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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.