|
Mark Morris 1956–, American dancer and choreographer, b. Seattle, Wash. After training in Balkan folk dance, flamenco, and ballet, he went on to dance for Eliot Feld, Laura Dean, and Lar Lubovitch. His own company, the Mark Morris Dance Group, debuted in New York in 1980; from 1988 to 1991 it was the resident company the ThEAtre de la Monnaie, Brussels. In 1990 he and Mikhail Baryshnikov established the White Oak Dance Project, a group formed to choreograph and perform new dance. In 2001 his company moved into permanent studios in Brooklyn, N.Y.
During the 1980s and 90s Morris's dances attracted great interest for their craftsmanship, ingenuity, musicality, and iconoclastic choreography as well as their sometimes eclectic and always live musical accompaniments; his solo performance of O Rangasayee was danced to an Indian raga. He won particular acclaim for The Hard Nut (1991), a campily ebullient version of The Nutcracker set in the 1960s. Generally less ironic and more serious in tone, his other works include L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, ed Il Moderato (1988), Dido and Aeneas (1989), The Office (1995), Greek to Me (2000), a dance version of the Virgil Thomson–Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts (2001), the ballet The Garden (2001), and the modern dance piece V (2002).
See biography by J. Acocella (1993, repr. 1995); J. Escoffier and M. Lore, ed., Mark Marris's l'Allegro, Il Pensoroso, ed Il Moderato: A Celebration (2001); T. Grimm, dir., Dance in America: Mark Morris with the Mark Morris Dance Group (video, 1986).
|
