The art and culture of South India will be the centerpiece of the prestigious music festival held annually at the renowned Lincoln Center in New York. The 7th season of Lincoln Center’s ‘White Light Festival’ will open on October 16. Award-winning choreographer Mark Morris will curate a ten-part series on it. The international multidisciplinary festival will have 41 performances in 10 venues over the course of a month, by artists and companies from nine countries. The festival will open with the US premiere of Human Requiem, an intimate and unique theatrical choral event performed by German classical choir Rundfunkchor Berlin.

As curator of “Sounds of India,” part of Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival, Mark Morris has invited a number of performing artists from South India to perform in New York; at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater of John Jay College, the Mark Morris Dance Group is alternating with the Kerala Kalamandalam Kathakali Troupe and Nrityagram. But all four pieces of his own program, which opened on Saturday night, show his talent’s marvelously irrational aspect.

The eight events curated by choreographer Mark Morris for “Sounds of India,” part of Lincoln Center’s current White Light Festival, include three dance presentations that provide particular sights for the sounds on offer. 

For inventiveness of motion married to the gestures of music, few choreographers are as adroit and unpredictable as Mark Morris. For the past decade Mark Morris Dance Group has regularly brought some of its dance programs to the George Mason University Center of the Arts.

Morris’s new piece uses the rhythm and gesture of Indian dance as its foundation