BERKELEY, Calif. — The earth may hold the moon in place, but that orb exerts its own pull on the earth’s artists, from Arnold Schoenberg to Margaret Wise Brown to — now — Mark Morris. MOON, a 55-minute dance, premiered at the Kennedy Center in spring 2025 and had its second run, seen Jan. 25, in Zellerbach Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, as presented by Cal Performances. Long associated with the Mark Morris Dance Group, Cal Performances co-commissioned the work.
It’s a dance that pulls in many directions. At first, the mood is ominous. The overture, from György Ligeti’s Musica ricercata, is a ferocious storm of a single pitch. But when the lights go up, it’s the dawn of a new day, trills the Gershwin tune, in a jaunty recording by Horace Heidt & His Musical Knights. Wearing two-tone Isaac Mizrahi sweatsuits — white in front, black in back — and neutral facial expressions, nine dancers stream onstage. Each takes a turn in the spotlight, strutting just a little. From there, the journey waxes and wanes.
MOON’s soundtrack, though grounded within a mid-century time period, swings from popular song to abstract keyboard music — the Ligeti along with organ inventions by Marcel Dupré (both aptly played by MMDG music director Colin Fowler). Multicultural greetings from NASA’s Golden Record — the 1977 album drop of all Earth’s culture, aimed at potential intelligent life — weave in and out. The combined effect is cryptic. You’re often left wondering whether you’re not stuck on the dark side of the moon.
But Morris’s choreography is nothing if not musical, and it’s only appropriate that the keyboard works, both of which are rigorously structured, accompany dances that feel unusually stiff. If Morris’ shapes more typically resemble those of Classical sculpture — simple, elegant — here the formations during the Ligeti music are busy and quick-changing. The movements are staccato, even jerky.
In Musica ricercata’s fifth movement (Rubato. Lamentoso), two dancers in a grandiose dialogue gesture hugely, like people speaking louder across a language barrier, as if that will help. Here, miraculously, it does. The two inch closer and closer and finally meet in a polite hug. But their torsos hardly touch before the other dancers rush in with fists, only letting up when the piano hits a screeching dissonance. (Everyone flinches.) These intrepid explorers, like the earth on its axis, can’t help but wobble. They continually quiver, their eyes gazing heavenward, their hands cupped in supplication.
Between these frontier dances, silhouetted episodes on rolling stools wheel past, like station breaks, to Dupré’s Space-Age organ music. The French performer-composer, today a little-known figure, was a virtuoso famous during the early 1920s for his marathon recitals of the complete Bach organ works. His 24 inventions, like the Well-Tempered Clavier, encompass a range of textures across all 24 keys. Morris, though, has selected mostly movements in the minor mode — a plaintive melody paved with opaque chords, a rather sad scherzando, a stern fugue.
Fowler’s performance on electric organ (with Oakland-based double bassist Michel Taddei joining in to cover the pedalboard’s third voice) was faultless. Yet Dupré’s music has a way of seeming distant even when it’s right in front of you, and Morris’ choreography here — the dancers little in contact with each other — is MOON’s least vibrant.
Sure, the premise of the Golden Record may now seem a bit silly. (The arrogance, to assume that whatever life exists beyond our galaxy, has evolved to use our same technology.) But there’s nothing more profound than the desire for connection, least of all in MOON.
In the dance’s third section, set to popular music, every song about the moon is really a song about loneliness, about love. As bluegrass and big band tunes play — Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” Al Bowlly’s crooning “Blue Moon” — the dancers finally meet one another, finally really move.
For the first time, embraces endure. A quartet of men arabesque in gorgeous lines; pairs greet each other with la bise, then take off in finger-twirls across the stage. It’s impossible to take your eyes off of Joslin Vezeau and Dallas McMurray, but all the dancers — Karlie Budge, Sarah Hillmon, Courtney Lopes, Alex Meeth, Brandon Randolph, Billy Smith, and Noah Vinson — are a joy to watch.
In one lovely movement, eight dancers sway, in duets and quartets, to Bonnie Guitar’s sweet “Dark Moon” while a rotating ninth dancer stands the odd one out. A lone man reaches out, beseeching, “Oh tell me why you’ve lost your splendor / Is it because I’ve lost my love?” A woman, one arm extended to an imaginary partner, waltzes herself around until she finds her match and sails offstage.
Another bright dance, set to Claude Debussy’s ubiquitous “Claire de lune,” exists in a universe of its own. To the music’s tender first chords, the dancers traverse the stage in cautious yet sweeping steps. Once assembled center stage, each turns — arms motioning from the eyes outward, as in ballet mime — to behold some great sight, first in one direction, then every which way. The stage is empty, but clearly, they’ve landed someplace wonderful. The last dancer to leave walks backward, as if he can hardly pull himself away.
