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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 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.

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.

The art and culture of South India will be the centerpiece of the prestigious music festival held annually at the renowned Lincoln Center in New York. The 7th season of Lincoln Center’s ‘White Light Festival’ will open on October 16. Award-winning choreographer Mark Morris will curate a ten-part series on it. The international multidisciplinary festival will have 41 performances in 10 venues over the course of a month, by artists and companies from nine countries. The festival will open with the US premiere of Human Requiem, an intimate and unique theatrical choral event performed by German classical choir Rundfunkchor Berlin.

The choreographer Mark Morris, who has long been drawn to the arts and culture of India, has programmed a 10-part series exploring the music and dance of South India that will form the centerpiece of this fall’s White Light Festival, Lincoln Center announced Thursday. 

The Mark Morris Dance Group presented two New York premieres as a part of its spring season. Alongside two older pieces, the repertoire showed the range of Morris’s smaller-scale concert performance choreography, encompassing rituals and formalism both ornate and more classical in nature. They danced at the company’s intimate home theater on the top floor of its Brooklyn headquarters with live music by the superb resident ensemble, which has become a proud hallmark of the troupe.

There is no question that Mark Morris is one of the greatest choreographers America has produced. His musical acumen rivals that of George Balanhcine, and one might even compare his fertile inventiveness to that of Merce Cunningham. The Mark Morris Dance Group performed four of his dances, including a premiere, in the capacious yet intimate fifth floor studio/theater of his eponymous center in Brooklyn, instead of at BAM, his usual springtime venue. Morris geared his repertory choices to the scale of his studio theater and a small musical ensemble of four.

After more than 35 years, Mark Morris still seems to have plenty to say. In a series of four works including a world premiere, shown in the casual James and Martha Duffy Performance Space of his own Mark Morris Dance Center, Morris offered his idiosyncratic and familiar dance worldview through relentlessly musical choreography. 

You experience choreography differently in such a setting... You become keenly aware of the dancers’ bodies: how distinct they are, how many shapes and sizes they come in. And what they sound like when they slap their thigh or stomp out rhythms on the floor. The dancers’ faces leave a powerful impression. 

No choreographer alive has built up a stronger reputation for musicality than Mark Morris. In his finest works, he taps both our most primal and our most sophisticated responses to music. That’s not the only reason he has been recognized since the 1980s as one of the very few great choreographers of our day — there are also his exceptional imagination; his phenomenal wit; the profundity of his view of society; his insistence on live music; and his exceptionally honest, natural dancers — but it’s fundamental.

In the field of American dance, rarely friendly to aging bodies, the number of master choreographers working into their seventh decade—and still directing a namesake company—can pretty much be counted on one artfully extended hand. Soon to enter that elite club is Mark Morris, who turns 60 in August and whose company, the Mark Morris Dance Group, performs its spring season May 17 to 22 at his center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Known as one of the more prolific makers of dance of his or any generation, Mr. Morris has amassed a long list of accolades...“Very few people have the gifts Mark has,” said Lawrence Rhodes, artistic director of the Juilliard Dance Division. “People hope to emulate his innate knowledge of music, structure and vocabulary.” The company, founded in 1980, hasn’t had a repertory season at its center since April 2013. Each of the four pieces on the program is a smaller dance—selected, Mr. Morris said, because in scale they are particularly well suited for the intimate space.

Certain dances — especially those packed with details — warrant intimacy. The Mark Morris Dance Group grants that wish with a spring season at its Brooklyn quarters, with new and vintage works by the stellar Mr. Morris and, as always, live music...One thing is sure: The close quarters will make Mr. Morris’s details shine.

Cal Performances kicks off its 2016-17 season with a star-studded bang in late September with the world premiere of Mark Morris' evening-length dance "Layla and Majnun," performed by his company and featuring The Silk Road Ensemble as well as Azerbaijani mugham vocalists Alim Qasimov and Fargana Qasimova. The work, drawn from the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi's story of forbidden love, plays Sept. 30 through Oct. 2 at Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall.

Delight defines Mark Morris' "Dido and Aeneas." Delight in sex, in music, in pathos, in mischief and even evil. Delight despite the ancient tragic story of love betrayed, and despite the historic and political trappings the story has accumulated over the centuries. Running for the second time in Chicago, through Wednesday at the Harris, Morris' hourlong "Dido and Aeneas" carries some major baggage. Choreographed in 1989 for Brussels' Theatre Royal de la Monnaie, it's based in Virgil's "Aeneid," which emphasizes fate, the gods, the destined history of Rome. Henry Purcell's 1689 opera, set to Nahum Tate's libretto, provides not only the music and a political message about England's ascendancy but a different tack on the characters: Dido becomes stronger than Aeneas, and witches, not gods, direct the action.

