★★★✰✰ Mark Morris's Layla and Majnun is a music concert with dancing, lamenting a love that cannot be. It's an age-old story, spread across continents and centuries.
Tag - Billy Smith
★★★★★ The house was abuzz on Friday evening for the opening performance of Mark Morris Dance Group’s The Hard Nut. It’s been five years since Cal Performances hosted the production, and clearly fans had been anxiously awaiting its reappearance.
★★★★✰ Few alternative takes on tradition survive this long and The Hard Nut remains as subversive as it is satisfying.
★★★✰✰ Where Morris succeeded beautifully was in melding Eastern dance styles into his balletic modern vocabulary in deep torso bends, dervish whirls and arms extended beyond his already expansive port de bras.
★★★✰✰ Every few years the Mark Morris Dance Group presents an evening of dances at the company’s Brooklyn headquarters, a nondescript brick building across from BAM...
As with the Balanchine version, the Hard Nut’s success is a foregone conclusion.
Morris seems particularly interested in deploying turning and spinning movements these days; turns appear again and again in different forms in many of the new works, especially fast chaînés or dizzying rotations in one spot.