were constantly doing for others, taking in strays, setting an extra place at the table. In part, this was simply a matter of character - both parents were extraordinarily kind-hearted - but it was also the product of social forces. When Mark was in grade school the population in the neighborhood began to shift. Black and Asian families moved in, and as they did, the white families moved out, with some exceptions, including the Morrises.

Many of these families had difficulties, as the Morrises were well aware. In 1960, Franklin High School set up a special-education program for students designated as "potential dropouts," and Bill Morris was assigned to this program. Bill took his responsibility for these students very seriously, and he looked after them outside school as well, throwing parties for them and giving them jobs so that they could make pocket money.

Throughout Mark's childhood, the Morrises had little money. High-school teachers made a poor living in the '50s and '60s. At times Bill felt that somehow he had missed the boat. All his brothers had better jobs and bigger houses and golf-club memberships. They chided him for falling behind, and this pained him. But he was not ambitious, and he didn't like golf, so he went his own way and, however ambivalently, taught his children to do the same.

In his early childhood, Mark's dancing was merely play. When his older sister Marianne danced in the living room in her point shoes, he jammed his feet into plastic orange-juice cups and danced on point, too. He made up solos for himself to the "1812 Overture," "Carnival of the Animals," "Danse Macabre," and performed them draped in sheets and towels. Then, when he was 8, Maxine took him to a performance of Jose Greco's flamenco troupe. That night he decided that he too would like to be a dancer when he grew up - a flamenco dancer. He pestered Maxine to take him for lessons, so she looked through the ads in the paper and finally found a studio that offered Spanish dance: Verla Flowers Dance Arts.

Verla Flowers (this was her real name) was the kind of person who would fascinate a child. She wore floral-print muumuus and silver tap shoes that jingled as she walked. She had copper-colored hair mounted in a beehive hairdo that got done on weekends and then descended gradually in the course of the week. (According to one of her students, you could tell what day of the week it was by consulting Flowers's hair.) She was warmhearted, vivacious, and slightly eccentric. In 1965, when Mark Morris arrived at her door, she was 52.

All the Spanish dancing at the school was taught by Flowers herself, so it was she who became Mark Morris' teacher. She took him as a private pupil, and they liked each other immediately. She soon realized that he was an unusual student. Within the limits of a child's body, he could do almost anything she asked him to, but what seemed to her most extraordinary was his power of concentration. "At the end of our half hour, he was still completely intent, ready to go on, and I was completely exhausted. When he got home, his mother told me, he would go up to his room and practice what he had learned until she made him come down to dinner. Then he would go back up and practice until he had to go to bed." The other unusual thing about him was his rhythmic intelligence. Spanish dance has extremely complicated rhythms, often 12-count phrases with complex internal accents, but he picked up everything immediately and wanted to go on to the next thing.

He was voracious - "a brain like a sponge," Flowers says. When things went too slowly for him, he became bored and disruptive. "His mother talked to me," Flowers remembers, "and she said, `Verla, we've got to keep him busy.' "

What Flowers came up with to keep him busy was ballet. To her way of thinking, ballet was the basic form of dance training. Mark had already been hanging around in the back of the school's ballet classes, trying out the steps. He was clearly interested. Then, even more than now, ballet for men was regarded as effeminate. Flowers assured Bill, in her words, "that as for effeminacy, I would work against that with every breath in my body. I said, `I know the word ballet is scary, but I really feel that if we look ahead to his future, he should have it.' " Bill said OK, and Mark began ballet lessons at age 10.

Mark was a born performer. From early childhood, he had always been a theatrical character; once he found his way onto a stage, he was completely at home. Even when he was 9, performing for PTA dinners, he was utterly self-assured. "He knew what to do to interact with an audience," says his sister Marianne. "He held his head up and looked at the audience and danced to them." He was self-assured offstage as well, and he needed this, for by the time he entered his early teenage years, he was not your average child. "He looked like a junior vampire," says the musical-comedy writer Chad Henry, who became friends with him around this time. "He was thin, small, very intense, with big dark circles under his eyes. He was outrageous - very verbal, a blabbermouth." Furthermore, he was already effeminate, a fact that of course drew comments from the other children and probably confused him for a while as well. Years later, in 1982, he made a piece, "jr high," that he says was inspired by his experiences at Asa Mercer Junior High in Seattle.

