Mark Morris Dance Group.

MARK MORRIS DANCE GROUP BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC AND MARK MORRIS DANCE CENTER BROOKLYN, NY MARCH 8-25, 2006 REVIEWED BY AMANDA SMITH

One of the happiest places I know is sitting in the audience of a Mark Morris performance. Never was this more true than in this 25th-anniversary season of Morris' company, which featured three weeks of dancing. From the 133 works Morris has made, 24 were shown, performed by 18 glorious and diverse dancers. At Morris' building, the performance space deliberately resembled the old Dance Theater Workshop, where Morris blasted onto the scene in 1983, emerging as the leading choreographer of his generation.

Of the three BAM programs, the most unusual was the middle week's two one-act operas. The great good humor of Four Saints in Three Acts, led by Michelle Yard and John Heginbotham in a vision of a gentle, frolicking heaven, was emblematic of the season's tone. In Dido and Aeneas, we saw for the first time the masterpiece without Morris, who had dominated previous productions with his mesmerizing, gender-bending double portrayal of both Dido and her enemy, the Sorceress. Here Amber Darragh, long, elegant, and stunning, with a profile made in heaven, was the tragic Dido to Craig Biesecker's increasingly authoritative Aeneas. His curls flying, Bradon McDonald's scampering Sorceress conjured a brilliant cross between a fiend and an imp.

Among the season's sweetest moments were the three programs, "Solos, Duets, and Trios," in the more intimate space, displaying the rarely seen smaller dances of Morris' earlier years. Seeing these works was like visiting with charming old friends.

Assuming another of Morris' roles, McDonald's lilting rendition of Three Preludes was in turn frisky, melancholy, playful. In the more mannerly Three Russian Preludes, David Leventhal was more Pierrot-like than Mikhail Baryshnikov, the dance's original interpreter. The two together in Love, You Have Won were a subtly extraordinary pairing, Leventhal's aquiline purity playing against McDonald's intelligent sprite. Biesecker, Joe Bowie, and golden girl Julie Worden aced Pas de Poisson. Lauren Grant, by far the smallest member of the company, but only in height, lit up the austere Bijoux--a strange little girl in a pink satin dress--and the even more austere Rondo, originally a solo for Morris.

The closer for each of the small programs was the comic, ingenious, and loosely set From Old Seville, a duet for Morris and Grant, two people in a bar who dance a flirtatious, combative sevillanas. The two were wonderful together, she small and feisty, and he moving on and around her, castanets chattering. Interpretations varied--occasionally Morris' character seemed torn, more interested in the cigar-chomping bartender (Heginbotham)--but in the last performance, Morris entered abruptly, looking wildly for Grant, fingers spread in anticipation. He was stalking her, his character a cousin to the vampire in One Charming Night, and at the dance's last beat, he dropped to the floor, spent or dead from his seductive efforts.

Morris' many passions include film, and he curated a selection of his favorites for the BAM cinema, running concurrently with the live performances. Not coincidentally, his recent Cargo, shown at the opera house, seemed like his version of the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In Morris' hands, the loincloth-clad dancers discover poles to experiment with and learn the lesson of mortality.

Always, for Morris, it's about the music. This season he made his conducting debut, leading 49 singers and musicians in Vivaldi's Gloria, a natural for the ebullient music-lover. If his first performance was a tad careful, by the end of the run he was swinging his hips with the music.

The season closer, Going Away Party, usually done to a tape by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, was set for the first time to live music by Western Caravan. Morris also chose bands, including his own MMDG Music Ensemble, to play in the BAM cafe. For the final evening, in a nod to his geographic and artistic roots--as a teenager he danced with a Balkan folk dance troupe in his native Seattle--his childhood friend Mary Sherhart serenaded us with her Balkan cabaret.

As Morris observed in the souvenir booklet, "Live music ... is in the flesh and in the moment, and it joins together those who hear it in a way that's both ancient and inexplicable ... All art is the same, or at least all great art. I get the same thrill from a Handel oratorio or a dance by Merce Cunningham. Both show me the world, or more precisely, the manifold worlds within me and in which I live." Morris' dances show us, magnificently, the worlds in which we ourselves live. See www.mmdg.org.