Mark Morris

We went to see the Mark Morris Dance Group last night. They were performing a set of dances based on Mozart piano pieces.

Morris always seems to listen to the music more than most choreographers. He doesn’t just use it to invoke an emotion. He’s actually paying a lot of attention to the structure of the music and reflecting that in the structure of his dances. This was particularly effective with the Mozart pieces. Mozart’s music is pretty, but it also has great bones. There’s a lot there for someone like Morris to bring out.

It’s also nice to see a dance company where the dancers don’t look like they were stamped out with a cookie cutter. This is particularly true of the women dancers who represented a wide variety of body types, but applies to the men as well. There are places in the Mozart pieces where it sometimes seems like it would be nicer to have dancers who were more matched in size and build to complement the symmetry of the piece, but this seems overwhelmed by the strengths of seeing a company who work together and have dancers with a wide variety of skills.

Afterwards, we went to the Indian restaurant Tantric for supper. All in all a nice evening.

Here’s a promo clip for the performance, but it’s not terribly effective because the music and the dance aren’t in sync. The actual performance was much more interesting than this.