The Brooklyn Rail

The Mark Morris Dance Group and Music Ensemble performs the New York premiere of The Look of Love, an evening-length work set to the music of pop legend Burt Bacharach, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through March 23, 2024.

The Look of Love, Mark Morris’s first major production in five years, features choreography by Morris, music arrangement by Ethan Iverson, design by Isaac Mizrahi, and lead vocals by Broadway star Marcy Harriell. The piece had its world premiere at BroadStage in Santa Monica in October 2022 to great acclaim and has been touring ever since.

Morris recently talked with me about his love of music, his creative process, and his friendship with Mizrahi. The following is an edited version of that conversation.

Caedra Scott-Flaherty (Rail): Where did the idea for Look of Love come from?

Mark Morris: It came from the same place all of my ideas for dance come from. Music! I start from music for just about everything. And I’ve loved—whether I knew it or not—Mr. Bacharach’s unbelievably fabulous music. It’s been around forever and has become part of the American musical landscape. And I think a lot of people aren’t even sure who wrote some of the songs that they know automatically. These songs are fifty, sixty years old. They were wonderful then, and they’re wonderful now.

Rail: Yes, I was one of those people who, when looking him up, thought, “He made that song? And that song, and that song?”

Morris: Exactly! He was so prolific and so wonderful.

Rail: But it’s different than the music you usually choreograph to.

Morris: I’m known for having done a lot of dances to Baroque music and classical music, which I love. And I still do. But I like to surprise myself, and my audience. And I try not to do the same thing twice in a row. I very often choose music that I can’t imagine making up a dance to. That’s what keeps me engaged and puzzled. And that was true with this. Ethan Iverson, who arranged this music and plays the piano in this show, was my music director years ago. He’s not now, but we work together sometimes. He did an arrangement a while ago for a commission with music from the Beatles. And we did a treatment of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a piece called Pepperland. We were touring that for a while. This is not a sequel or anything like that. But we’d been talking about Bacharach’s music ten, fifteen years ago, and it just became the time to do it. So, it was sort of serendipitous. Mr. Bacharach gave us his blessings and permission to explore these songs in a new arrangement.

Rail: You met him?

Morris: We did! When we first worked with him, it was over zoom. We were nervous to meet him, but he was really great and funny and wonderfully pleasant. He had a beautiful, deep voice and he would sing a little bit. And then we were fortunate that he was able to come to our last dress rehearsal before we opened it. It was a couple of years ago now, the very end of the worst part of COVID. We performed this in the BroadStage theater in Santa Monica, we did the world premiere there, and he came to see it. No one was in the audience then except my staff and crew and the musicians and dancers, and he came and watched the whole show—he was masked and protected and everything. And he gave us a wonderful pep talk from the audience. It was great. And, unfortunately, he died a couple of months after that. But he was lively and with it, and it was wonderful to meet him in real life.

Rail: You mentioned that it seemed like the right time for you and Ethan to work on a Bacharach piece. Why now for these themes, this music?

Morris: Because I love it. I mean, we’re not going to save the world with this. But we can entertain and delight and question. If you have to worry about the relevance of something, you’re thinking of the wrong thing. It’s relevant because it’s good art. Mores change, things change over time. But the heart and soul of this music is all about people. A lot of the music is very upbeat and swingy, but if you listen closely to the words, they’re about bad relationships. And they’re hard tunes! They jump all over the place. If you get drunk enough at karaoke to sing one of these songs, you’re going to be in trouble. Because it’s not what you think. There are these little catches in rhythm and tune, that’s why they get stuck in your head. So, it all sounds peppy and fun. But the stories are often about how someone did you wrong, or you miss somebody, or you love them and they’re gone. They’re all sort of love and hope songs. That’s a terrible thing to say! That sounds like a bumper sticker. But there’s always hope in them.

Rail: Once you put the sequence of songs together and started choreographing, did any narrative emerge for you?

Morris: Since every song has its own narrative, I’m not trying to force it to mean something that it doesn’t. I had pretty much completed the pieces before I arranged them. So they all affected each other: who ended up dancing with whom. It’s just sort of tucking in the corners of it to make it a full piece that makes sense on its own. But there’s no literal narrative because that’s a different kind of show. That’s an opera.

Rail: Right. And how many dancers are there total? In the cast?

