Hymn to intellectual beauty

The Mark Morris Dance Company has established a “second-home” relationship with Cal Performances, the arts-presenter at the University of California, Berkeley, and have just finished a 25th-anniversary residency with two weeks of dances in UC’s 2200-seat Zellerbach Hall, including a world premiere “for Susan Sontag.”
The Sontag ballet, a minor but exhilaratingly beautiful work called “Candleflowerdance,” was performed by six dancers and an onstage pianist.

Brilliant stage lighting created an arena centerstage, shaped like a boxing ring, while in the shadows at the edges stood dozens of votive candles flickering softly. The whole thing was set to Stravinsky’s neo-classical  “Serenade In A” from 1926  and it seems like a monument to Sontag’s fighting spirit, her righteous indignation, her compassion, her inward conflicts of body and soul as well as her outward ones (viz. her willingness to be an anti-intellectual intellectual and write “Against Interpretation”).
The ballet was exhilarating, intellectually beautiful -- almost deliberately unsensual, the movement was semaphorically binomial and emphasized the forked quality of human anatomy. Its attitude was Judson-ish, “pedestrian,” ...