But while he was different, he had a kind of confidence and sophistication that spared him the treatment normally meted out to non-conforming children. The cartoonist Lynda Barry, who knew him in junior high, remembers:

At Mercer if you were weird and you were white it was very easy to get beat up. I was always trying not to get beat up. But Mark seemed to walk right through it. It was like he had some sort of song playing in his head that no one else could hear, but it made him strong in the center of what was then called weirdness. I remember, once, being in the hall. One (kid) said, "Hey, you a boy or a girl?" I got nervous. I thought there was going to be a fight. But Mark didn't even break stride. He said, "Follow me to the bathroom and see which door I go into."

We were in a play together. I was a princess and he was a prince, and we were on stage presenting it during assembly in our school auditorium. I gave my cue line and turned to where Mark was supposed to enter from, and he wasn't there. I gave it again, and no Mark, but the audience was screaming. I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on. I kept looking around and they were laughing and screaming, and finally I looked up and saw that Mark had decided to make his entrance by lowering himself from the ceiling on a rope. The teacher liked it. She gave him an A.

For ninth-grade graduation he got voted loudest laugh. I got that vote, too, for the girls. I think we also both were voted weirdest.

Even at 13, it was clear that he was staying up way too late. You could see it in his face. He looked like he never slept. And it looked like the thing that was keeping him up was exciting.

In fact, at 13 he was staying up too late, and the thing keeping him up was a folk dance group. In the '60s and '70s, the folk dance movement underwent a temporary expansion, fed by the utopian ideals of the period. Community, universal harmony, the quest for "roots," the longing for innocence, the search for a popular art rather than a high art: These aspirations, together with allied movements in the music world, produced a folk dance renaissance, and the West Coast, where utopianism always runs high, and ran highest in those years, contributed heavily to this trend. In many cities and college towns, new folk dance groups sprang up. In Seattle, Koleda Folk Ensemble was one of them.

Koleda's membership, which over the years numbered between 30 and 50, consisted in part of ordinary middle-class citizens who simply made Balkan dance their hobby. But this was the late '60s, the height of the hippie movement, and most of Koleda's members were counterculture types.

According to Chad Henry, who was one of the Koleda musicians, "It was about 90 percent misfits and spiritual homeless" - "a very wild bunch indeed," as Morris later put it.

Short of the members' living together - actually, some of them did live together - Koleda was like a '60s commune. Holding hands in a circle, dancing and singing in harmony, they made art of friendship and love, and friendship and love out of art.

In 1970, at age 13, Morris was taken to a Koleda rehearsal by a friend, and for the next three years he more or less never left.

Koleda was to have a profound influence on Morris's choreographic style. From the Balkan dances he learned how he wanted the dancing body to look, with the weight held low and the feet flat against the floor. He also learned the habit of combining complicated rhythms with simple steps, and he took some of those simple steps - chain dances, circle dances, certain hopping and bouncing steps - directly from Koleda's routines. From Koleda's dances and from its ideals, he also learned how he wanted an ensemble to look: like ordinary human beings, full of variety. The dancing ensemble was not to be a sleek, high-bred group, different from the world, but rather an image of the world: human beings joining hands and dancing together.

It was within this communal atmosphere that Morris had his sexual awakening: "I fell in love with the group. I fell in love with several individuals in sequence, and they fell in love with each other." The fact that the majority of the people in Koleda were not homosexual was probably critical to his view of this experience, for what he seems to have developed was a sense not so much that he was different, or even a member of a group that was different, but merely that he was part of the world's variety. Koleda's group-centered philosophy supported his sexual discovery; in return, he embraced that philosophy and never forgot it. Not just sexual acceptance, though, but all the forms of happiness that he found in Koleda - artistic, social, emotional, physical - reinforced the communal vision. Utopianism is a constant theme of Morris's work, and that utopianism comes from Koleda.

