Watching the men of the Mark Morris Dance Group in V, I’m reminded of Fotherington-Thomas in Geoffrey Willans’s Down With Skool. According to Molesworth, the book’s spelling-challenged narrator, Fotherington-Thomas is “uterly wet and a sissy” and is given to saying: “Hullo Clouds, Hullo Sky” and “skipping like a girlie”.
There’s a lot of skipping like a girlie in V, which Morris created in 2001. The men also execute bunny hops, pony gallops and startled, little, Bambi-like springs. Some of them wear sage-green vests and trousers; others are bare-legged in tight, turquoise underpants with matching floaty blouses – possibly the most machismo-sapping outfits ever to hit the dance stage.
