In Honor of the Divine Lou Harrison.

It's impossible to resist the comparisons--Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa in the waning years of the 19th century; Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine in the middle decades of the 20th. These relationships between important composers and major choreographers were so fertile that they rewrote the history of artistic collaboration. Now, as dance limps uncertainly toward the millennium, Lou Harrison and Mark Morris look like the latest team to fuse sound and step posterity as they leap confidently toward the renewal of the medium.

Five dances--four choreographed for the 15-member Mark Morris Dance Group, one for the San Francisco Ballet--have already come tumbling from the relationship that began in 1988 with "Strict Songs." The latest, "Rhymes With Silver," is the first for which Harrison--who celebrates his 80th birthday May 17--has written an original score. It's an enchanting 40-minute opus arranged for violin, viola, cello, piano and the percussion that nobody else exploits with such bewitching results. The new work, plus "Strict Songs" and "Grand Duo" (1993), will make up In Honor of the Divine Lou Harrison, one of the Mark Morris Dance Group's two programs at the Brooklyn Academy of Music April 15-20.

Despite the 40-year difference in their ages, the similarities between Harrison and Morris are to uncanny to ignore. Both grew up in the Northwest. Both are openly gay artists who have explored sexual themes but are more likely to transcend particulars of gender identity in order to advocate inclusion on a global scale.

Both men steeped themselves in the arts of distant countries long before multiculturalism became a buzzword. And finally, both composer and choreographer are blissfully eclectic in a way that dispenses with theory and goes right to the heart. Morris does occasionally display a social conscience. Two years ago, in "World Power," he created (to Harrison's music) a culture doomed because of incursion by an alien force--think the United States in the Pacific at the beginning of the century. Now, in "Rhymes With silver," Morris offers a prequel: a panorama of a society at one with itself, a community so unified that when one member shrugs his shoulders, everyone takes it up in unison. Perhaps no such society ever existed, but then, nothing rhymes with silver. It doesn't hurt a choreographer to dream.