Press Room

“Layla and Majnun,” a classic Azerbaijani tale of young lovers and meddling parents, has been compared to “Romeo and Juliet.” In Mark Morris Dance Group’s production, which opened at the Kennedy Center Opera House on Thursday, the story is given lusciously sensuous form, with gentle, insistent music from the Silkroad Ensemble and two celebrated Azerbaijani singers, as well as the physical charge of Morris’s superb dancers.

Sarah Haarmann stands out without trying to. There is a precision and lack of affection ni her dancing that is very Merce Cunningham. Her movement quality is sharp and clear; her stage presence utterly focused. It's no wonder she caught Mark Morris' eye. Even though she still considers herself "very much the new girl" at Mark Morris Dance Group (she became a full-time member in August 2017), in a recenet performance of Layla and Majnun, Haarmann seemed completely in her element. 

Mark Morris Dance Group company member Lauren Grant interviews choreographer and teacher Mark Morris.

Pepperland named 2017's Show of the Year

Pepperland named one of the Top 10 Dance Shows in 2017

Pepperland, was a creation of the legendary choreographer (and Seattle émigré) Mark Morris and his frequent musical collaborator Ethan Iverson of the Bad Plus. It was commissioned by the city of Liverpool to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the release of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP last June.

One look at the clips online, and I was hooked. This is not some jukebox revue, with leotarded coryphées swanning around like plasticene porters in "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," pantomiming shovel work for "Fixing a Hole," and impersonating roosters on "Good Morning, Good Morning" while wearing kooky silk military uniforms against a tie-dye backdrop. Far out, man.

This story of a burning love became a poem by Muhammad Fuzuli (1483-1556), which became the libretto for an opera by the Azibaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyli (1885-1948) that premiered in Baku in 1908. A hundred years later, violinists Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad Ensemble collaborated with the great Azerbaijani singer Alim Qasimov to transform the opera into a chamber piece. In 2016, Mark Morris added dancing to it—not incidental dancing, but movement deeply embedded in the music and the story.

The immediate antecedent to Mark Morris’s Layla and Majnun may date back only a century, to the first Azerbaijani opera, but the story has pervaded the Islamic world, from India to Morocco, for over a thousand years — as folktale, epic poem, miniature painting and classical dance. By idiosyncratic means, the American choreographer confirms why this tragic romance has long mattered: the love it describes is essential and vast.

★★★★★

On June 28, 2017, in Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Hall, the Mark Morris Dance Group premiered a work, Numerator, set to Harrison’s Varied Trio for violin, piano,and percussion. The title of the program? Lou 100: In Honor of the Divine Mr. Harrison. That brings to seven the number of works that Morris has set to music by a man he considered a friend.

Though born almost 40 years apart, the composer Lou Harrison and the choreographer Mark Morris, both from the West Coast, became one of the great artistic partnerships. At Tanglewood on Wednesday and Thursday, the Mark Morris Dance Group performed “Lou 100: In Honor of the Divine Mr. Harrison."

The Mark Morris Dance Group will conclude their 2016-17 season with the world premiere of Mark Morris’ Numerator at Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood Music Festival for Lou 100: In Honor of the Divine Mr. Harrison, an entire Lou Harrison program performed with the Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center.

Mark Morris, seasoned choreographer of everything from baroque odes to country and western hits, was the perfect choice for a danced response to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, whose 50th birthday celebrations began at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool last weekend. Pepperland was the first of 13 anniversary events in the city, one for each track on the album.

Kicking off Liverpool’s huge Beatles celebration, Mark Morris Dance Group’s Pepperland is both sunny and unpredictable. For all its pop 1960s costumes and Lennon-McCartney numbers, it refuses to be a nostalgic romp.

Sgt Pepper at 50 was conceived as a celebration of the Beatles’ legacy. The festival, which brings together artists as disparate as Jeremy Deller, Judy Chicago and DJ Spooky, all of them inspired by the album’s songs, opened on Thursday night with the premiere of Mark Morris’s Pepperland. The American choreographer is based in Brooklyn, and his response to the album has been to take half a dozen tracks, relocate them somewhere not too far off Broadway, and reinvent them as jazzy show tunes for the 15 dancers of his company.

