A Brief Look At Mark Morris

Mark Morris is an avant garde choreographer, who revolutionized the dance world without giving a care. Morris decides what he wants, who he is, and what is going to happen - his ostentatious nature formed his place as a dance celebrity. What makes him so impressive, next to his sheer brilliance and unparalleled creativity, is his unapologetic nature. Audiences don’t flock to Mark Morris’s work because he needs them to, it simply demands to be seen.
Mark Morris, by Joan Acocella is a biography that humbly, admirably, and at times condescendingly dictates who Mark Morris is, and how he came to be. Mark Morris was born a performer, he was a confident child that marched to the beat of his own drum, “when [his sister] Marianne danced in the living
He became the “bad boy” of modern dance; constantly pushing the envelope, from a brief obsession with showcasing butts in his work, to creating movement that intentionally was impossible to execute with grace - Morris was always testing the limits of the audience and his dancers. Mark Morris also tested the limits of traditional gender roles in his work, and there was a blatant play on raw sexuality. Morris spent a great deal of time exploring the meaning of love and sexuality in several romantic works. The AIDS epidemic of the eighties, which was accompanied by a strong anti-homosexual societal sentiment, changed the Morris’s swooning sixties tone. Another thematic element which was vital to Morris’s choreographic explorations was the concept of Heaven and Hell. Religious exploration and thought is apparent in Gloria, which by nature of the music context is inherently spiritual. Yet, arguably the strongest quality of Morris’s work is his ability to tell the audience a story. Writing plays for his family as a child, Morris was a born storyteller, and all of his works reflect that. By using literal means of choreographing, abstracting those images, and employing a myriad of other choreographic tools, Morris has the unique ability to tell the audience exactly how things are without them leaving feeling spoon fed the information.
Morris revolutionized the practice of music visualization, which has been a part of the choreographer’s toolkit since essentially the creation of music. Morris’s manifesto clearly delineates the key features of his