No choreographer alive has a higher reputation for musicality than Mark Morris; and that reputation — despite several blunders along the way — has been well earned over more than 30 years of marvelously eclectic creativity. From the Baroque to American modernism, from Monteverdi to Stravinsky, from Stephen Foster to jazz, his dances have brought music to meet dance in ways that have expanded our appreciation of the alchemy that these two arts can achieve together. And he is singularly, courageously, committed to live music in a field where, for economic reasons, recordings are increasingly employed.

Morris has put a lot of different things into this new, more open sonic territory. There are tributes to spring, notably the title of the piece, “Spring, Spring, Spring.” (It’s the name of a song in “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”) The dancers all wear flower garlands in their hair, and the men wear jeans in hotly vernal pink, blue, orange, yellow, and so on, with bare chests. Four of these guys stick together and zoom around wagging their rear ends naughtily.

With 35 years of impressive and variously poetic dance-making behind him, Mr. Morris appears in no way ready to confine himself to the tried and true. Whatever title he gives his next dance, it is likely to be provocative and may turn another new corner.

Any chance to see Mark Morris Dance Group must be grabbed ­enthusiastically and immediately. MMDG has visited Australia only three times before — for the 1994 Adelaide Festival; Sydney in 2003; and for this year’s Perth International Arts Festival. Get it while you can.

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.

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.

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.