Mark Morris
American dancer, choreographer and director Mark Morris is one of the most successful and influential of contemporary modern choreographers. Interviewed by Gerald Dowler, he talks frankly about the role of improvisation in choreography, egalitarianism in dance, his experiences with international dance forms other than ballet and his particular affection for British dance. This episode is introduced by Patricia Linton, the founder of Voices of British Ballet, who talks to Natalie Steed about Mark Morris.
First published: March 23, 2025
Biography
Mark Morris was born in Seattle in 1956. Having been excited by both flamenco and his sister’s ballet classes, he himself began studying Spanish dance at the age of nine. In 1970 he joined a dance ensemble specialising in Balkan dance, which was the beginning of a lifetime’s passionate immersion in dance and music of all sorts. He went to New York in 1976, during the era of Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp and Lucinda Childs, to pursue his study of dance. He began working with a group of like-minded modern dancers, who shared Morris’ focus on beauty, genuine musicality and community. From 1980 on Morris began choreographing in earnest and his group was henceforth known as the Mark Morris Dance Group (MMDG). From the start his work was recognized for its musicality, and its deep understanding of the medium of dance. Hallmarks of the Morris style were the recognizable ordinary body-types of the Company dancers and its up-front treatment of contentious issues, both political and sexual.
From 1980 until 1988, the growth of Morris’s reputation as a choreographer and dancer resulted in an engagement as resident company at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, following the departure of Maurice Béjart. While there he created two of his most famous works: L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (based on poetry by Milton and music by Handel) and The Hard Nut (a revelatory version of The Nutcracker). The company remained there until 1991. From 1990 until 1995, with Mikhail Baryshnikov, he founded and ran the White Oak Dance Project. In 2001 Morris and MMDG moved into a permanent headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, which included a community centre and a school. As well as working with his own company, Morris has created works for many international ballet companies and for opera productions in San Francisco, Washington, Boston, London and New York, among other places. His own works for the MMDG, around 150 of them, are notable for their range of musical styles and genres, from Bach and Vivaldi through modern composers to jazz and the Beatles, the repertoire also includes music from Balkan and Asian traditions, as well as collaborations with folk performers and Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project.
Transcript
In conversation with Gerald Dowler
Mark Morris: I get a question all the time like after show, sometimes a Q&A session, people say, is it completely choreographed in advance and basically fascistic or are the dancers allowed to express themselves by improvising freely? And it’s like, well, that’s interesting that you present it in that sort of one and zero way. I don’t think that way. But everyone thinks like, oh, they have to they’re in line, it must be Pyongyang. And ,they’re improvising, that must feel so great. It’s like, you know, tripping and, you know, just dancing around. And to me, full on free improvisation, except with some of the very, very great jazz masters is… a waste of time. I don’t like it, I’m not interested. Same with Contact Improvisation in the dance field. Feels great, you love it, you love doing it – there’s nothing for me as a viewer. And so there are improvisational elements in a lot of my work, but it’s never completely released. So it’s my dance. You know, I’ll say I want to see something that looks like the ocean: go, and the dancers will improvise something. I’ll say, oh, that’s good, let’s keep that. Or, no, your left, you know, thumb goes like this, can’t you get that right? So it’s, it’s free tyranny, simultaneously. So it’s that it keeps it interesting and active. So you have to pay attention in a way like you do with live music. Everything is improvised at the moment of performance, no matter how strict the composition or the rehearsal period or whatever, you’re still stepping off into nothing. It’s dangerous. Performing is dangerous.
Gerald Dowler: So do you think then there’s a paradox because there’s a form of liberty in performing something which is being set down.
Mark Morris: Yes, but it’s not enslavement. To me; like, the more you rehearse something, the more free you are at the second it happens on stage with other people to respond because you have to respond. I can sense the bullshit factor in a performance in a second. They’re facing each other, but they’re not seeing each other. Or they’re on the beat, but they’re not with the music. And I go to a lot of shows. I go to a lot of opera, a lot of music, a lot of dance. And it’s not just, I’m not looking to hate it, but I very often am left cold with the feeling that there aren’t people inside what I’m watching. And if I want that, there’s computer generated everything at your command at all times now, and I don’t want that. I want people.
Gerald Dowler: And is this something that you did and felt personally, which you are now looking for from your dancers in your company?
Mark Morris: I guess so. I mean, I’ve had a company nearly 40 years and, you know, I did a lot of what people call folk dancing. I did a great deal of dancing from the Balkans. And I was a Spanish flamenco and a jotero for years. I know Appalachian dancing, clog dancing, and I know some Morris dancing and I know a lot of dances. I love this stuff. I love dancing, which is why I have a sort of a lower tolerance sometimes for bad concert dancing that costs a lot of money when you could just go to like a village wedding and get a real wonderful experience with other people. So that always involves participation with other people. It’s really a communitarian kind of thing more than it is the freedom of improvisation. It’s solving problems. It’s like, you know, there isn’t room to do this line dance at this particular gathering. So we have to thread it out into the hallway, you know. Or, you know, there’s no music, so somebody sings. You know, you’ve solved the problems. And of course, my job is to create the problems and then solve them.
Gerald Dowler: But it sounds as if your Catholic tastes, when it comes to movement and to dance, there’s a great egalitarianism in the way you see movement.
