MARK MORRIS: 20 YEARS OF SERIOUS FUN.

MODERN DANCE'S GROWN-UP BAD BOY SETS UP IN BROOKLYN

That fun aesthetic (if you can call it such), initially articulated in 1980 by choreographer Mark Morris, has never been entirely discarded. These days, the Mark Morris Dance Group has its fun everywhere--at least in the English-speaking world--from the cavernous, slightly seedy London Coliseum to the 600-seat Van Duzer Theater at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. The merriment is not universally appreciated: Continental Europe, where Tanztheater angst is served in packets like freeze-dried chicken soup in lunch boxes, remains suspicious of dancers, at least these dancers, having fun.

This year, however, the company will have a different kind of fun. In August Morris turns 45, and he has already put away several roles, not least of them the tragic Queen of Carthage in Dido and Aeneas. It was the 1989 setting of this Purcell opera that divided the Belgian audience and press during the troupe's legendary three-year residency at the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. Last November the Mark Morris Dance Group (now numbering eighteen) celebrated its twentieth anniversary, almost exactly two decades since its New York debut concert at the Merce Cunningham Studio.

Between March 6 and 25 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Morris is permitting himself the luxury of his first substantial retrospective. The repertoire ranges from Gloria, a revised version of a dance that has been a company perennial since 1981, to the New York premiere of Morris's production of the abridged version of Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, unveiled by the English National Opera in June and introduced in this country in September at the University of California, Berkeley (reviewed on page 96 of Dance Magazine, December 2000).

This year, also, Morris returns to work with American Ballet Theatre for the first time in thirteen years. His new one-act work, set to Colin McPhee's Balinese foray Tabuh-Tabuhan, opens May 2 at New York's Metropolitan Opera House. Meanwhile, this spring and summer, the San Francisco Ballet will tour France, England and Spain with two Morris works: his Leroy Anderson romp, Sandpaper Ballet, and the Richard Strauss-inspired opus, A Garden. The latter piece, the choreographer's fourth commission for San Francisco Ballet's artistic director, Helgi Tomasson, was premiered by the troupe February 23. In addition, a book of photographs and essays (by sundry hands) on Morris's first Monnaie hit, L'Allegro, il penseroso ed il moderato, will be published this spring (to coincide with the hundredth performance of that work) by Marlowe and Co. It's the first tome about Morris since Joan Acocella's watershed study of him in 1993.

Another milestone to give one pause: The redoubtable Ruth Davidson retires this year. She is the last member of the original team that performed with Morris at his first concert at Merce Cunningham's studio in Westbeth. With Davidson's withdrawal, the Mark Morris Dance Group has made a complete transition to a second generation.

However, the most significant event in Morris's professional life in 2001 will be the opening in Brooklyn, sometime this spring, of the Mark Morris Dance Center, just a shoe's throw from BAM. The price tag is $6.3 million (raised publicly, privately and with healthy subsidies from the City of New York and the Borough of Brooklyn). Barry Alterman, the troupe's one and only general manager, says the four-story building will be the first artistic home constructed from the ground up by a single-choreographer American modern dance company. The site will be a permanent home for the company and a community resource.

The outlaw aspect of Morris's company, no matter how endearing it has been, clearly has been superseded. What we are talking about is institutionalization in an art form where the transitory is standard. "A lot of people think I should be institutionalized right now," retorts Morris, clad in what looks like an old motel bedspread on a drizzly December afternoon during the Berkeley run of The Hard Nut, his off-center version of The Nutcracker. Where a conversation ends and an interview begins is probably something that has never occurred to him, and he has an opinion, almost always informed, on virtually all matters.

"As a young teenager, I just wanted to make up dances and put on shows and do really good work. It turned out I needed a company to put on the shows the way I wanted them. I never imagined we would be this big and successful. We're friendly and reliable and people like us."

Now the likable Seattle-born funster becomes a landlord. "I have been thinking about a home of our own since Brussels, since I realized that it was possible to have everybody in the same office. The village aspect of this is fantastic," says Morris. "We looked at sites in Manhattan--nothing, impossible, columns everywhere, and unless you're Mr. Trump, you can't afford to build. So then we find a place a block away from where we perform in Brooklyn and the property, which had been everything from a bank to a halfway house, was state-owned."

