OnDance

...Marble Halls, a group creation to Bach's Concerto for Two Harpsichords in C Minor, has a similarly oversimplified movement scheme, but its nature is complex and problematic...

...I found it rather tedious, an oversimplification that verges on dogmatism...

...The space between it and the most high-vaulted music are in effect his clay...

...Still, it was heartening to see that Morris is not forcing his talent at this stage in his development—especially in the light of all the national coverage he has had lately in such magazines as Esquire, Vanity Fair and People...

...This wonderfully "literary" shocker conjures up the whole voluptuous oppression of gothic tales, despite an amazingly small array of skips, hops, and traditional poses...

...This season saw him moving in so many different directions, you might conclude he was showing off...

...Rhythmically, the dances are daring and elegant...

...One thinks of the new Vestige, a large-scale work to Shostakovich's Sonata for Cello and Piano ind, whose black on black quality and heavy, engine-fueled groupings have the surge of exodus occurring under cover of night...

...Morris' Love, You Have Won, follows Vivaldi's curlicues almost mockingly, and with precisely the right set of head and wrist evokes to a striking degree the frilly decorum of the 18th century...

...It is as if the heart and ear will take Morris where the musculature cannot...

...There is also One Charming Night, a duet in which a prettily buttoned-up Victorian courtship unexpectedly succumbs to a vampirish existential hunger...

...On Dance MIXED MARK MORRIS BY LAURA A. JACOBS Mark Morris brought his company to New York last month for its much awaited two-week concert at the Dance Theater Workshop, an alternate space specializing in the experimental...

...Morris revels in the ordinariness of the human body...

...Morris is not really experimental, just young...

...Moreover, he does this with an unfailing musical sophistication...

...By searching plainness the dances ascend to beauty and its enigma...

...Morris' solo, "Jealousy," from the Handel Choruses, is a case in point...

...My Party, a critical favorite, plays with the group patterns of party dances: circles, squares, kick lines, and crack the whips...

...Indeed, given his penchant for extending traditional themes and metaphors far over the abyss, Morris may be emerging as a classicist with a nihilistic streak...

...Morris' own performance of the steps fell somewhere between foppish aristocrat and winsome Pierrot, an approach that took the full measure of both a style and an era...

...For contemporary choreographers employing classical music has always involved a problem of scale...

...None of the pieces on his recent program had the emotional ambition of last year's Gloria, or the power to enchant of O Rangasayee, the solo that spun fine strands of Indian dance around its central metaphor, the Christlike spirituality of performing...

...There is something too hard, possibly too willful, in its stern arithmetical form, its theoretical flight...

...Morris' arguments do carry you along...

...Through repetition and a particularly sensitive use of posture, though, the body takes on the powerful, essentially moral energy of Michelangelo's nudes...

...It is ravishing...

...what stays, however, is a spirituality (for want of a better word) that, even when absent as a specific subject, is strangely, palpably present...

...Superficially this impresses...

...It is like a prideful young seminarian caught up in academic arguments for faith...

...Perhaps it is his joining of musical brilliance and technical humility that gives the dances their freshness and precocity, their quality of congress between the material and immaterial worlds...

...Pinned to one bit of floor, the dance is little more than anguished twisting performed with a sustained and bilious muscularity...

...Because of ballet's somewhat analogous technical basis, even a mediocre work can seem equal to, say, Handel, yet by contrast the pedestrian steps and earth-bound emotionalism of contemporary dance seem lowly, ordinary and underdeveloped...

...His most balanced, structurally delineated and imposing pieces are subtly rocked by brackish undercurrents...

...Composing not so much in steps as in lengths of bone and knots of muscle, he weaves distortions, odd angles and knobby knees like nubs into the loom...

...Although he frequently uses punk, rock and ethnic music, Morris appears to favor older works...