Making The Right Moves

By JANICE C. SIMPSON

After more than 90 minutes of nonstop kicks, leaps and turns, the 27 dancers, sweating through their leotards, are beginning to drag. But Mark Morris, the precisionist putting them through these paces, is unmoved by their exhaustion. "A little dynamism would help," he drawls, drawing on the Dunhill cigarette he has been using to tap out the beat.

The dancers try again, but their taskmaster is notoriously difficult to please. Cigarette dangling from his hand and his Tiny Tim-style ringlets bouncing on his shoulders, he strides to the middle of the floor to show them how the steps should be done. Morris, 35, is tall and bulky. There is more than a hint of flab around his waist, an authentic beer belly, the result of a , prodigious thirst that can cause him to put away as many as four bottles within an hour. No one in the room looks less like a dancer. But as he performs the individual steps, they suddenly coalesce into a transcendent mix of movement, music and soul-stirring emotion.

Having accomplished this alchemy, Morris takes another puff and nods for the dancers to start again. "Be expressive," he commands. "Milk it. When it's expressive, it's a lot more interesting. When it's just steps, that's bad news. And when you're embarrassed about doing the steps, that's really bad news. You can't be a performing artist and be embarrassed."

Richly expressive and almost never embarrassed, choreographer Mark Morris has been one of the most interesting and original artists in the modern-dance world for more than a decade now. In recent years he has gained wider fame through his association with Mikhail Baryshnikov, with whom he co-founded the White Oak Dance Project. Their sold-out shows across the country have introduced new audiences to the choreographer's work. Now, after three years of voluntary -- and controversial -- exile in Brussels, this wunderkind of American dance has returned to the U.S.

Morris' offstage performances have sometimes been as outrageous as his onstage productions. He first caused tongues to wag in 1984 when he jumped up in the middle of a performance of Twyla Tharp's Nine Sinatra Songs and shouted his displeasure at the stage before walking out. "I think she's a great choreographer, but I hated that dance. It was horrible," he says now. "You know, a lot of people go along with things. But if I don't like something, I'm like 'Yech, come on, everybody, let's open our eyes.' " Morris provoked an eye-opener of a different sort three years ago when he appeared in a series of photographs in Vanity Fair wearing lipstick, eye shadow, earrings and not much else.

An open homosexual who customarily wears the pink triangle of gay liberation on his lapel, Morris regularly criticizes others in the dance community for failing to come out. "I'm tired of choreographers who are gay pretending that they are straight," he says. In his dances, duets are often performed by dancers of the same sex and androgynous dress is pushed to the point where men have worn tutus. Says Morris: "Passing is a way of agreeing with the prevalent culture that gay is a bad thing. I'm out partly because it's the way I am as a guy and partly because it's my responsibility in the public eye to be gay."

Behind all that public posturing, however, is a dedicated artist who is widely acknowledged as the legitimate heir to the tradition of distinctively visceral dancing that traces its roots back to Martha Graham and Isadora Duncan. His musical gifts are both instinctive and sophisticated; in this he is linked to Balanchine.

He may dream up what for some are odd pas de deux, but this postmodern master maintains his allegiance to such old-fashioned values as form and narrative. "I am very, very strict structurally," he says. "You can break any rule you want, but you have to have a clue about what the rules are." Morris makes up full-bodied dances that celebrate the pure joy of movement, usually spiked with an irreverent wit. "The knee-jerk response is to assume that a lot of what I do is parody or sarcastic when it actually isn't," he observes. "I'm interested in the story and really good dancing. But you know, you can't force people to get that."

A precocious child, Morris and his two older sisters grew up in Seattle in a family that encouraged creativity. A typical party at the Morris home was a Bastille Day celebration in which guests were invited to come dressed as their favorite subject from the French Revolution. Morris' father William, a high school English teacher and amateur musician, taught his son to read music when he was just four. His mother Maxine, a dance aficionado with a special fondness for flamenco, took him to see the Jose Greco company when he was eight. It was love at first jete. A local dance teacher gave him a scholarship, and by the time he was 13, Morris was choreographing pieces. "I'd make up these dances, and they were really cool," he recalls. "All the steps and everything I do now was there in germ form."

Moving to New York City in 1976, he whirled through a quick succession of jobs with such big-name choreographers as Eliot Feld, Lar Lubovitch, Laura Dean and Hannah Kahn. "I didn't have a giant attention span," he says, explaining why he was so peripatetic. But that was only part of the reason. "Modern dancers are not trained to do anything but follow directions," says Erin Matthiessen, his former lover; Morris met him when they both danced in the Dean company. "Mark thought for himself." Too often, he thought aloud, arguing with the choreographers, making unwanted suggestions on how he thought they should develop their dances. Finally, in 1980, Morris rented Merce Cunningham's studio for two nights and presented a program of his own works, including O Rangasayee, a stunning 20-minute solo to an Indian raga that marked him as a talent to watch.

Eight years later, at the invitation of Gerard Mortier, director of the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, the young American replaced Maurice Bejart as resident choreographer for Belgium's national opera house. The deal included doubling the size of the company to 24, spacious rehearsal studios, production budgets of up to $1 million for new works, and most important, the opportunity to work with live musicians. The Belgian capital's reputation for good food and great beer didn't hurt either.

Once there, his creative juices flowing, he produced 10 new dances that include three masterworks: L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, an elegant composition set to the Handel oratorio; Dido and Aeneas, a sensuous interpretation of Purcell's opera; and The Hard Nut, a delightful high-camp version of The Nutcracker. But Morris' personal style alienated his Belgian patrons. While his American fans may have considered him an enfant terrible, the Belgians thought it was just plain terrible when he described Bejart's work as merde or referred to Flemish choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker as Annie Tearjerker. Accustomed to the extravagant productions that Bejart mounted, they were also put off by Morris' deceptively simple choreography.

Never one to suffer criticism gracefully, Morris lashed back. Belgians, he told a reporter, were "highly racist, highly sexist, highly homophobic." The final showdown came when the company performed Mythologies, a trilogy based on essays by Roland Barthes that ended with all the dancers stripped naked. The next day the French-language daily Le Soir carried the English headline, MARK MORRIS GO HOME!

He acknowledges that his Belgian sojourn did have some advantages. "I like big shows," he explains. "There I could get a giant set or expensive costumes that allowed me to use that part of my imagination." Company members say the reception might have been better had Morris been more diplomatic, but the choreographer concedes few regrets. "Better means what? No waves?" he asks. "Well, the company got better. I made up really good work. So what could be better?"

This month the Mark Morris Dance Group makes its homecoming debut in New York City with two programs that include two world premieres. The economic realities of running a dance company in the U.S. are, if anything, worse now than when he left, but Morris has been taken up by a chic set. Vogue magazine editor in chief Anna Wintour and Bloomingdale chairman Marvin Traub hosted a fund raiser for him last year at Manhattan's hyper-trendy Paramount Hotel. Foundation support is coming in too, as well as a MacArthur genius grant.

The dance community, envious of all the fame and good fortune that has come his way, is waiting to see if he will stumble. But Morris confidently stands his ground. "People say, 'How do you top that?' " he says, referring to the work he created in Brussels. "Well, you don't. You do something different." And if that doesn't work out? Well, it's unlikely that Mark Morris will be embarrassed about it.