While Mark Morris has mostly choreographed to classical music, he has also created dances set to popular music since the beginning of his career. This collection features pieces set to rock and roll (Violent Femmes, Yoko Ono), country western (The Louvin Brothers, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys), and show tunes (Richard Rogers). Mark’s interest in popular music continues up to the present day in pieces like Pepperland (2017), set to music by The Beatles, and The Look of Love (2022), set to music by Burt Bacharach.
In addition to being an exceptional choreographer and dancer, Mark Morris is also a captivating, funny, and thoughtful speaker. This exhibit features a collection of interviews with Mark Morris that span from the late 1980s through a 2014 conversation at Jacob’s Pillow.
Pianist, composer, arranger, and writer Ethan Iverson has been one of the Mark Morris Dance Group’s key musical collaborators for over twenty-five years. A founding member of the jazz trio The Bad Plus and the Mark Morris Dance Group’s Music Director from 1998 to 2006, Iverson has composed, arranged, or played on countless Mark Morris works and continues to work with the Dance Group on recent pieces such as Pepperland (2017) and The Look of Love (2022). This digital exhibit brings together archival videos of some of Iverson and the Dance Group’s most memorable collaborations, an in-depth discussion between Iverson and two other Mark Morris Dance Group Music Directors, behind-the-scenes photographs, ephemera, and more.
We are now featuring the full-length performance videos of three previously excerpted works showcasing Mark Morris as a performer: in “Pièces en Concert” (1986), “Pas de Poisson” (1990), and “Zwei Harveytänze” (1999). Read more about each work in the descriptions connected to each video.
Since the early 1980s, the Mark Morris Dance Group has been performing at two major venues in the Berkshires, the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, MA, and the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, MA, home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer institute for advanced musical study. These venues – only about 15 miles apart – have served as preeminent international performing arts presenters for nearly a century. Morris first performed at the Pillow in 1982, in a reconstructed solo choreographed by Pillow co-founder Ted Shawn in 1929; and since their debut in 1986, the Dance Group has returned to the Pillow 23 times. Morris and the Dance Group were instrumental in bringing dance to the stage at Tanglewood beginning with their first residency in 2003, and in expanding live music performance at the Pillow. The Dance Group has premiered 16 works with these presenters, 10 of which were commissioned by the Pillow or the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In addition to performance videos, the Mark Morris Dance Group Archive holds a wide variety of rehearsal footage, panel discussions and interviews, residency materials, and snapshots of daily life from the Dance Group’s memorable summers spent in the Berkshires.
Tom Brazil has been photographing the Mark Morris Dance Group since their earliest days in the 1980s, performing at Dance Theater Workshop and P.S. 122 in New York, and well into their current seasons at the Dance Center and the neighboring Brooklyn Academy of Music. Some of the most iconic images of Morris’s most well-known works, such as Grand Duo, Gloria, Dido and Aeneas, and The Hard Nut — are photographs by Brazil, who has traveled internationally to capture these performances. In 1992, Brazil and the Dance Group published a book together of Brazil’s photographs of the Dance Group since 1983, the year Brazil left his job as a picture researcher at Magnum Photos and began primarily photographing dance. Beyond the Dance Group, Brazil has photographed well over 5,000 performances and served as the house photographer for many presenters and venues around the city over the decades. His work has been published in countless newspapers, magazines, and journals. Please enjoy this selection of Brazil’s brilliant work that expresses the vibrancy, beauty, and humor that Brazil and the Dance Group share.
Tom Brazil passed away on January 29, 2022. It has been such a privilege for the Mark Morris Dance Group to be seen through Tom’s lens over the last forty years. So much of the visual history of the Dance Group is told through Tom’s photographs. We celebrate and honor his life, his artistry, and his commitment to dance through this exhibition.
COPYRIGHT NOTICE:
The photographs in this exhibit are protected by copyright law and other restrictions, and may not be reproduced, distributed, or published without permission from the copyright holder. Please contact archive@mmdg.org for more information.
