Let me tell you about something I saw last night. Eighteen men and women, all lightly dressed in summer white, lay on a proscenium stage. From the floor, 36 naked hands bent at right angles from 36 wrists and wriggled up, each at a slightly different pace. Let me make sure you’ve got the picture: 36 splayed palms with urgently curled fingertips, turning clockwise and counterclockwise, clockwise and counterclockwise—as if working the lids of enormous and invisible upside-down jars—and at the same time lifting slowly, pushed upwards by long, lithe, tendril-like arms.

Just to give you a sense of the oddness of the image, these naked, floating, turning palms rose from a stage deep in the heart of Boston (in a building with crystal chandeliers, ruby damask walls, curving staircases, and gold-leaf everywhere) and deep in the heart of winter (on a night whose 17-degree cold plummeted to a wind-chill factor in the aughts).

I was watching Mozart Dances, by the Mark Morris Dance Group, and my imagination was being lifted and loosened like those imaginary glass jars.

Upstage, a backdrop was turned into a giant canvas, covered with enormous watercolor brushstrokes—one part mad child making fingerpaintings, one part mad giant making like Motherwell.

The dances were sometimes balletic, sometimes modern, always surprising: pliés, bourées, jetés, and attitudes, but all done barefoot, barelimbed, and with ironic twists: arms floating up all pretty, then squeaking into something angular and awkward; a circle dance suggesting Matisse, then flattening into the Virginia Reel; languid ballerinas freezing into Egyptian vase ornaments, a butterfly morphing into an insect, a bird into a mechanical doll, a corsair into a sailor cruising the street. The lyric vocabulary of ballet devolved into the vernacular, the poetic turned pedestrian.

What did any of this have to do with writing?

As I headed back out into the bitter cold, I thought about Mark Morris’s creative instincts. He never lets himself cross over into cliché, and he plants, plays with, and then supplants our expectations. His language is always surprising, fresh, and funny. I can’t get that one image out of my head, the palms floating up from the floor. They are terribly close to something I’ve seen before, yet remain completely unfamiliar: Sperm, propelled by wriggling tails? Lily pads, levitating out of the swamp and dancing on their stems? Lima beans, sprouting up into the air rather than up through the dirt? Periscopes, pushing up through water and taking a look around?

Images organic, evocative, surreal. And entirely original.

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