A Bad Boy Comes of Age

By TERRY TEACHOUT

The first thing you see is a huge white curtain covered from top to bottom with gibberish: TO KNOW TO KNOW TO LOVE HER SO. FOUR SAINTS PREPARE FOR SAINTS. A drummer fires off a stand-up-and-salute roll. Then the orchestra lurches into an off-center waltz (complete with a wheezing accordion on the oom-pahs), and a chorus starts to sing the words painted on the curtain, which flies open to reveal a dozen dancers in Spanish costumes prancing merrily in front of a backdrop that is an explosion of magenta and yellow. Hold on to your ticket stub: Mark Morris' joyous dance version of Four Saints in Three Acts, the surrealist opera by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, is off and galloping.

Four Saints, which opened in New York City this month (it was first seen in London and Berkeley, Calif., last year), was the exuberant centerpiece of the Mark Morris Dance Group's 20th-anniversary season. Sixteen of the choreographer's 100-odd dances--from L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, a full-evening extravaganza for 24 dancers, four singers, chorus and orchestra, to Peccadillos, a duet for Morris and a toy piano--were presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Meanwhile, across the street, the company is moving into the brand-new Mark Morris Dance Center, its first permanent home in the dance capital of the world. The $6 million building's top floor contains one of the biggest rehearsal studios in the U.S.; there will also be a school open to professionals as well as children from the surrounding economically depressed neighborhood.

The five-story building offers a telling symbol for what has happened to the man who used to be known as the Bad Boy of Modern Dance. Openly gay and utterly frank, he wore his hair in a messy mop, tossed off unprintable remarks about his colleagues in a braying class-clown voice, and made startlingly fresh dances whose loose-limbed, heavy-gaited steps (Morris' wonderful dancers can look like James Thurber cartoons come to life) did nothing to conceal his passionately inspired response to music of all kinds (Baroque, Balinese, even country).

Except for the hair (he cut it, sort of), Morris, 44, is still the same mouthy iconoclast he always was--only now his once controversial work has become the gold standard of creativity for a new generation of dancers, choreographers and critics. Charter company members like Tina Fehlandt are currently teaching the gospel of St. Mark to such prestigious ensembles as the American Ballet Theatre and the San Francisco Ballet, both of which commissioned new pieces from Morris this season. He is the subject of a just published coffee-table anthology of essays and interviews about L'Allegro. "Some of my dancers first saw the company on pbs when they were 11 and dreamed of dancing with us when they grew up," he says bemusedly. "It's a little strange, this whole thing of how the baby-boom people are now in power. Like kooky Bill Clinton gets elected President, and menopause has become something to be proud of. So who better to be in charge of what I do than me? I guess I'm the Establishment now. Hooray!"

Has success spoiled Mark Morris? Not even slightly. In his glorious production of Four Saints, the singers are relegated to the orchestra pit, while St. Teresa (Michelle Yard), St. Ignatius (John Heginbotham) and 12 "assorted saints" swoop, skip, strut and tango across the stage, bringing out all the fun in an opera that, since its 1934 premiere, has been embraced almost solely by devotees of the avant-garde. Skating atop Stein's nonsensical wordplay ("Once in a while and where and where around around is as sound and around"), Morris has created a heavenly playground full of beautiful saints who dance like angels. As always, he draws his main inspiration from the music. "It's so friendly!" Morris says of Thomson's score, a festively fractured reminiscence of the Sunday-school hymns of the composer's Missouri childhood. "It's not complicated, and it doesn't wear out."

Great choreographers have a way of spreading their wings in middle age. When he was 44, George Balanchine launched the New York City Ballet; within a decade, he was the dominant force in American ballet, making his art form a vital part of the cultural landscape. Now, with the opening of his new dance center, Morris, the most prodigiously gifted choreographer of the post-Balanchine era, has a similarly secure institutional base from which to lead modern dance into the 21st century.