Mark Morris Dance Group was a welcome return to Brooklyn. In the contemporary dance scene, often movement comes first, and music is fit into the pre-arranged movement which can leave a piece feeling a bit empty. The genius of Morris as a choreographer doesn't come from large, loud movement, but from the simple elegance of allowing the music to breathe life into the movement.

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.

If you try to analyze the way the choreographer Mark Morris fits dance to music, you quickly become aware of something akin to a scientific operation of intense intricacy: The connection of movement phrases and motifs to each score is extraordinarily complex in both structure and detail — and, often, brilliantly satisfying. But when you stand back and simply watch the sheer imagination with which Mr. Morris decides what kind of drama he’s marrying to music that, in most cases, was written long ago with very different ideas in mind, then he starts to look eccentric, a peculiar and daring oddball, an engaging but naughty maverick.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.