Mark Morris: Yeah. And people.
Gerald Dowler: And people.
Mark Morris: Yeah.
Gerald Dowler: Does that then link into your choreography? Are you promoting that egalitarianism of movement from the vernacular to the…
Mark Morris: Yes. That’s changed over time. No two people dance the same way. No matter how much you want to match the 32 white 5 foot 2 slender swans in the Corps de Ballet. That’s why a dancer of color sticks out. That’s in pink in like fake pink flesh toned tights. Ff who is that? Whose flesh tone is that in the first place? But, you know, when you were doing this in St Petersburg in 1890, whatever, that’s who was there. And they were also bigger then, by the way, everyone had a little bit more heft, which I love. So if it’s clones, you can do that now with your phone, with an app on your phone. You don’t need the people to do that. And so that kind of is an, you know, an archaic, ridiculous, outmoded thing that we don’t need anymore. Choreographers are now what usually roughly the same number of men and women or male and female identified dancers, and men and women who can dance equally, instead of the women did all of the dancing; the men would carry you around a little bit and then leave, because they weren’t very good. They didn’t have to be and they couldn’t dance for more than about 40 seconds. Like every variation from the 19th century is, the male variation is the shortest thing in the world, because they’re exhausted.
But now I have always wanted men and women and whatever to be able to do the exact same text of the choreography. So dogmatically in my earlier queer politics days and my feminism, which doesn’t, has not abated in any way. I’m just older now, so I don’t have the energy, but I wouldn’t use a move in my work, unless every single person could do it. Well or not, they all did it differently, but the tiniest woman and the biggest man had to be able to do everything. So I wouldn’t use lifts that you couldn’t do. And that’s, you know, then I realized you want to change a light bulb way up there. It’s easier to have the biggest man on the bottom and the smallest woman on top. It just works for gravity, physics, whatever. If I want a special effect of a certain kind of giant sweeping lift, it’s better the upper-body strength distribution just kind of has to happen that way. And it doesn’t make me less of a feminist or less of a queer activist. It just makes a bigger possible palette of dance moves, dance possibilities. But still, my women are super strong and tough and my men have the wonderful, a wonderful, delicate capacity when needed. Everybody has a huge range and that’s very unusual in dance.
Gerald Dowler: Have you worked with British dancers or are they exclusively American?
Mark Morris: I’ve worked with dancers from all over, particularly when I worked for, the years I did in Brussels. I had a big audition, everyone from all over the place. There were a bunch of Euro dancers. But I have to tell you, that’s less likely now because of the horrors of international relations and the government in the United States. But it’s, you know, I can barely bring in a violinist from the UK. You know, it’s like, oh, is there an American? You know, no American. It’s like this, ridiculous rules. And plus, they hate traveling with instruments. Airlines are horrible that way. And also people work with me for a very, very long time. So I work with adults and people stay for 15, 20 years. Very often people come and go, but it’s pretty much all American dancers right now.
Gerald Dowler: Mark, can you remember the first time that you were aware of anything, particularly British, about dance or the dance world?
Mark Morris: When I was probably little, maybe like, well, I had started dancing when I was 9, I was studying ballet a lot by 11, I must have been 12 or 13 when the Joffrey Ballet, which was a fabulous company then back when Mr [Robert] Joffrey and Mr [Gerald] Arpino, who were fabulous, were around, Joffrey famously included [Frederick] Ashton’s dances in their repertory. And I’d never seen it. And nobody was doing it. Nobody was doing I mean, there was English ballet, British Ballet in New York, but I wasn’t there. And the Joffrey was on tour. And I remember seeing Les Patineurs and a whole bunch of stuff that I was just so surprised and delighted. So that was a very early memory of seeing some of Ashton’s work, I mean, done in an American company. And they were great, they did it great. And he, you know, Joffrey himself, who was a wonderful guy, coincidentally from Seattle, like I am, included these, you know, already historical dances, including, you know, they also revived Parade and Les Biches and like really surprising old dances. He was just great. So I would say that it was seeing Ashton for the first time with the Joffrey Ballet, very young in Seattle.
Gerald Dowler: Is there something which even now you identify particularly with British dance?
Mark Morris: Well. But, you know, that’s, of course, all changed hugely, enormously. I actually I saw Margot Fonteyn dance when I was very, very young. I saw her dance with [Rudolf] Nureyev, in fact, in New York, I’m pretty sure someplace and let’s see, the British “ism” is what I would say is my favourite thing that I use in my work when I work with my company, but also when I work with ballet companies. I prefer a pre-post-Balanchine arabesque or a pre Gerald Arpino, what I call a Swiss Army knife arabesque, where everything’s pointing out from your centre instead of the implied infinitude of a horizontal, low, elegant, gorgeous arabesque like Ashton, like [August] Bournonville, for that matter. So I love pre “splay”. And you know what Balanchine did. I’m a big, big fan of [George] Balanchine. But everything after Balanchine has become even more splayed and sprung and hyperextended. I don’t, I like to see a direction. So that’s the principal thing. And it’s not just, you know, Margot Fonteyn famously with her tongue between her teeth to simulate a smile, which I love. But it’s also, you know, not the super uptight part of it, but the reserved, gorgeous reserve of it.
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