★★★✰✰ 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 - Dallas McMurray
★★★✰✰ How striking Morris’ dancers are, how diversified in form and unique in expression and cohesive as a troupe — ever present and responsive to each other.
★★★★✰ It’s one of the most striking characteristics of the Mark Morris Dance Group. A common sense of focus, an alertness to the music and to each other.
★★★★✰ This year’s White Light Festival, at Lincoln Center, has spawned a mini-festival of its own, Sounds of India, curated by the modern-dance choreographer Mark Morris. Why Morris? Because he has been going to India since the eighties...
★★★✰✰ 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...
The evening offered a sampler of Morris’s newly-minted works (A Wooden Tree, Jenn and Spencer and Crosswalk, all made in 2012-13) and his splendid Italian Concerto from 2007.
L’Allegro, with its painterly tableaux, classical references, and unselfconscious evocations of sex and death, feels both ancient - almost pagan - and perfectly of our time...
What was curious about A Wooden Tree is that it did not include much dancing in the traditional sense. It was as if Morris had decided to do an experiment: to make a dance with as little dancing as possible, practically a pantomime.
It is something of a cliché to say it, but the guiding principle of Morris’s Dido - as in the more recent Socrates - is simplicity. No single element - musc, words, dance - is privileged above the others.
It’s hard to top Morris’s dancers for spontaneity, dramatic force, and exhilarating energy. On opening night, the dancing was nothing less than brilliant: From the opening “Mad Crossing” to the concluding “Finale,” the cast commanded the stage, dancing with sheer joy and élan, compelling the audience at the end of the performance into a thunderous standing ovation.