Morris: It’s ten dancers, five chairs, five pillows, and seven musicians. The costumes and the chairs and pillows were designed by Isaac Mizrahi, who is my best friend. We’ve worked together a lot. And this is just the latest thing that he’s done. It’s very beautiful and colorful and exciting.

Rail: I didn’t know you guys were best friends!

Morris: Oh, yes. For way longer than you can imagine.

Rail: That’s amazing. So, you’re known for your musicality. You even conduct! For this project, did you look at the scores and analyze them as you would baroque music? Or did you have a different approach?

Morris: It was absolutely the same process. Because it’s hard to figure out. It changes meter, it goes from three to five, it’s tricky. And Mr. Bacharach was very strict and insistent on the rhythms he wrote being reflected in the singing. That’s why Dionne Warwick was such a perfect partner for him. Rhythmically, she was great at that stuff. When you look at the scores, it’s different from what you think when you sing along. It’s kind of amazing. Very sophisticated.

Rail: And did you choose Marcy Harriell to sing the vocals?

Morris: That’s a good question. We chose each other. Ethan had been working with her already. And when he mentioned her, I was like, wait a minute… I remember who that is! It turns out that years ago, I was choreographing and directing the Paul Simon musical Capeman, which was a big Broadway flop and a fabulous show. And she had been in early workshops of that. She ended up getting a job, I think with Rent, so she was never in the performances, but we’ve worked together. She’s had a good career, and she’s a wonderful singer. So, it was kind of accidental and fortuitous and wonderful.

Rail: It must be so fun for her to perform this live, and for the musicians, too.

Morris: They seem to have a good time. It’s from a jazz point of view, so there’s a certain amount of openness. Not huge swaths of improvisation, but it’s different every night. Just like the dancing is, and the audience is. I love that.

Rail: How did you come to your deep understanding of music? Was that through dance, or did you come to music first?

Morris: There were always both of those things around. I started dancing very young. And I also sang in the choir. There was a lot of music around my house. Starting in the nineties, I made the vow to always use live music, and we do unless it’s a historic recording or something that has to be recorded. And that includes rehearsal. I have live music for every class in my school. Because I love music. That’s why I choreograph. I can read scores pretty well. I don’t play an instrument, but I’m a self-proclaimed expert. It’s like people who have no children and are expert parents. You know what I mean? It’s ridiculous, but it’s kind of like that.

Rail: So how does the process work for you? Do you start out looking at the score and listening?

Morris: Listening! Listening, and looking and thinking about it. Working on it in my head. And that could be for years, but it’s usually a few months.

Rail: And then do you start to see the movement in your head? Or do you have to play around with bodies in the space?

Morris: I’ve been doing this for a very long time, so I can do a lot of it in my head. But I don’t see a dance in my mind and then make it come true. That’s sort of a fairy godmother approach, which I wish I could do. That would be great, like ding! done. But no, it’s the working through it that shows me what to do next. I’ll work on something for hours or weeks, and then keep it or get rid of it or modify it. It’s a living project until opening night, and then it’s released. I don’t change stuff once it’s premiered.

Rail: How would you describe the movement vocabulary for this piece?

Morris: A lot of it looks like social dancing. And a lot of it is. But there are incredibly complicated walking patterns. There’s a lot of group dancing and breaking out, as well as points when as a dancer you can decide whether you’re going to join that group or not. It’s open, to a certain extent. It’s action-packed. It’s a big variety. We’re very excited to be at BAM. I mean, one thing is people can go home and sleep in their own damn bed, instead of a hotel. And, you know, it’s New York. We’re home.

Rail: Before we go, I wanted to ask about the design. Was the vivid color palette Isaac’s idea? Or yours?

Morris: Isaac is a colorist. He’s brilliant. He says that he has synesthesia, that he really sees music and hears colors or something like that, which I have no doubt about. And he draws from the music. It doesn’t look like a period piece, but it’s just right. There’s a circular motif, discs on all the costumes, big and small. So, yeah, it was definitely Isaac. I could say, yuck, that color is horrible. And then we’d fight about it, and then one of us would dominate, depending on everybody’s opinion. We work very closely together. And then, of course, there’s the lighting as well, by Nicole Pearce. So everything is affected by everything. And that’s how it should be.

Rail: Well, I love the color palette.

Morris: Me too! Bring your sunglasses.

Rail: It’s very bright and joyful at a time when we need that.

Morris: Yeah, I agree with that. I can’t cure anybody. But I can offer this show.