Stage

There is communal love in New Love Song Waltzes, too, hinting at the '60s-era bed-hopping practices of the Koleda Folk Ensemble with which Morris danced as a teen. But this is a more passionate and dangerous love, finding a broader meaning in the text. When it speaks of exchanging rings, there are ring dances; when it speaks of love, reclining couples rise and indiscriminately change partners, crawling lazily across one another's backs like crabs. Sometimes the brutality is comic, when eager lovers are crushed underfoot by more eager lovers; and sometimes it's just brutal, in uncomfortable duets in which partners aren't so much lifted as prodded and hoisted like baggage. Morris' love waltzes eventually end with the same hard assertion: We are all, ultimately, alone.

When a daisy chain of dancers spirals into the center of the stage and falls one by one, the text asks plaintively, "Will we never be together? Must I always go about sighing like this?" Morris' adept translation makes us sigh with him.

-- Heather Wisner