HUNTINGDON, PA.-- The Mark Morris Dance Group, a groundbreaking artistic ensemble noted for technically-dazzling-yet free-flowing choreography and the use of humor and eclectic musical choices in its dances, will perform three acclaimed works, "Words, A Wooden Tree, Grand Duo" at Juniata College at 7:30 p.m., Friday, Sept. 18, in Rosenberger Auditorium in the Halbritter Center for the Performing Arts. 

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.

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.

Mary Brennan for Herald Scotland 

Time was, the Mark Morris Dance Group was a familiar sight in Scotland: a highlight in several Edinburgh International Festivals, a hot ticket during subsequent UK tours. It's not clear why that fell away. The company's last Scottish showing was in Edinburgh (2009) - this one-night-only in Aberdeen proved a bitter-sweet reminder of how much Morris and his group are missed.

There is a simplicity in Mark Morris’ speaking, and in his choreography, that belies the deep knowledge of music, mastery of form, and breadth of human expression that have earned him recognition as one of today’s pre-eminent living choreographers. This Saturday, his New York-based Mark Morris Dance Group and Music Ensemble will make its first Atlanta appearance in nearly 15 years at the Rialto Center for the Arts.

Jane Robinson for The Scotsman 

Does Mark Morris create the visual embodiment of our secret wish to move whenever we hear music, the extension of the discrete toe-tap? Is he using our eyes to give us new ears for music? Whatever the trick, it’s close to magic.

The prolific American choreographer and his dancers have been in Australia only once since his double bill at Christopher Hunt’s 1994 Adelaide Festival.

Now at 59, he’s on the coat tails of those deceased elders of contemporary dance, like Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch, with people calling him a veteran. He’s back with a program of four varied works at the Sydney Opera House, diverse, yes, but most garlanded with joy.

"It made you aware of every note of the music." Thus Dame Marie Rambert explained to me something o the merits of Dalcrozian eurhythmics which she had studied and which enabled her to work with Nijinsky as he prepared The Rite of Spring in 1913. These word are eminently true today in describing Mark Morris choreography: everywhere you see the dance exploring the composer's inspiration, the creative devices, the attitudes -historic, emotional, social- implicit in the score.

In the intimate setting of the ICA’s black-box concert hall, Morris and his dancers conjured a world of enchantment.

by Iris Fanger for The Patriot Ledger 

The program of four Boston premieres is a reminder that Morris has lost none of his fervor for live music mixed with dance or his eclectic taste in finding composers to spur his creative choreography. Presented by a company of 17 elegant highly gifted performers, some of them new to local audiences, the evening passes in a luscious mix of joy in dancing and off-beat surprises - a gift to brighten our cold winter.

by Thea Singer for The Artery

Mark Morris has the uncanny ability to show us the darkness in light, the still point in a maelstrom (of traffic, of relationships), or, as Joan Acocella put it in her 1993 biography of him, "one noble, one ignoble, version of the same truth." He did so again last night, in a concert of four Boston premieres by the Mark Morris Dance Group and Music Ensemble presented in the intimate Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Tobi Tobias for ArtsJournal

Jenn and Spencer, being given its world premiere on the opening night of the Mark Morris Dance Group’s run at the company’s studio/theater in Brooklyn, refers to two of the company’s splendid dancers, Jenn Weddel and Spencer Ramirez.  The duet named for and performed by them illustrates the magic a pair of dancers may be capable of and an extraordinary exploration of the duet form.

Deborah Jowitt for ArtsJournal

You can’t predict much about a dance by Mark Morris. There’s no doubt that he responds to music and —with love and respect—choreographs that response into what he hears. He acknowledges with great sensitivity a composer’s tempi and structures and atmosphere, but you never know what else the sounds will trigger.

Robert Gottlieb for New York Observer

In the small theater on the fifth floor of his Dance Center across from BAM, Mark Morris is presenting a smorgasbord of four chamber pieces, three of them to live (and beautifully played) chamber music—and three of them new to New York.

Robert Greskovic for Wall Street Journal

Dance doesn't demand a big venue to make a memorable impression, as two small-scale events this month have shown.

Robert Johnson for The Star-Ledger

Two premieres, including the high-spirited "Crosswalk" and the fraught duet "Jenn and Spencer," adorn the Mark Morris Dance Group’s marvelous new program, which opened on Wednesday at the Mark Morris Dance Center. Joining them is "A Wooden Tree," making its local debut, and a revival of "The Office."

Joan Acocella for The New Yorker

One thing that Mark Morris knows how to do is to create an ambiguity that feels like clarity. Often in his work, a person, after doing something that you think you understand, does something that utterly contradicts that. Or he goes on doing his thing, but someone at the side of the stage does something altogether different. It’s not that Morris’s work is hard. He just doesn’t like to give everything away at the start.

Alastair Macaulay for The New York Times

The musicality for which the choreographer Mark Morris is celebrated reveals itself on multiple levels and in mysterious ways. Sometimes he hears the folk strains in music, like an ethnographer; sometimes, scarcely bothering with the music’s meter or instrumentation, he reimagines a score’s structural tension in terms of strange personal or social dramas.