With high-spirited humour, eccentric charm and a joyous musical sensibility, Morris and his composer, Ethan Iverson, have revisited the album’s ambition and influence to produce an hour-long celebration that is as ingenious as it is entertaining.

Dancers move with deliberate yet languorous ease through a series of same sec and mixed double pas de deux, while Morris and Iverson have created a fiendishly tricky music and movement sequence to When I’m 64 where the beats in the bar vary from 10/4 to 4/4, giving the feel of time stretching and bending – and confusing the young audience members valiantly trying to clap along. The piece is also suffused with humour, and what comes over more than perhaps anything else is how much fun the dancers appear to be having on stage. You almost want to leap out of your seat and join in with the Carnaby Street-clad chorus.

Such a festival deserves a grand opening, and they don’t get much grander than Pepperland, the world premiere of a specially commissioned work by the internationally acclaimed Mark Morris Dance Group. Combining dance by the New York-based company with a musical score by American composer Ethan Iverson, the show is a truly joyous, celebratory work of art.

With Mark Morris it always starts with the music. His new work Pepperland has been created for the celebratory Sgt Pepper at 50 festival, but Morris has done nothing so simple as choreograph the Beatles’ album itself. Instead, he’s commissioned a new score from composer Ethan Iverson, featuring six boldly idiosyncratic reinventions of the original songs. A Day in the Life comes with haunting piano and theremin; a wonderfully arthritic version of When I’m Sixty-Four has its vaudeville rhythms creakily jangled and out of key.

A dance production inspired by Leonard Cohen and another honouring the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band will be part of the Sony Centre’s second annual international Dance Collection. Also onstage will be the Canadian premiere of Pepperland by Mark Morris Dance Group, which includes an original score by Ethan Iverson performed by a chamber music ensemble of voice, soprano saxophone, keyboards, theremin and percussion.

Mark Morris’ identity as an artist is inseparable from the music. Not only does he make dances, he conducts their scores, and “Mark Morris: Two Operas, An evening of Britten and Purcell” was a personification of this artistic Janus. Each work profited from his devotion to both opera and dance, but in opposing ways. Morris highlighted the music in his New York premiere of Benjamin Britten’s “Curlew River” and focused on the dance in his 1989 classic, Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas.” In both cases, though, the partner art was rendered with beautiful attention.

On the last day of July, 2013, I saw and heard an unforgettable performance in Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Hall. Mark Morris had directed Benjamin Britten’s Curlew River for a cast of Tanglewood Fellows and paired it with his 1989 visualization of Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, performed by the Mark Morris Dance Group and the MMDG Musical Ensemble. The last sentence of my review was this: “I wish I could see it again this very minute.” I’ve had to wait three-and-half years.

Every decision Morris made here — keeping the instrumentalists onstage throughout, dressing the chorus and the main performers all in identical white shirts and trousers, using minimal sets, and having the “ghost child” who appears at the end not appear, but instead sing from offstage (in the voice of countertenor Daniel Moody)—worked to heighten the effect of this unusual Britten work. It was at once austere and moving, weird and familiar, and though its seventy minutes did not feel short, they all earned their keep.

As a choreographer, Mark Morris believes that dancing is a perfectly natural thing for humans to do. How else to explain the way he turned a company of male opera singers into a troupe of dancers?

Mark Morris has always been interested in music, but in 1989, when he premiered “Dido and Aeneas,” that interest was expressed primarily through dance. He also continued to be concerned with the gender issues that marked the first decade or so of his work.

For inventiveness of motion married to the gestures of music, few choreographers are as adroit and unpredictable as Mark Morris. For the past decade Mark Morris Dance Group has regularly brought some of its dance programs to the George Mason University Center of the Arts.

“Opulent” and “majestic” are words frequently mentioned when people hear mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe sing. Since winning the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in 1994, she has been at the peak of her trade on opera and concert stages.

Mark Morris begins his Nutcracker conventionally enough, with a Christmas gathering. But this party, set in Ice Storm suburbia, amounts to a riot of self-interest. The hosts’ preening teenage daughter (Lesley Garrison) wants sex. Their boy (June Omura, more demonic with each passing year) wants trouble. The clueless dad (Morris as a man who has mistaken himself for a cartoon) wants to appear in charge. The maid (Brandon Randolph in a detailed role debut) wants as much fun as her thankless job permits. The venturesome guests want to get it on with anyone but the person they came with. And the mom (delectable John Heginbotham) wants to be sedated.

