High point: The resurgence of the duet as the most expressive and urgent of movement forms. Mark Morris’ “Jenn and Spencer” topped the list, but one also enjoyed memorable duets by Liam Scarlett (the second movement of “Hummingbird”), Crystal Pite, Nora Chipaumire, Alonzo King (virtually all of “Shostakovich”) and Kate Weare.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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."

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. 

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.