“Layla and Majnun,” based on a fifth-century Persian romantic poem, performed by the Mark Morris Dance Group with The Silk Road Ensemble. A Meany Center co-commission and Northwest premiere, it opens the season. (Oct. 6-8)

The baroque opera “Dido and Aeneas” comes at 8 p.m. to Elliott Hall this Saturday, brought to life through vocalists, dancers and a live chamber orchestra. The Mark Morris Dance Group will discuss the ins and outs of the aesthetics in a pre-show talk at 7 p.m. in the Mechanical Engineering Building, Room 1103. Below, Laurel Lynch, lead performer playing dual roles, Dido and the Sorceress, answers questions to give you a sense of what you’ll be able to take away from the show and pre-show.

Rather like El Niño’s oscillation between warm and cold in the Pacific, Morris’ monumental work cycles between two temperaments — the one irrepressibly gay (l’Allegro), the other pensive and introspective (il Penseroso). The poet Milton’s musings, richly ornamented by Handel, are brought to vivid life by Morris — though the cheeky choreographer doesn’t confine himself to any one method of word painting.

The Mark Morris Dance Group on April 2 will bring Henry Purcell's famous baroque opera "Dido and Aeneas" to life with a live chamber orchestra, vocalists and dancers under the baton of choreographer Mark Morris at Elliott Hall of Music.

The Mark Morris Dance Group returns to Krannert Center's Tryon Festival Theatre on the University of Illinois Urbana campus for performances Friday and Saturday evening.  Illinois Public Media's Brian Moline talked with Morris from his dance studio in New York.

As a member of the Mark Morris Dance Group since 2002, Noah Vinson has enjoyed touring the world. This time around, he won't be helping with the Mark Morris Dance Group's extensive community engagement efforts. He has in the past. Five of the 18 members of the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based dance company arrived here earlier this week to lead 27 community engagement events — more than any other performing arts group that passes through Krannert Center.

I envy anyone experiencing Morris’ setting of Handel’s ode “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato” for the first time. One of the most encyclopedic and humane dance masterworks of our age, the piece fulfills its fifth engagement at Zellerbach Auditorium, the first revival here since 2009... Despite the sensual pleasures the work affords, to eye and ear it repays close study of Morris’ profound talent for fusing note and step and making it all sublimely entertaining.

Brooklyn's Mark Morris Dance Group has announced a new production based on a seventh century Persian love story. The company's eigth evening-length work, Layla and Majnun, is set to premiere later this year. 

As audiences saw in the Mark Morris Dance Group’s annual performances at George Mason University on Friday and Saturday, the best of Morris’s works offer wholeness. The musical response is fluid and handled lightly. No distractions, rhythmic or otherwise, take us out of an unpredictable but effortless meeting of sound and movement. The dances simply feel right, to the eye, intellect and nervous system.

The greatest pleasure of this program is the return, after an eight-year absence, of Mark Morris’ “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes” (moved up from Program 7). The experience is akin to encountering an old friend and sensing that he has grown younger with the years.

If you pictured a dancer, you probably wouldn't imagine someone with Parkinson's disease. Worldwide, there are 10 million people with the progressive movement disorder, and they struggle with stiff limbs, tremors and poor balance. But over the past 15 years or so, a few thousand have taken dance classes that are part of a program called Dance for PD. It began in Brooklyn and has spread throughout the country and around the world. It has also attracted the attention of scientists interested in the ways dance might ease symptoms.
"We don't dumb it down. I believe very much in making this a really joyful and challenging experience," she says. "But it has to be both challenging and kind of satisfying."
Karlin learned what she needed to know to start her Parkinson's program at the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn, where Dance for PD began about 15 years ago. David Leventhal is the director of the Mark Morris program. At the beginning, he says, it was trial and error because "there's no one type of Parkinson's, no one set of symptoms."

The connection between music and dance has long been toyed with, considered, argued and experiemented on. From the famed collaboration of John Cage and Merce Cunningham to babies bopping along to beats, there is an undeniable synergy between the two. Mark Morris puts this relationship at the core of every one of his creations. As one of the only choreographers to insist upon live music with every performance, Morris champions the belief that these two art forms do and must exist together.

Despite several precedents in Mr. Morris’s work – his enthusiasm for Asian forms goes back to his earliest days in dance – this is a departure for him, since it couples a story unfamiliar to many Westerners with unfamiliar accompaniment. In the company’s announcement on Tuesday, Mr. Morris said: “The music for ‘Layla and Majnun’ is unusual for its profound depth of sorrow and ecstasy. The mugham style is a thrilling and rare glimpse into old Azerbaijani culture. Love, acceptance, devotion and peace are the ruling esthetics of this production.”

