5 Questions to Pepperland designer Elizabeth Kurtzman about collaborating with Mark Morris
With Pepperland about to tour the UK for 6 weeks we talk to designer Elizabeth Kurtzman about her striking costumes and what it’s like working with Mark Morris…
Mark Morris, Choreographer and Director, Spices up Sgt Pepper
We talk to Mark Morris about Pepperland, his exuberant celebration of The Beatles ground-breaking album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, touring the UK and Ireland for six weeks in March and April.
Mark Morris Dance Group / Silkroad Ensemble – Layla and Majnun – London
★★★✰✰ 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.
Gallery – Mark Morris Dance Group / Silkroad Ensemble: Layla and Majnun
Photographed by Foteini Christofilopoulou…
Mark Morris Dance Group – Pepperland – San Francisco
★★✰✰✰ Cal Performances patrons were clearly entertained on Friday evening. I, too, wanted to like the piece, but it didn’t really resonate with me.
Mark Morris Dance Group – Love Song Waltzes, I Don’t Want to Love, The Trout – New York
★★★✰✰ 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.
Mark Morris Dance Group – Lou 100: Pacific, Numerator, Serenade, Grand Duo – New York
★★★★✰ 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.
Dance Heginbotham – Harkness Dance Festival program – New York
★★★✰✰ As part of the 92nd Street Y’s annual Harkness Dance Festival, John Heginbotham’s company performed a brief, manageable program of solos and duets on Friday, including several New York premieres.
Mark Morris Dance Group – The Hard Nut – San Francisco
★★★★★ 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.
Mark Morris Dance Group – Pepperland (premiere) – Liverpool
★★★✰✰ Morris is not the man to create a Beatles tribute show, choreographing 1960s dance routines to the original songs. Instead, he commissioned an hour-long score from Ethan Iverson…
Mark Morris Dance Group – The Hard Nut – New York
★★★★✰ Few alternative takes on tradition survive this long and The Hard Nut remains as subversive as it is satisfying.
Sounds of India Festival – Mark Morris Dance Group & Kerala Kalamandalam – New York
★★★★✰ 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…
Mark Morris Dance Group – Layla and Majnun – San Francisco
★★★✰✰ 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.
Mark Morris Dance Group – Mozart Dances: Eleven, Double, Twenty-seven – New York
★★★★★ 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.
Mark Morris Dance Group – Cargo, A Forest, Foursome, The – New York
★★★✰✰ 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…
Mark Morris Dance Group – The Hard Nut – New York
As with the Balanchine version, the Hard Nut’s success is a foregone conclusion.
Dance for Parkinson’s and English National Ballet
Last month English National Ballet and Roehampton University held an event at London’s Sadler’s Wells to talk about their joint work on helping those with Parkinson’s disease: “Dance for Parkinson’s Evidence of Impact – Moving Forward”. Jann Parry reports for DanceTabs…
Dance Heginbotham – Angel’s Share, Diamond, Easy Win – New York
Heginbotham has a knack for choosing just the right music for his dances, none of it hackneyed or used solely for its atmospheric qualities: no Arvo Pärt, no Philip Glass…
Mark Morris Dance Group – Pacific, Words, Whelm, Grand Duo, Crosswalk, Jenn and Spencer, and Spring, Spring, Spring – New York
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.
Joffrey Ballet – Incantations, Son of Chamber Symphony, Bells, Episode 31 – San Francisco
As always, it’s a pleasure to see the Joffrey Ballet, especially since 2007 when artistic director Ashley Wheater assumed his post and began a terrific revival of the company…
