Mark Morris Dance Group, BAM Opera House, April 15, 17-20, 1997.

Mark Morris did Lou Harrison proud. The New York premiere of Rhymes with Silver (1997), with music commissioned from the composer, was the centerpiece of a program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music aptly titled In Honor of the Divine Lou Harrison. Marking the composer's eightieth birthday this spring, it is a luscious work for the full company of sixteen dancers, set against Howard Hodgkin's bold and lively backdrop of grand wavy lines in red and lime.

The piece begins with a beautiful, slightly mournful cello solo (played by Yo-Yo Ma on opening night, by Matt Haimovitz in subsequent performances) and expands to include chimes, piano, violin, and viola. Dancers in black pants and dark green velvet tops (by Martin Pakledinaz) come and go in recurring motifs -- semaphoring arms, winsome shoulder shrugs, spinning (Laura Dean-style), and oversized sewing gestures. There's a funny foxtrot with June Omura partnered simultaneously by six men; elsewhere Guillermo Resto drags himself across the stage by his hands, an evocation of the afflicted among us. The varied imagery reflects the diversity of Harrison's richly accomplished music, a marvelous mix of East and West, a blend particularly attractive to Morris.

Morris once observed to me that he usually presents himself in character roles. Indeed, he appears in this work as a larger-than-life presence, sometimes humorous, sometimes mysterious. In one section he is flowy-armed, head tilting side to side, gliding sideways back and forth, Indian-like, across the stage, as Kraig Patterson stands still to one side.

Rhymes with Silver is workmanlike in the best, most joyous sense of work well done, intelligently wrought, sometimes soulful, sometimes cheery, an evocation of the spice and variety of life. It is a dance that enjoys a kind of feeling and lush ecstasy Morris doesn't always choose to plumb.

The other New York premiere of Morris's season, presented on his second program, was the playful / Don't Want to Love (1996), ironically tided because that's precisely what its protesting characters do want. Set to seven Monteverdi madrigals pondering the exigencies of love, charmingly performed by the Artek Singers and 458 Strings, the seven dancers, in a variety of white, chic, and shaggy costumes by Isaac Mizrahi, declare their supposed aversion to love with arm-sweeping gestures; yet two lovers seem to plead for favor from a madonna figure, and dancers hold up two fingers to pledge love or leap with arms suggesting birds in flight -- light, sweet, cupidlike. The dance ends with Joe Bowie edging sideways toward the back of the stage, looking over his shoulder, checking out the possibility of love, or its loss.

While Morris was saluting Harrison at eighty, Capezio was saluting Morris at forty with its lifetime achievement award, presented onstage before one performance. Among other joys of Morris's season was the thrilling, hip-slapping tribal finale of Grand Duo (1993), also to a Harrison score, as well as some remarkable performances in this fine ensemble company: the openness and graciousness of Mireille Radwan-Dana in I Don't Want to Love; Omura, silver-footed in Mosaic and United (1993), the work splendid in its clarity and overall performance. And in One Charming Night (1985), Marianne Moore danced the innocent but willing victim as a kind of Alice in Wonderland to Morris's swooping, succulently seductive vampire; Morris himself gave a galvanizing performance, a predatory Dodgson to her Alice.