★★★★✰ Mozart Dances goes far beyond a basic choreographic rendering of the score, instead inviting an active dialogue between disciplines.
Tag - Lauren Grant
★★★✰✰ Morris has added two performers to the line-up since the Liverpool premiere, which now stands at seventeen dancers, spreading the load for his continual torrent of flowing, elegant, musical choreography.
★★★✰✰ 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.
★★★★★ 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.
★★★★★ It’s difficult to think of a better way to bid farewell to a New York summer than with Lincoln Center’s “Mostly Mozart” festival, and seeing Mark Morris Dance Group performing Mozart Dances was the icing on the cake.
As with the Balanchine version, the Hard Nut’s success is a foregone conclusion.
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.
Who knew that Beethoven composed his own cover version of ‘Sally in our Alley’? Mark Morris, obviously: the (English) song is the centrepiece of The Muir...
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...
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.