Mark Morris Dance Group profile picture

Mark Morris Dance Group

Music is a song and a dance." -Lou Harrison

About Me


When MARK MORRIS got together with a group of friends and put on a show in New York City back in 1980, he called it the Mark Morris Dance Group .
Within its first ten years, MMDG had been featured on the PBS special Dance in America; the national dance company of Belgium for three years; and the subject of three films and an abundance of television specials.
After returning to the States in 1991, the Dance Group continued to tour around the world and established long-time residencies at several U.S. cities like Berkeley, CA, Seattle, WA, and Urbana, IL.

MMDG is committed to live music, a feature of every performance on its full international touring schedule since 1996, and has collaborated with the some of the greatest orchestras like Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Seattle Symphony; opera companies like English National Opera, New York City Opera and The Metropolitan Opera; and musicians including Yo-Yo Ma, Zakir Hussain, Ethan Iverson, The Bad Plus, Emanuel Ax and Yoko Nozaki.
Added to the mix to realize Morris's work for the stage are the most amazing visual artists like Isaac Mizrahi, Adrianne Lobel, Howard Hodgkin, and Stephen Hendee.
In 2001, MMDG opened the Mark Morris Dance Center in the arts mecca of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, NY offering an wide assortment of affordable dance classes for people of all ages and levels. All of it, from every show to every class, as always, is with live music.
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My Interests

Music:

Member Since: 2/5/2007
Band Website: mmdg.org
Band Members:
MARK MORRIS
DANCERS / STAFF
Influences: Growing up in Seattle
"The high school I went to had a fabulous African drumming ensemble that was headed by a teacher from what was still called Rhodesia - that shows how old I am. There was a Samoan musical group. I had lots of Japanese friends and I used to dance looking ridiculous with a fan and a hapi coat." MM

Koleda Balkan Dance Ensemble
"It was a whole subculture of nuts who did what was then called international folk dancing. It was just a wonderful community of people who were friendly and welcoming and odd. That's how I learned to hold hands and dance with other people and not stick out and not show I was intellectually independent of rhythm." MM

Flamenco, José Greco
"I had the great good fortune to take a workshop with him when I was 11, and I made up my mind then and there that I wanted to be a flamenco dancer. Then I went to study in Madrid and I decided that wasn't the way to go. I think Francisco Franco had something to do with it. I was just coming out as a queer, and if you were a fag in Spain, you were essentially executed." MM

A Company
"Lar Lubovitch said to me, 'You're not going to start a dance company, are you?' I guess he was thinking that it's very hard, and it is hard. You're doing so many things and working with all these personalities, several of them your own. I really just wanted to make up dances and it never occurred to me that you needed a company to do that. I just asked my friends, who were all eager to do it." MM
Sounds Like:

Widening the definitions and boundaries of traditional forms

Notable musicians to which Morris has choreographed (highlights):
Lou Harrison
Yoko Ono
The Violent Femmes
Henry Purcell
Béla Bartók
W. A. Mozart
J. S. Bach
George Frideric Handel
P. I. Tchaikovsky
Henry Cowell
Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys
Léo Delibes
Stephen Foster
Virgil Thomson

Musical Collaborations (highlights):
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson
The Bad Plus
Yo-Yo Ma
Emanuel Ax
Matt Haimovitz
ARTEK
John Adams
Paul Simon
Deborah Voigt
Philharmonia Baroque
William Winant
Handel & Haydn Society
Western Caravan

Commissioned scores by:
Hershel Garfein
Michelle Shocked and Rob Wasserman
Lou Harrison
Zakir Hussain
The Bad Plus

Type of Label: None

My Blog

NEW WEBSITE: Mark Morris’s Romeo & Juliet (World Premiere 06/04/08)

www.LoveLives.netTHE PRODUCTION IS BASED ON PROKOFIEV'S ORIGINAL MUSIC AND THE ORIGINAL STORY CONCEPT BY SOVIET DRAMATIST SERGEY RADLOV, WITH NEW CHOREOGRAPHY BY MARK MORRIS The premiere of Romeo &...
Posted by Mark Morris Dance Group on Tue, 11 Mar 2008 02:35:00 PST

Dancing for Mark Morris by David Leventhal

DANCING FOR MARK MORRIS by David Leventhal Dancing for Mark Morris is one hell of a hard job.  It's not so much the physical pain of overworked muscles, or the split, bleeding feet, or the soul-...
Posted by Mark Morris Dance Group on Mon, 27 Aug 2007 01:01:00 PST

Word from the big *dic*

Since Mark Morris and several of us here at MMDG are obsessed with language, MM brought in a beautiful dictionary - affectionately called the big *dic* - for the entire office to look up wor...
Posted by Mark Morris Dance Group on Wed, 14 Feb 2007 09:45:00 PST