By now Morris had also begun to make dances of his own. At age 14 he created his first modern dance piece; at 15, his first ballet, on point - a piece called "Renaissance." This is an early start for a choreographer, but he set out, as usual, with complete confidence. Most of the dancers in "Renaissance" were in their 20s, but they seem to have had no problem taking direction from a 15-year-old choreographer. "I worked with him again later, when he was older," says one of them, Jennifer Carroll Walker, "but when he was 15, he was exactly the same, just skinnier. He knew what he was doing. He knew what he could ask, and couldn't ask, from each dancer. And the piece he made was very hard." From 1971 to 1976, the remaining years of his youth in Seattle, he created some 20 dances, and often chose the music and found the musicians as well, to say nothing of running the rehearsals and getting everybody to do what he wanted. In other words, he wasn't just a fledgling choreographer: He was a fledgling company director.

Aside from dance, the other thing that occupied his life was music. When he was 7 or 8, his father taught him to read music and thereafter he spent hours every day playing the family piano.

Music became the basis of his social life, the thing he did with his friends. When he was a young teenager, one of his closest companions was Page Smith, a girl who lived down the block and was a serious cello student. (Today Page Smith is a principal cellist with the Northwest Chamber Orchestra and the Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra.) Smith remembers that in junior high she and Mark often spent all recess playing rhythm games: "He would stamp out one rhythm with his feet and another with his hands. Or I would be the drone, keeping a steady rhythm, and he would try out things over it - a four to a three, or something like that. So we'd just walk around the playground, stamping and clapping, until recess was over."

At age 15, Mark and Page moved over to Franklin High School, where Bill Morris taught. The school was only a half-block from the Morris home, and almost every afternoon they went directly from school to Mark's house to play music. A number of Morris's later works were set to pieces he played with Page, such as Gershwin's Three Preludes.

Between dancing and music, Morris had little time for school, and little patience for it. Already in elementary school he was often removed from class for being disruptive. High school he seems largely to have ignored. Finally they put him on a work-study whereby he was given academic credit for studying and teaching dance. As a result, he was able to graduate a year early, at age 16.

In high school he was no longer teased for being different. He was too authoritative, too independent. There was an artistic crowd in the school and he hung out with them. "We were pretend-Bohemian," he remembers. "I would buy ancient, old men's overcoats, and on the coat, every day, I would wear a big, beautiful jeweled broach, with rhinestones, from the Salvation Army. I changed the broach pretty much daily." With his long hair and his dark-circled eyes, this gave him a sort of louche glamour. By his last year of high school, he had separated himself even from the artistic crowd. His friends were mostly older people: musicians, actors, people from Koleda. He never had any doubt that he would be an artist, or even saw this as a choice. The thing he was doing - choreography - he had been doing from childhood. Eventually, he started getting paid for it, but that was the only change.

Maxine Morris, a woman of completely conventional appearance and manners, was absolutely unswerving in her support of this unconventional child. A dancing career was something she respected, and she did not wish he had chosen something more usual.

Bill Morris did wish this. Those brothers of his who nagged him about his lack of ambition also nagged him about Mark. To them Mark's peculiarities were merely a subdivision of Bill's fecklessness. "They said to him, "Tell Mark to go play basketball. Don't let him take ballet,' " Maureen remembers. "They were worried that Mark would be gay." Bill was undoubtedly worried about this, too.

But Bill had mixed feelings. Mark was not just an unconventional child; he was also, by now, a very accomplished one. Bill was proud of Mark's achievements, particularly his piano-playing, and defended him to the uncles. He also enjoyed Mark. "He got a kick out of him," says Maureen - a kick that was probably based in part on vicarious satisfaction. Torn himself between doing what he wanted and doing what others expected of him, he cannot have helped admiring this child who did exactly what he wanted. Maureen remembers: "Dad would yell at Mark, `Don't wear that. Go upstairs and change.' Mark would turn around and walk out the back door, and my dad just thought it was funny. He had an image of what a father was supposed to be - how you put your foot down - but it wasn't really him."

Unlike Maxine, Bill was straitlaced. He made the family go to church; he gave lectures on duty; he allowed no alcohol in the house. Some of what Mark felt about this can be read in a solo, "Dad's Charts," that he made for himself in 1980, for his company's first concert. The title refers to the chord charts that Bill Morris, like other amateur jazz players, used in structuring his improvisations. "Dad's Charts" is likewise an improvisation, structured by certain movements to which Morris keeps returning, movements that were his father's. There is a bowling move, because Bill bowled; there is a falling-asleep movement, because Bill was always falling asleep at inopportune times; there is a typing movement, because Bill taught typing (and was always after his children to learn typing, so they could make a living). There is a movement where Morris slaps himself in the face, because a student once slapped Bill in the face, a thing that greatly shocked him. There is a gut-out stance that is Morris' memory of seeing his father standing naked in a sauna, with his belly out.

