Since arriving on the scene nearly 20 years ago, dancer-choreographer Mark Morris has been hailed for his musicality and daring dance-lovers have followed his work (even when he performed en travestie). This weekend, the Mark Morris Dance Company brings five new-to-Chicago pieces to the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave. Performances are 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 3 p.m. Sunday. $30. 312-397-4010.
Q: You’ve set dances to everything from the Violent Femmes to baroque opera; do you work hard to find scores, or is your taste so catholic that it’s easy to be inspired?
A: It’s both. There’s music that I’ve known my whole life that I would like to choreograph, and then occasionally I want to do a particular something for our repertory, for diversity or casting or something, and I end up really fighting hard to find something that’s exactly perfect. Or sometimes I hear something and I have to make a dance right away.
Q: Is it important to you that audiences grasp how well-made your dances are, or is just liking how they look enough?
A: I’m very attached to the idea that dance is a very important visual art. And it’s like a lot of things, the more you know about it or the more you watch something, there’s more to find. But it’s not real important that everybody gets like, “Oh, I see this theme is recurring spatially as well as gesturally, blah, blah, blah.” You don’t have to know what’s holding the arch up; the fact that it gives pleasure in some way as an arch is fine.
Q: Critics have made a big deal about “The Argument,” which you’re doing at the MCA. They say the way it deals with male-female relationships is a first for you.
A: I sort of didn’t think of it that way, you know, if it was like a radical new departure, or like finally I got around to that. I certainly didn’t do it as a response to the critique that I hadn’t done it. But they might know better what I have and haven’t done, because I don’t look at sort of the big style waves of my work.
———–
Send inquiries to hlajewski@tribune.com