The center will include a 150-seat performance space with full lighting rig, sound rig and curtains. The Morris troupe may use it for revivals of chamber works that don't always translate to the large auditoriums where the company generally performs these days. The street floor will be rented to commercial firms, Alterman said. The bets are on that a bar, to which Morris can repair for refreshment between rehearsals, will occupy some of that space.

Morris, who is following Twyla Tharp in relocating to the Fort Greene area, remains aware of the implications for the dance community. "Small companies in Brooklyn have been pretty much restricted to storefronts and church basements. We won't be rehearsing more than twenty weeks a year, so during the rest of the time, the center will be rented out under a subsidy agreement to local groups who need a place to rehearse or perform.

"The BAM proximity is nice, and Harvey Lichtenstein [the former director of the complex] has been very helpful; the development of Fort Greene is nice. But I'm not approaching this as an imperialist in any way. We just want to be in the neighborhood."

The desire for rootedness may be a sign of maturity; Morris seems to flourish in places where he appears regularly. In the post-Brussels 1990s, the San Francisco Bay Area became his second home. The San Francisco Ballet always maintains a Morris work in the active repertoire. And thanks to Cal Performances director Robert Cole's visionary planning, the Morris troupe frequently dances across the bay in Berkeley three times during a calendar year. The university has already co-commissioned five works, and a sixth, part of cellist Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project, will happen in 2002.

"It has been a happy marriage," says Cole, a sometime conductor whose willingness to provide the Morris company with live music endeared him to the choreographer when he was in the process of jettisoning taped sound from his concerts. "Mark and I were made for each other. And, more than any other dance artist, he has increased our visibility. He attracts a much wider audience than most modern choreographers. We found, oddly, that our chamber music subscribers are strongly drawn to Mark."

The Mark Morris Dance Group made its San Francisco Bay Area debut in June 1985 at the then-intimate Mission District New Performance Gallery, and a community, then grappling with diluted Cunningham maneuvers, was stunned down to its Doc Martens. The program, one recalls, included The Vacant Chair (Morris in his underwear with a brown paper bag over his head) and Lovey (dolls are abused and ripped apart to recordings by the Violent Femmes). Nobody exited that night in a state of indifference, and Morris earned the enviable reputation of being politically incorrect years before the world went gaga over such inanities. He still maintains that the cruelty is there in the Violent Femmes: "There's an ancient, terrifying ballad quality to those records, and they also had a beat you could dance to."

He was miffed when, during his University of California debut engagement in 1987, audiences tittered at his fanged vampire raping a little girl in One Charming Night, about which there is nothing remotely amusing. (The fangs disappeared in revivals.) Yet Morris shares with Cunningham (a giant of modern dance, and one of Morris's idols) a refusal to interpret his own dances. Rather than assign meanings, he would rather discuss the music; you can easily end up in an hour's chat on the emotive power of a C-minor chord and the modulation to the major. (Morris calls C-major "the truth chord.")

Nor (another Cunningham characteristic) will Morris deny you your right to interpret as you will. "I hate the idea of homogenization," he declares, "the mandate for everybody to have the same opinions about everything. Hey, it's my right to put on a show and say what I want. There's something wrong with the philosophy that says you're not allowed to hate anything."

Nor do noble intentions suffice: "The fact that you are disenfranchised in some way is not enough to make up a dance about it. Still, if a ranty, political dance is a great one, I'll stand up and cheer. I'm not supporting the Ku Klux Klan or the Log Cabin Republicans, but I'm all for the First Amendment."

Nevertheless, there is a limit. During our conversation, Morris, who devours all his reviews, starts reading aloud from a bizarre local critique of The Hard Nut, a sour deconstruction that has been emailed from somewhere in the vicinity of Jupiter's second moon. The hotel room becomes his theater. He gushes as his eyes travel down the page: "Oh, isn't that interesting? ... A sexual sprite, isn't that wild? ... Gee, I didn't know that ... Gosh!??

