Dancing for Mark - Mark Morris Dance Group

Dance Magazine, June, 1998 by Nanette Maxim

FOR SOME TWENTY YEARS RUTH DAVIDSON AND TINA FEHLANDT HAVE SERVED AS PERFORMERS AND RESIDENT MUSES FOR MARK MORRIS.

Because choreography for Mark Morris is a complex web of cultural, musical, and personal references, performing his work involves more than just doing the steps. "It's not just that you can dance it," he says, "but that you get why it's happening. Because all of this is based on everything that ever happened before." After some twenty years of dancing with him, even before there was a Mark Morris Dance Group, Ruth Davidson and Tina Fehlandt do more than "get" it. As company general director Barry Alterman says, "They are it. Because of their history and longevity, they embody Mark's work."

Davidson and Fehlandt are the only company members who have been with Morris's present sixteen-member group since his November 1980 concert Cunningham's studio in New York City. They have indeed witnessed a sea change in the choreographer's work and in their own careers. They were part of the casual pick-up group that performed Gloria at Dance Theater Workshop in the early eighties. They were with him amid the creative tumult of his 1988-91 residency at the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, where he created the breakthrough works L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato; Dido and Aeneas; and The Hard Nut. And they were with him at the 1997 Edinburgh premiere of his Platee, the comic opera of Jean-Philippe Rameau, which receives its American premiere at the Berkeley (California) Festival & Exhibition (June 10-13). Seasoned veterans of Morris's use of the eclectic dance and musical palette, they wouldn't have had it any other way. "Mark is so versatile," Davidson says; "a real chameleon. He constantly challenges me, and I thrive on that." Echoes Fehlandt: "Together we've made something from nothing. I've spent almost twenty years building this company, and everything that happens is still exciting to me. It couldn't have been better."

This may sound a bit strange at first coming from Fehlandt, a self-described baby ballerina who devoted years to intensive training with former Ballet Russe dancer James Jamieson in her hometown of Wilmington, Delaware. "Dancing," Fehlandt says, "was a family tradition." Her mother performed on Ed Sullivan's television show, Toast of the Town, in the 1950s, and both her sister and brother began dance training at early ages. She was determined to make it in the ballet world, despite an affinity for modern classes and performances, at age thirteen, with May O'Donnell protegee Lida Nelson Smith. Further encouragement to consider the modern came even from Jamieson, who thought Fehlandt's well-muscled build more suited to that form. An audition for the Harkness Ballet's summer program at age fourteen proved the turning point. Who should be standing next to her at the barre but that wisp of a dancer, Gelsey Kirkland! Fehlandt recalls, "I thought, `Oh, Tina, maybe you should reconsider your career choice.' Director David Howard also informed me, `Mrs. Harkness doesn't like girls with big thighs.' But I had a career plan," Fehlandt adds with a laugh. "I'd join Pittsburgh Ballet, then Joffrey, then ABT."

After a short stint at Point Park College in Pittsburgh and American University in Washington, D.C., the nineteen-year-old Fehlandt attempted to follow that plan by moving to New York City. But as fate would have it, a fellow dancer at the Joffrey School introduced her to ex-Seattle residents Morris and dancer Penny Hutchinson. And when Fehlandt and Morris found themselves in Marjorie Mussman's ballet class together, it was, says Fehlandt, "instant chemistry. He was so gregarious, and instantly accepting." Morris was then dancing with Eliot Feld but was eager to perform his own works and asked Fehlandt to join him in putting a concert together. "Tina was losing heart with ballet at the time," says Morris, when asked why the two began working together, "and we were friends--I just liked her."

Unlike Fehlandt, Davidson saw her way clear to modern dance early on. "Culture, specifically ballet, was a big my family," says Davidson, who grew up on Staten Island. Davidson and her two sisters studied with Ballet Russe dancer Meredith Baylis and later followed her to the Joffrey School. But no sooner was Davidson accepted as a dance student at New York City's High School of Performing Arts than she began to focus on modem forms. Her interest intensified at the State University of New York at Purchase; she recalls, "Purchase was then known for the experimental and innovative, and I knew at the age of eighteen or nineteen that I wanted to be a part of that--something tensile and alive. I threw myself into it."

Her style was further defined in a Lar Lubovitch workshop and in Don Redlich's group, where she worked with Hanya Holm, then in her nineties. ("She got frustrated with me because my technique was still developing.") But it was her turn with the Hannah Kahn Dance Company that set her on her present course. She met Morris and shared a dance floor with him; later he would create works that made her shine--Wonderland, New Love Song Waltzes, Bedtime, and A Spell.