This month, two of the finest examples are on display in New York. In “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” at New York City Ballet, dancers gleam like ice princesses as they flit across the stage in brisk petit allegro jumps under a steady snowfall that eventually reaches blizzard proportions. And in “The Hard Nut,” by Mark Morris, the dancers, male and female, throw snow while dashing across the stage in sleek formations. The effect in both is a thrilling merging of motion and music.

After twenty-five years in Mark Morris’s version of “The Nutcracker,” Kraig Patterson’s maid still embodies the spirit of the piece.

It’s not hard to say why Mark Morris’ rendering of the holiday Nutcracker classic is better than all the rest. In contrast to other productions I’ve seen, Mark Morris has created a party scene for the first act which is unrivaled.

Choreographed in 1989, Dido and Aeneas has an antique patina thanks to Virgil's epic story and Henry Purcell's 1689 opera, performed live at the Harris Theater by the MMDG Music Ensemble and conducted by Morris himself.

The White Light Festival at New York's Lincoln Center focussed this year on southern Indian arts and revived the Mark Morris dance, 'O Rangasayee'

The eight events curated by choreographer Mark Morris for “Sounds of India,” part of Lincoln Center’s current White Light Festival, include three dance presentations that provide particular sights for the sounds on offer. 

"O Rangasayee", A Mark Morris dancing solo has been revived as part of Sounds of India, at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival. Morris, a passionate admirer of Indian music and dance, is the curator of the series. The Mark Morris Dance Group is giving three performances two of which have Indian themes and “O Rangasayee” is definitely the highlight. 

Morris’s new piece uses the rhythm and gesture of Indian dance as its foundation

As curator of “Sounds of India,” part of Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival, Mark Morris has invited a number of performing artists from South India to perform in New York; at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater of John Jay College, the Mark Morris Dance Group is alternating with the Kerala Kalamandalam Kathakali Troupe and Nrityagram. But all four pieces of his own program, which opened on Saturday night, show his talent’s marvelously irrational aspect.

For this Lincoln Center multiarts festival, continuing through Nov. 16, Mark Morris shares his enthusiasm as the curator of the “Sounds of India” series.

The Mark Morris Dance Group and the musicians of the Silk Road Ensemble, come to the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center this week with Layla and Majnun.

Few stories capture the hearts of people all over the world as reliably as one about ill-starred lovers. No matter that we all know the outcome of “Romeo and Juliet” — their plight perennially moves us. Another of the world’s great love stories, “Layla and Majnun,” dates back long before Shakespeare. Its most famous literary expression, a verse romance by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi, has been casting its spell over Middle Eastern and Asian audiences for nearly a millennium.

Layla and Majnun, choreographer Mark Morris’s 13th work to have its world premiere at Cal Performances, is a delight. The piece, slightly over an hour long, combines — with concision, precision, heart and brio — all the qualities that are best in Morris’ aesthetic.

The sixty-minute work is based on the 1908 opera by Azerbaijani composerUzeyir Hajibeyli, available on YouTube. You can’t miss its grand opera gestures which Qasimov, Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobson, however, condensed into an exquisitely focused version which retained the integrated perspective of western and Azerbaijani music. The original version's chorus and additional singers are here carried by Morris always strong dancers. Sung in the original language, super titles helped our understanding but also gave an inkling of the lush poetry and a quasi-transcendental concept of human love. Curious was the idea that love and suffering are inextricably connected; the very concept of passion, apparently, is painful.

Cal Performances sponsored a few events last month, but for many, the season opened at Zellerbach Hall Friday, Sept. 30, with the world premiere of “Layla and Majnun,” Mark Morris’ choreographed retelling of a classic Persian legend, set to exquisite Azerbaijani music by early 20th century composer Uzeyir Hajibeyli. Members of the remarkable Silk Road Ensemble and two great vocalists in the mugham style, Fargana Qasimova and Alim Qasimov, performed the arranged score, and they presented a problem by dividing our attention.