The Mark Morris Dance Group hasn’t visited Britain for some time, but his lyrical masterpice L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato has finally been recorded on DVD, bringing his genius into our homes. Along with The Hard Nut, his sardonic retelling of The Nutcracker, L’Allegro shows him at the height of his interpretive powers.

The company returns to Cal Performances with Morris' masterwork, "L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato," set to Handel's oratorio of the same name performed live by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra.

Like the Christmas Spectacular, “The Hard Nut” is retro-inspired. It takes place in the 1970s, with a comic-book look based on the off-kilter perspective of Charles Burns, the D.C.-born creator of such teen-horror graphic novels as “Black Hole” and “Blood Club.” The decor for the Stahlbaums’ Christmas party includes a white aluminum tree, a deluxe television console and the prominent positioning of a cocktail cart. The characters are superbly detailed, and masculinity and femininity are easily transferable. Mrs. Stahlbaum, portrayed with gallant faded grandeur by John Heginbotham, is desperate for her happy pills and the booze to wash them down. As Dr. Stahlbaum, Morris is benignly oblivious.

The gap left by the departure of Alexei Ratmansky’s Nutcracker for the West Coast – where it seems to be enjoying a successful run – has been filled this year by the return of Mark Morris’s now classic The Hard Nut. Made in 1991 for the Théâtre de la Monnaie, it was Morris’s farewell to Brussels, where the company had spent a productive, if embattled, three years. In short, local audiences and reviewers never really took to Morris’s irreverent style. With The Hard Nut, he gave them one last piece of hard candy to break their teeth on.

Twenty-three years after its American premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Mark Morris’s “The Hard Nut” returns to the venue through December 20 as a modern classic. That status was not entirely assured when this cheeky re-imagining of the ballet set to Tchaikovsky’s beloved “The Nutcracker Suite” first electrified audiences. “It’s deepened over the years,” says Morris now. “People who saw it as kids are now bringing their own kids.”

“Nobody can listen to The Nutcracker any more,” Mark Morris once exclaimed, because “it’s used to get you to buy everything you can imagine.” His hilarious and deeply touching Hard Nut may return the magic to the score but it also revels in the junk the music drove us to consume.

f you’re like me, this time of year can be a sore trial with all the forced holiday cheer. There’s so much pressure to be jolly and all of those obligatory holiday shows just strain your patience. You’re thinking, please, not another production of The Nutcracker! The good news is that you don’t have to suffer any more. You can re-discover your inner holiday mirth by going to see The Hard Nut with the Mark Morris Dance Group. From start to finish, this production is a triumph courtesy of Morris’ abundantly affectionate imagination.

The greatest single “Hard Nut” dance is the Snowflakes waltz at the end of Act I. No other treatment of this famous music so excites its audience, and again Mr. Morris’s secret is timing. And yet how crazy it is, with these unisex dancing Snowflakes in their bizarre bikini-tutus and skewed shell hats, releasing snow from their hands now in steady drizzles, now like explosions of cocaine. First, we laugh at, then we laugh with, these creatures. They’re preposterous; they’re life-enhancing.

“I wanted a giant, giant number of snowflakes, but I thought, ‘Why are snowflakes women?’ I’m not sure. Once you’re frozen, it doesn’t matter what your sex is.”
That's how choreographer Mark Morris recalled his inspiration for "The Hard Nut," his edgy, gender-bending take on "The Nutcracker," which returns to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York Dec. 12 after a five-year absence. The Mark Morris Dance Group's production, which has become a holiday tradition in its own right, breaks from the traditional "Nutcracker" mold by transporting the yuletide coming-of-age story from Europe to mid-20th century American suburbia.

Dance took off in a number of unexpected directions this year. The dance critics of The New York Times — Alastair Macaulay, Gia Kourlas, Brian Seibert and Siobhan Burke — look back at some of the biggest surprises.

Elegance Revisited The thought of a contemporary ballet can cause trepidation, but Mark Morris’s “After You” for American Ballet Theater honored both the art form and its dancers. Subtle and refined, “After You” is a modern ballet worth saving.

Mark Morris' modern take on The Nutcracker sizzles at BAM. Twenty-three years after its American premiere, Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut returns to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (December 12–20). “The challenge is to keep it fresh, current, and surprising,” says Morris.

The Hard Nut and Mark Morris

Of all the many “Nutcracker” productions I’ve seen, this is one of only two (with Alexei Ratmansky’s for American Ballet Theater) to play Tchaikovsky’s score complete in the correct order; and (unlike Ratmansky’s) it has a live choir for the wordless snowflakes sequence.