What is interesting about the dance, however, is that it is not just the father but the father and the son in one body. In between, the solid, fuddy duddy "father" poses, Morris becomes the runaway son, leaping, flying, scooting across the floor, out of reach. When he does the sauna stance, for example, Morris keeps alternating it with a ballet stance. The effect is like a card being flipped back to front: on one side the big, heavy father, with his stomach out, spied on in his nakedness; on the other side the agile son, escaping from his father and his father's life, and escaping by dancing. The piece is a declaration of independence, with a nasty little edge.

Page Smith remembers one night in January of 1973 when Bill came home from work very tired. "Mark asked him if he wanted to hear what we were doing, and he said he would love to, so he lay down on the couch, and we played him Faure's `Apres un reve' and Satie's `Trois Gymnopedies.' He became very peaceful, with a beautiful expression on his face. I think he fell asleep." A few days later, Bill was found slumped over his desk at work, dead of a heart attack at age 59. Mark came home that day and found the house empty, but there was a note telling him to call his grandmother. He called, and she told him that his father had died. The funeral was three days later. Mark intended to play the music at the service with Page Smith, but in the end he was too upset and someone else took his place. They played the pieces that had so pleased Bill a few nights before he died, `Apres un reve' and `Trois Gymnopedies.'

"The tragedy of my father's dying when Mark was only 16," says Maureen, "was that Mark never got to resolve those 16-year-old problems that you have with your father. The two of them never got past the rebellion stage."

There is a long streak of anger in Morris' work. Asked in a 1988 interview whether he took pleasure in giving pain to bourgeois respectability, Morris answered simply, "Yes." This emotion is inseparable from the qualities that give his work its strength: his idealism, his honesty, his wit, even his way of presenting the body. It has not always served him well - "Dad's Charts" is not a great dance - and it is certainly not restricted to his relationship with his father. But his father, like everyone's, was a force in his mind, and his sense of struggle with the world is probably due in some part to the fact that Bill Morris died before his admiration for Mark could supplant his disapproval, or before Mark was old enough to feel free of that disapproval.

Before his father's death, Mark had made plans with two friends to go to Europe in the fall of 1973 for a long hitchhiking-and-Eurailpass trip. After Bill's death the family's finances were very straitened, but Maxine characteristically urged Mark to go ahead. In June 1973, five months after Bill's funeral, Mark graduated from high school, and in September, the three friends left for Europe. In early 1974, the others went home and Mark settled down in Madrid to study Spanish dance. At this point he was still nursing his childhood ambition to become a Spanish dancer . . . but he soon became discouraged with the state of Spanish dancing in Spain. The concerts were badly choreographed and badly staged, and the working conditions for flamenco dancers were appalling.

He had written to his family from Madrid to say that he was homosexual and got a letter back saying, as he summarizes it, "We love you - it's no problem." Maxine Morris was not surprised by his announcement, though she was sad, she says, "because it meant that he would have a harder time, that he would suffer." In May 1974, after five months in Madrid, he went home, abandoning his hope of becoming a Spanish dancer.

From then on, his way was clear. In addition to flamenco dancing, many other things were now behind him. His father was dead. Koleda had disbanded. Many of his friends were gone. His childhood, in large measure a happy one, was over.

His plan was to go to New York and become a choreographer. Before choreographing, though, he wanted to dance, and therefore his sole effort now was to cram enough ballet training into himself so that he could get a job with a New York ballet company. For a year and a half he took class every day with Perry Brunson, a respected local teacher. He also performed, made dances, and taught. Finally, in January 1976, he decided it was time to go. Maxine and Maureen drove him to the airport, Maureen weeping all the way, and he boarded the plane for New York. He was 19.(Copyright, 1993, by Joan Acocella. Reprinted by permission of Farrar Straus Giroux.)