Across the open and darkened stage the lights of small lamps flicker. At the back of the stage stretches an eight-foot-wide platform, and from that platform run two more ‘runways’ at a lower level. The stepped platforms fashion a squared-off C-shape pushed against the outer edges of the stage. In the center of the C is a shorter platform, with just enough room for two people to sit crosslegged, facing the audience, and sing.

BERKELEY, Calif. — “My soul is on fire because we are apart. My only wish is to perish in the world of love. My true love knows every sliver of sorrow in my heart.” “Dear God, let me feel even more despair for my love.” “The true purpose of love is sacrificing oneself.” These lines, capturing various archetypal facets of Romantic love and anguish, come from the libretto of “Layla and Majnun.” The story, known from the fifth century onward in oral versions, reached its first definitive form in the Persian romance of Nezami Ganjawi (1141-1209).

A friend said to me the other day, “People go to see Mark Morris for the music.” We were discussing the upcoming world premiere of Mark Morris Dance Group’s Layla and Majnun, and why she, a dancer, wouldn’t be seeing it. The truth is not as unequivocal as that – clearly, Morris’ choreography has as many adherents as his exquisite taste in music and musical collaborators. But judging by the applause at Zellerbach Hall, where Layla and Majnun opened on Friday, 30 September, people really were there for the music. At the curtain call, they clapped respectfully for the fifteen dancers, huzzahed for the Silk Road Ensemble and stood up and cheered for the two vocalists, Azerbaijani father-daughter mugham singers Alim Qasimov and Fargana Qasimova. It was a fair assessment of the 50-minute work, for which the music was exquisite but the slight choreography was tastefully decorative when not cloyingly frilly.

Inevitably, as the 65-minute work progresses, you find yourself immersed in something organic and wonderful.

If you peek online at the Mark Morris Dance Group rehearsing Morris’s choreography for a new cross-cultural variant of the 1908 opera “Layla and Majnun,” you see movement that is clean and distilled, marking space in elegant circles and lines. But on stage Friday at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, where the company joined members of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble in performing the world premiere of this renowned opera of the East, a cross-cultural traffic jam occurred.

This September, the tale will come to life in an ambitious operatic production commissioned by Cal Performances and at least ten other organizations, including the Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center. The artists who have come together to build the opera form the ultimate dream team: It includes world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble arranging and performing the music, choreography by Mark Morris and the Mark Morris Dance Group, lighting designs by James F. Ingalls, and set designs and costumes by the British painter Sir Gordon Howard Hodgkin. This is the first time an adaptation of Layla and Majnun is being presented in the Western Hemisphere on this scale.

It may be human to err, but it's also human to get things very right. That is, to pour devotion and diligence into a chosen endeavor until it is as close to perfect as possible. Just weeks ago in Rio de Janeiro, the world watched, mesmerized, as a multitude of athletes performed stunning physical feats. In the coming months and much closer to home, other types of performers — musicians, dancers, thespians, acrobats, comedians — will share their own varieties of near-perfection on smaller stages. And the rest of us will watch. Hey, performing arts season: Welcome back!

“It just does really have a lot of different worlds,” says violinist Colin Jacobsen about Layla and Majnun, the sui generis work which he’ll accompany, as part of the Silk Road Ensemble, at Zellerbach Hall at the end of the month. And he’s referring to different kinds of worlds. And it's their first full-length, choreographed and costumed collaboration, with the Mark Morris Dance Group providing motion and color.

Fall is upon us and we’re desperately trying to dodge the howling sirocco of the presidential election campaign. Seeking new distractions now that the throbbing beat of samba, bossa nova and funk from Rio is a distant echo, now that the glorious sight of athletes flying through the air and synchronously swimming is a distant memory. Stop trying to parse the rapping Chihuahua, the naked woman swimming in a fish tank, and the unnerving sight of Frank Ocean self-immolating in Blond/Blonde.

The eighth of Mark Morris’ full-evening entertainments, Layla and Majnun is one of the more intriguing. Thanks to cellist Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk Road Ensemble and Azerbaijani vocalists Alim Qasimov and Fargana Qasimova, the Brooklyn-based choreographer became fascinated with this tragic tale of thwarted love.

The Berkeley campus is perennially a hub of artistic performances, exhibits and readings in the Bay Area, and this semester is no exception. From a world premiere by Mark Morris to theater inspired by student veterans to readings by bestselling authors, the arts are thriving at Berkeley.

