The Look of Love, a new work by Mark Morris that riffs on Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s legendary song catalog, is currently enjoying a brief run at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music). For the show’s costumes, which capture the choreographer’s exuberant celebration of music, he tapped his frequent collaborator (and friend) Isaac Mizrahi.
Fans of Mizrahi’s 1995 documentary Unzipped will recall the choreographer’s memorable cameo in a furry cropped jacket by the designer. With his then-long hair falling in curls across his shoulders and a cigarette dangling from his lip, Morris pronounces, “It’s very Rod Stewart on me.” Their friendship goes way back. “We met the first time he brought that magnificent masterpiece called L’Allegro to BAM in 1990,” Mizrahi shared on a recent phone call. “We met that night, and I fell so hard for him because I felt like it was the greatest thing I’d ever seen onstage that was made in my lifetime. I think it was Angels in America and then this great thing of Mark’s. Later, Anna Wintour had a dinner at one of Ian Schrager’s hotels, and all these people were there and Mark was there and Anna said, ‘Oh darling, you should make clothes for Mark’s ballets,’ and she kind of set us up on a date. We went on a date and we had a little moment, but then we kind of realized that we had this friendship that was also meant to be a collaboration.” A few months later, Morris asked the designer to create costumes for Three Preludes, which premiered in 1992. Since then Mizrahi has created the costumes—and sometimes the set designs—for over 20 of Morris’s productions.
“We work together so often, it’s kind of an open-ended conversation,” Mizrahi says of their collaborative approach. “It’s always flattering when he asks, because he has other people he works with, and I always say yes. I don’t think I’ve ever said no because he has such good taste in music.” Mizrahi continued: “But the minute he mentioned he was working on [The Look of Love], I thought, ‘Well, he’s going to ask me to do the costumes.’ Not because he brought it up, but because he knows how I feel about Burt Bacharach, and that it would be so hurtful if he didn’t. You know what I mean? He knew he had no choice but to ask me to do the costumes.”
Because they’ve been working together for so long, the designer can usually recognize what Morris is looking for when he calls upon him—though that doesn’t mean he always gets it right on the first try. “He usually approaches me when there’s a color kind of feature about the music,” Mizrahi said, adding that it was Morris who helped him realize that he has synesthesia, which is commonly used to describe people who are able to see music as colors.
“I thought to make these kinds of tunics that were bifurcated, completely cut in half, and the tops and the bottoms would be black and white, and they would just be this amazing kind of sophisticated geometric thing,” Mizrahi explained about his initial ideas for The Look of Love. “And so I presented it to him and he was like, ‘Oh that’s a good idea, but no, keep thinking about it.” Mizrahi went back to the music, and came up with a rich color palette of dusty magentas, mossy greens, and mustard-y yellows anchored by bright poppy red, lavenders, and orange-y oranges. “With Mark, the music always dictates what the show is,” Mizrahi adds.
The dancers perform on stage devoid of props, except for a few folding chairs that borrow from the costumes’ color palette—something that Mizrahi’s responsible for almost by accident. “I was watching a rehearsal and I was like, ‘What’s with the chair?’ and he was like, ‘Well, what about it? It’s just a chair, don’t worry about it’, and I was like, ‘Well, what if I did think about it? What if I did worry about it?’” Mizrahi had the idea to paint the chairs instead of having them be the usual drab brown-ish color. “I drove so many people crazy trying to get those chairs made, they had to go to a powder-coating show, and we had to have them stripped and re-finished, and we had to do a minimum of chairs, and we had to pay. It was a lot of coming and going for something that no one will notice, and when they notice they’ll think, ‘Oh yeah, they probably just sent someone to Pottery Barn to pick up some chairs’.” He added, “[Watching the performance] is like watching Fred Astaire, you never see [‘the work’] you just see something that’s beautiful.”
The Look of Love, presented with support from Dance Reflections by Van Cleef Arpels, runs at BAM until Saturday, March 23.