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Doing it right
Mark Morris returns to Boston
BY SALLY CRAGIN

Asking to speak to MacArthur Award–winning choreographer Mark Morris at first elicited no reaction from the switchboard operator at his swank West LA hotel last week. But there must have been a notation next to his room number, because the response suddenly transformed into "Oh-h-h-h! Here you go!"

As for Morris’s speaking voice, it’s a touch sharpish and a little nasal. Although not an essential part of his performing persona, it’s the voice of someone who gets things done and makes sure they’re done correctly and precisely. Such precision is only what we should expect when the Mark Morris Dance Group visits the Shubert Theatre for a FleetBoston Celebrity Series–sponsored four-day engagement starting next Thursday. MMDG will perform two 1993 pieces — A Spell, to John Wilson, and Grand Duo, to Lou Harrison — and two pieces new to Boston, Serenade, to Lou Harrison’s Serenade for Guitar, and All Fours, whose 14 dancers will be backed by a string quartet performing Béla Bartók’s Quartet No. 4. "It’s a fabulous lyrical piece of music that I’ve known for thirtysomething years," Morris says of the Bartók, "and now I have the dancers and the quartet to do it. It’s complicated and thrilling music for a set of eight people and a set of four people." He’s dead serious about his long history with the Bartók; the dance will include fragments of choreography he wrote as a teenager for it.

Serenade, on the other hand, is a solo for Morris, who’ll wear a costume designed by Isaac Mizrahi. "The first movement has guitar and no percussion, so I decided not to use my legs. So it’s only a torso and arm dance just from the waist up." What’s more, he increases the complexity by playing finger cymbals and castanets in the challenging time signatures of subsequent movements. "I, of course, must play the cymbals myself," he wrote in the New York Times last spring in "Mark Morris: The Making of My Dance." "It is not very easy to do."

Neither is his other essential role, that of landlord presiding over a multi-million-dollar building in Brooklyn. The complex, which combines studios, changing facilities, and offices, was purchased in 2001. Such stability has been a boon to the Dance Group, though he admits that "it’s a giant responsibility. We own the property — the studios are incredibly great, you don’t have to bring a bag into work, and we control the space, the temperature, the lighting and it’s fantastic."

Some 400 students as well as other companies are using the space, and being a landlord clearly agrees with Morris, who says the next big project is to transform the large studio (a capacious 60 by 60 feet) into a black-box theater. "I want to be able to make up a show and do it right away. There are also old — old — pieces I couldn’t do with live music, or they’re juvenilia, but I want to do that in studio shows."

He still decries the fact that dance doesn’t benefit from a "big public." He thinks this is because "a lot of it is not very good. If you hate it, you’re not going to go back." For his own part, he keeps a sharp eye on everything connected with his dances, from music to technical details to the smallest of gestures. "We want it to be high quality — that means we have to keep control of it. If that seems slick or cold or something, why would you want it to be sloppy?"

The Mark Morris Dance Group is presented by the FleetBoston Celebrity Series at the Shubert Theatre, 265 Tremont Street in the Theater District, March 11 through 14. Tickets are $25 to $60; call (800) 447-7400, or visit www.celebrityseries.org.


Issue Date: March 5 - 11, 2004
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