We did Bulgarian and Yugoslavian dances, which have a lot of hard rhythms and movements, which I try to use in my dances. There i were about twenty dancers and ten musi! You have to build something; it has to be structured and thought out, and it has to be interesting to watch. Then, from the left, far upstage, the dancj ers, all in black, arrive again in the equivalent dark, the composite of their exposed j faces, arms, and lower legs the only visible j references. Behind them follows another bedraggled assortment in a different but equally pathetic configuration. Once arrived, they all collapse into themselves, rise in sequence from left to right, their backs hunched against the audience, and then tum in unison to face us.

The dance is never an imposition on the music but rather a compelling exposition of it, a whole new construct made of sound and motion. In Vestige, as in other Morris pieces, it appears that the dance is designed to be slightly outsize for the performance space: They J engage you in so many different ways! I what he calls the Fascist Wave, a kind of mechanical head-and-torso tilt with both j arms raised wide above the head. There are certain pieces that I have no idea how I made up anymore.

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His choreography rarely gives rise to the soloistic flourish, but occupies all the dancers equally. He has that mischievous smile on his face again.

I want every dance to be a total surprise whenever it shifts gears. Along with his pieces to Vivaldi and Bach, he has set dances to the countrygospel songs of the Louvin Brothers and, recently, to four songs by the Violent Femmes in which his dancers do illicit things with naked baby dolls.


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His work displays what might be called a healthy eclecticism. Both Balanchine and Busby Berkeley are acknowledged influences. I love that stuff. Morris will also tell you that while the complex constructs of classical music inform his choreography, so do the cartoons of Hanna-Barbera and Walt Disney.

In Championsnip Wrestling After Roland Barthes, Morris essentially borrows the gestures and the garb of wrestling to create his own black comedy of senseless, repeated pounding and tumbling in a void. In one sequence, which Morris calls The Bitch Fight, two female dancers, each held aloft by three other dancers, are brought face to face for a battle. That kind of thing is what I love to watch.

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As someone preoccupied with ways of moving through space, Morris is particularly fascinated by stories of people falling down. Not long ago, after talking with a woman about her new baby and the unique way babies fall—a kind of sudden, boneless collapse to another level—Morris had his dancers try that very thing in his Violent Femmes dance. They were sore for a week. To this day, he claims his biggest epiphany, outside of the ones music inspires, is based on the sight of someone falling.

Morris was just out of high school, traveling in Madrid. But novels take on a life of their own and sometimes drift out of the writer's control. I now know that could happen even when the writer was living in Paris. Now, Atlanta was calling me away from this enchanting, provocative city, a part of which would live inside me forever. Before we left Paris, we rented a white Simca and bought three wineglasses, a corkscrew, paper plates, knives and forks, and paper napkins. I packed my page manuscript as carefully as though I were transporting the Book of Kells across hostile borders.

While putting it in my suitcase, it struck me as a very bad idea that I had resisted mak-ing a copy of the book because of the exorbitant price. We loaded up the Simca with our luggage and set out for Rome with Frank, driving out of the sixth arrondissement, my home for five months. We took all backroads through the peerless French countryside, through villages that were breathtaking to behold and past farms that were hundreds of years old.

For lunch, we stopped and ate beneath an arched bridge that crossed over a swift stream where trout hunted mayflies.

A herd of sheep grazed on a nearby hillside. Lunch became our joy and our specialty. We searched out locally produced cheeses, olives, sausages, and breads. We tried to buy wines made in the same district where we purchased them. We lunched on a pier overlooking the city of -Geneva, near a waterfall looking at a monastery near Brig, Switzerland, and in the ruins of a portico that extended out into the waters of Lake Maggiore, in Italy.

At Maggiore, as we feasted on grapes and olives and prosciutto, we agreed we had come to the most beautiful place on earth.

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At one of the beaches near Portofino, Cliff and Frank decided that they wanted to join the crowds who were swimming in the ocean. I issued a warning that I had been robbed my first time in Rome, but the day was hot, and Cliff and Frank were determined they were not going back to America without having swum in the Mediterranean.

We locked the car, changed into our bathing suits, and, despite my misgivings, were soon by the water's edge. Frank and Cliff swam out into deep water as I remained in the shallows and tried to keep an eye on the car. I soon grew fascinated by the sight of an Italian man lifting black sea urchins out of the water, disemboweling them, and eating them raw.

When we returned to the car, Cliff was the first to notice that a thief had kicked in one of the windows and robbed us. Frank lost his camera and Cliff lost a gold watch his father had given him. I went weak at the knees when I remembered that my manuscript was in a suitcase in the backseat. If the robber had reached in and stolen all the luggage, my life would be very different today. I could easily have lost five years of my life. But he was discriminating in his desires and had no need for a novel written in a strange tongue.

On the evening we entered Rome, we rented a cheap hotel room near the Spanish Steps and met Jonathan and Susan Galassi for dinner at the Trattoria del Pantheon da Fortunato. I handed my novel to Jonathan, and the next day he called to tell me that he would accept it if I would make one major change. When we met, I agreed on the spot to the change, and we shook hands.

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For the next two days Jonathan and Susan took us around to explore a city they had come to love as much as they had Paris. Here, in a Roman setting, they seem-ed even more cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and enlightened than ever, and they treated Cliff and Frank as though they had known them all their lives. Because of fate, the Galassis had given me the city of Paris, which led to Frank and Cliff's discovery of Europe.

On my last night in Rome, I watched the sunset with the Galassis on their terrace in Trastevere. I was full of emotion and felt lucky to have such friends. The sun darkened the enameled, coppery city below us. I raised a glass of wine to toast my friends before I went back to my life in Atlanta, the one I was born to live.

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