One of the choreographer Mark Morris’s favorite places to cook is a tiny kitchen in an almost exclusively female commune near Bangalore, India. “The girls freak out,” he said. “They can’t believe a man is cooking.” The kitchen is equipped with two gas hobs and a lone light bulb and is open to the outside, welcoming in mosquitoes. Mr. Morris insists on cooking, although the older women sometimes disapprove of his methods. “The aunties are very strict,” he said. “They come in and shake their heads. ‘Oh, you’re going to do it like that?’”

Morris’ intense musicality — his ability to interpret the accompaniment through movement in a unique, organic and interesting way — may be his most distinctive contribution. Although most choreographers have some appreciation of music, there are few with Morris’ depth of knowledge and his ability to bring whatever music he is using so kinetically alive.

Such a treat it was to experience the Mark Morris Dance Group back on Oct. 27, also at the Lensic. This lavish evening, sponsored by Performance Santa Fe, brought in a troupe comprising 17 dancers. That is in itself substantial for a touring company, but Morris’ dancers always perform to music played or sung live by members of the company’s music ensemble, which is directed by pianist Colin Fowler. The Oct. 27 performance exemplified how closely these elements of dance and music were interlocked even while occupying separate planes.

If you look beyond steps to structure, you see in After You idiosyncrasies of Morris’s method of building a dance shared with almost all his work. The foundation is a small array of motifs—individual gestures and poses, phrases (in this ballet, all short, but in other works sometimes much longer), geometric spatial configurations. The curious thing is Morris’s way of recombining these elements throughout the dance independently of the music’s own development (the way the composer explores his ideas for melody, harmony, rhythm, and so on). The choreography fits the music’s phrasing neatly moment by moment, but the pattern it unfolds through time is its own. Morris also wants you to really see his structural ideas: near the end of After You, for example, he shows us a little partnered duet a few times, then has Gillian Murphy (in the first cast) do the same phrase of three stabbing low développés all by herself—Look, Ma, no hands!

The work itself is very different from Balanchine or Petipa. Mark’s work is not about flash; he doesn’t care about tricks or gimmicks, and that presents its own challenges. He constantly tells us to “dance under”, even for performance. He doesn’t want a typical performance quality — nothing presentational in any way. Instead he wants a very natural quality, and it feels very natural, but you have to be especially engaged and present; you can’t have any mannerism. To keep it pure takes a lot of focus.

If ballets are like woodwork, Morris is a skilled carpenter. The piece was well wrought, and what he does best was on display from start to close: animating the stage with layers of movement. Morris reimagined the tiered hierarchy of classical ballet as something more egalitarian, seeing his cast of twelve dancers as a cross between laborers and courtiers. Isaac Mizrahi’s costumes were on the same wavelength: simple, softly draped tops and wide-legged pants in bright colors.

Morris takes pains to show us a range of classroom steps—from sprightly jetés to melting renversés—with an emphasis on light-footed moves, which the choreographer may juxtapose ingeniously. Traveling across the stage in tandem, for instance, one dancer performs a turning jump while his partner leaps sideways. To this received vocabulary, Morris adds no-nonsense pedestrian striding; along with gestures, like the sweeping arm with which a dancer invites her companions to join her; and contemporary inventions, like the moment when a woman rests her hand on the floor and her partner circles holding her feet. After You might even be thought of as a post-modern Études—which is not so crazy, if we remember that Morris used some of Czerny’s music for his Canonic 3⁄4 Studies.

An interview with Mark Morris by Pasatiempo.

For all the nonverbal grace of ballet, a studio rehearsal with choreographer Mark Morris is a hyper-verbal affair.

Some comments are direct: “Facial expression! You’re looking at the inside of your heads?!”
Some are counterintuitive: “More and less.”
Others are morsels of praise: “He doesn’t look like an a—hole!”

The occasion for the rehearsal was American Ballet Theatre’s upcoming presentation of Mr. Morris’s “After You,” which the company will dance Wednesday night and throughout its fall season at the David H. Koch Theater.

Mark Morris discusses with "City Lights" executive producer Noel Morris about his crafta nd the underlying philosophy that guides his articstic life on Atlanta's 90.1 FM NPR station.
Listen to the interview >

Fifteen years after its last visit to Atlanta, The Mark Morris Dance Group and the MMDG Music Ensemble will perform three works Saturday, October 17, 8 p.m. at the Rialto Center for the Arts: Pacific (1995), Festival Dance (2011) and A Wooden Tree (2012). While these may not be his most famous works, anything by Morris is a must-see.

“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.