Mark Morris (born August 29, 1956 – ) decided that he wanted to be a dancer at age eight, after seeing Jose Greco. He studied in Seattle at the all-purpose Verla Flowers Dance School and the Koleda Folk Ensemble. There he witnessed everything from ballet and hula to Spanish dance and Balkan folk. He choreographed his first dance at 14. Coming to New York at 19, he danced with Eliot Feld, Lar Lubovitch, Hannah Kahn, and Laura Dean.
He started the Mark Morris Dance Group in 1980 with 10 members. The group performed at the Dance Theater Workshop and the New Wave series at BAM. His idiosyncratic choreographic voice combined live music, and plainspoken ensemble movement. The style drew widely from ballet, Jose Limon, social dance, and international folk dance. From 1988 to 1991, he was the director of dance at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, and in 1990, he co-founded the White Oak Dance Project with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Notable among the 150 works he has choreographed are The Hard Nut, L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, Gloria, and Four Saints in Three Acts. In 2001, the Mark Morris Dance Center was founded in Brooklyn.
About The Downtown Performance Series
NYU Skirball and Artifacts have teamed up to produce NYU Skirball Presents Downtown Performance. This series spotlights the directors, performers, and artists who shaped the movements loosely defined as “Downtown.”
Inspired by the cultural history rooted in NYU Skirball’s neighboring blocks, the Downtown Performance series captures in-depth interviews with living legends of performance. The first installment features groundbreaking directors Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, JoAnne Akalaitis and Richard Schechner. For more on NYU Skirball, please visit their website.