"You know," he says, adding the review to his clip file, "by the time I release a work for performance, I'm happy with it. But I am always surprised at how people respond to something, and that doesn't mean just laughing at something I think is not funny, or thinking something is underchoreographed or not musical enough or, maybe, too musical. I'm sorry, but like, maybe I meant that, and, maybe, I tried that ending you wanted and I rejected it."

How a choreographer responds to the works of colleagues reveals much. Morris, whose roots lie in world dance, will readily reveal his adoration of George Balanchine, as much for his eclectic dance vocabulary as for his musical insights. He makes a rare confession: "I laughed the first time I saw Concerto Barocco. I was 14 or 15 and had been studying Busby Berkeley [movie] musicals independently and a lot of those musicals from the 1930s, which I continue to love. And there's that bit in the ballet when they're in threes and fours at the same time, and I said, `Wow, like, he's seen them, too.'

"Since Balanchine died, he has been deified; people forget that he was fabulously cheap and funny. Some of it is tearjerker stuff. Some of it, of course, is so frighteningly deep that you can't watch it. The Four Temperaments is kookie stuff. And the end of Symphony in Three Movements, where people just stop dancing and there's a curtain and you're dying. Sheer genius! It's weird that people accuse Twyla and myself of being experimental when working with ballet companies. Well, excuse me; will you please look at Balanchine again?"

Morris maintains a distinctive relationship with the members of his company. Over the years, the team has acquired a technical polish it lacked in the mid-1980s and this may have prompted Morris to increase the demands made on his dancers. In Berkeley, David Leventhal's elegant performance as the Nutcracker Prince in The Hard Nut bespoke an allegiance to classical values only intermittently in evidence before.

As a company, "we're formal and close, but not incestuous in any way," Morris notes. "The company is just big enough so that, if you're sick of anybody, you don't have to see them for a few days. And it's just small enough so everybody knows what's going on in every dance."

June Omura, who has performed with the Mark Morris Dance Group since Brussels in 1988, notes, "Mark is either fair or chicken about hurting people's feelings. There are days when I don't think I can stand this any longer. Mark is a genius and the funniest guy in the world when he's not making you cry; sometimes his behavior is so childish you wonder how he can live with himself. Still, I would do this forever."

Morris will accept a dancer's departure "if it is done with grace and consideration for the others and enough notice. We've had a few rancorous partings, but I have never blown up and fired anybody over the phone. I like to give work to people. Many of the alumni will be teaching in the school."

No alumna has been more closely associated with Morris than Tina Fehlandt. She introduced Alterman (to whom she was married for a spell) to Morris back in the 1970s when they were ice-cream scoopers in Greenwich Village. Fehlandt missed only one performance in twenty years and, although she retired in January 2000 to raise a family, she will be back with the organization; she and Morris are discussing a series of comprehensive teaching workshops. "I'm a lifer, with no possibility of parole," she insists.

The company is entering a new era, Fehlandt notes, and Morris is ready for it. "Mark feels terribly responsible about this center. But it's a far cry from the early years when the fact that we were all best friends made the work special and the process was what was important and we all hung out on a diet of rice and beans."

Morris the choreographer, rather than Morris the grand seigneur, is planning his life through the next several years. The relationship with English National Opera, which started auspiciously with Four Saints, will proceed with Purcell's King Arthur in June 2003.

Morris will continue to work selectively with ballet companies: "What I love is that men and women dance completely differently from each other; it's not a matter of pointe shoes, it's a whole other style." He has a standing invitation from Tomasson to prepare a full-length piece and has been mulling Sylvia, Leo Delibes's score for the Paris Opera Ballet from 1876 that was memorably choreographed in the twentieth century by another Morris favorite, Frederick Ashton. He is fascinated, too, by Bartek's score to The Wooden Prince. But it won't be for New York City Ballet, for which, he states with chilling finality, "I have no plans to do a piece."

Morris's reputation for so-called tampering with classics is irksome to him: "Here's what drives me nuts: There's as much Ivanov or Petipa in my setting of Nutcracker as in anybody else's. There's this weird, conservative feeling about the classics, like there's this traditional way of doing them. Look, it's my choreography set to a piece of music, so what's the problem? I'm a choreographer, right? And if it works, hooray!"

Allan Ulrich was the dance critic of the San Francisco Examiner for twenty years before joining the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle last year.