A refresher on the backstory: Choreographer Mark Morris grew up in Seattle and began dancing here before leaving for a spectacular dance career in New York. (An early work was at On the Boards, way back when OtB was resident at Washington Hall.)

Every weekday at 10 a.m., the hosts at Classical MPR play a standout work based on the theme for the week. We call them Morning Glories.

Mark Morris Dance Group will perform Layla and Majnun (Sept. 30–Oct. 2), based on the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi’s story of forbidden love and accompanied by the musical virtuosity of The Silk Road Ensemble.

The Berkeley Forum, a student-run organization that hosts prominent speaking events on campus, announced its fall semester lineup Sunday night. Berkeley Forum President Daniel Ahrens said the lineup this semester is its most expansive yet. It will include tech entrepreneurs, journalists, advocates and artists.

(Brooklyn, NY) – The Mark Morris Dance Group (MMDG) completes their lively, engaging and varied 2016-17 season with the world premiere of Mark Morris’ Numerator at Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood Music Festival for Lou 100: In Honor of the Divine Mr. Harrison, an entire Lou Harrison (1917-2003) program performed with the Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center.

(Brooklyn, NY) – The Mark Morris Dance Group (MMDG) in partnership with Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University (CBA) will launch the Mark Morris Dance Accompaniment Training Program, a new, innovative program to train and provide practical experience for dance accompanists. This one-of-a-kind program recognizes the significance of music in the dance studio and aims to further legitimize dance accompaniment as a viable and much needed profession within the music and dance industries.

“No choreographer alive has built up a stronger reputation for musicality than Mark Morris” The New York Times

Morris Choreography Set to a Chamber Arrangement Performed by the Silk Road Ensemble with Stage and Costume Design from Painter Howard Hodgkin, Lighting by James F. Ingalls 

Ten National and International Performing Arts Institutions Combine Forces to Support Mark Morris’s Eighth Evening Length Work

Layla and Majnun Will Tour the US and Abroad

FREE ACTIVITIES FOR ALL AGES - DANCE AND FITNESS CLASSES, PERFORMANCES BY MMDG, FOOD FROM LOCAL VENDORS, HARD NUT TICKET CONTEST, RAFFLE, PLUS A BEER GARDEN WITH LIVE MUSIC

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 9:30AM - 5PM

Mark Morris's signature work comes to television for the first time, hosted by Mikhail Baryshnikov.

An essay by Sophia Preston

Just a few minutes into Mark Morris’s 1989 dance to Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas it is clear that at least some of the movement “represents” the words of the libretto. Whether by looking apt (shaking hands in the air to “shake”), or through repetition (hands held out in an Indian dance mudra every time the word “fate” is heard), associations build up between gestures and words, creating a lexicon of gestural signs. This “re-presentation” of the libretto through gestures might be viewed as a redundant doubling of the words, but my contention is that, on the contrary, Morris exploits the transparency of this strategy to sophisticated and moving effect.

Alastair Macaulay for The New York Times

Every so often someone declares ballet dead. The theater critic Kenneth Tynan even did so in the 1960s, a decade that many of us assume must have been a golden age. (The choreographer Frederick Ashton said, “It’s having the biggest funeral in history.”) In 2010 it was the turn of Jennifer Homans, the dance critic of The New Republic, in the epilogue of her ballet history, “Apollo’s Angels.” In 1993 — I’d better come clean — it was me.

All it took to condemn one of the greatest operas ever written to three centuries in shadows were a bare dozen words—“Perform'd at Mr. Josias Priest's Boarding-School at Chelsey. By Young Gentlewomen.”

And the worst of it? It wasn’t even true.

In fact Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas was probably written for performance before the King and Queen of England. But those words, at the head of the libretto published in 1689, have cast such a pall of dainty respectability, of amateur night shenanigans over the work that most listeners have neglected the evidence of their own ears. Dido has been mostly revived professionally when a mezzo-soprano combining musical insight with box-office clout—a Kirsten Flagstad, a Josephine Baker—has insisted on performing it. Paradoxically, Mark Morris's danced version of the piece has probably done more to establish Dido in the repertory than those artists did.