★★★✰✰ 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 - Noah Vinson
★★★✰✰ 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.
★★★✰✰ 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...
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.
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.