Kiwi troupe learns the knack of Morris dance

By KATE BELGRAVE

Mark Morris strides out of the lift at Wellington's Plaza Hotel and orders a coffee in flat, penetrating American tones. Other patrons turn surreptitiously to watch and to hear what he says. They stop when they start to catch his line of chat.

"Women should not keep dancing if they're not getting their periods," Morris hollers at one point in our assignation, stabbing the air with the morning's third fag and purposely raising his voice so that it might reach the inner ears of those hotel guests studiously trying to ignore it. It is a brilliant moment.

People go up to the Plaza for air, not to hear raving Yanks publicise their enthusiasm for healthy females and regular menstrual cycles. But that's Morris for you. He may be part of the establishment now, but he is still the enfant terrible who burst on to the scene 12 years ago, when he won the coveted position of director of dance at the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels.

He was in Wellington last month to fine-tune the Royal New Zealand Ballet's production of Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes, the work that Morris created for the American Ballet Theatre in 1988 at the request of their then artistic director, Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Drink - the rich, complex, emotionally extravagant work Morris set to Pulitzer prize-winning composer Virgil Thomson's difficult Etudes for Piano - will be performed as part of the Telecom Season of halo. The season includes halo, a new Douglas Wright work and Eric Languet's much-admired piece, Drifting Angels.

Morris accepts very few invitations to work with companies outside America. He spends most of his time working and touring with his own company, the Mark Morris Dance Group.

Still, Matz Skoog, the RNZB's artistic director, began to approach Morris with invitations to work with the company several years ago. Skoog also made sure that Morris saw videos of the ballet's work in 1998, the year Morris brought his group to New Zealand to perform his acclaimed piece L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato at Wellington's International Festival of the Arts.

Getting Morris was a coup. You get the feeling, though, that the ballet's next challenge was to survive its time with him. Morris is full-on. This is the guy who once observed that working with 24 dancers meant working with about 48 personalities. Certainly, his extraordinary intelligence and wit, brashness, perfectionist's streak and monumental confidence were in full flight.

Morris, now aged 43, has changed physically from the early days. He has cut his trademark, shoulder-length, black Milli-Vanilli curls and has gained a little weight but the rest of Morris is true to the original. He is, as always, as engaging and exuberant as he is wholly terrifying.

He gets very annoyed when people describe his stint in Brussels as the beginning of his international career (the Mark Morris Dance Group was established in 1980, and had been touring extensively long before the group went to Brussels). Nonetheless, the Brussels experience was viewed as a turning-point for him.

It certainly was for Brussels. Morris turned Belgium on its ear with the unique, highly emotional, complex, modern arrangements that he set to composers whom, until then, few audiences had considered shaking a leg to.

The situation was exacerbated by the fact Morris was preceded at the Monnaie by Maurice Bejart, the French-born choreographer whose works created an appetite for lavish, albeit somewhat in-your-face, epics. Morris' work, although heavily based in the classical tradition, was not after Bejart's style.

Dancing as a collective, rather than around principals, Morris' barefoot troupe rushed on to stage, expressing in breathtaking detail the harmony, sensuality and subtleties Morris found in music composers like Handel.

(L'Allegro - which, along with Dido and Aeneas, Morris' dance version of Purcell's opera, is one of the most famous pieces Morris created while in Brussels - is set to Handel's oratorio).

But Morris is an eclectic borrower, taking as much from folk and tribal dance as he does from classical ballet.

It was still a bit much for Brussels. Apparently he was booed at curtain calls. Legend also has it that one local upended his beer glass over Morris' head on discovering that he was the Morris of the Monnaie.

Still, Morris survived the experience and created some of his greatest works in the middle of it. "I know what I want," he grins. He knew exactly what he wanted from Drink as well. He came to New Zealand to ensure that the RNZB delivered it. He thinks the local dancers are well up to the challenge of the piece - "I like them because they're very versatile, flexible in their thinking. I like them," he grins, "because they're not very scared."

A day into rehearsals with Morris, dancers Larissa Wright, Stephen Wellington and Toby Behan all spoke of the compliment Morris paid the company by agreeing to work with it.

They were as impressed by his energy ("he came to rehearsals almost straight from the airport") and his profound understanding of Thomson's music.

They felt that their own understanding of the ethereal, complicated Drink was improving. "It's classically based," says Wellington, "but almost the opposite of what you would normally do. First it feels all wrong, but then you see what you're meant to do."

"You're struck by the intent and the patterns," says Behan. And Morris? "Not shy about telling you if you're wrong."

* halo, the Royal New Zealand Ballet perform works by Douglas Wright, Mark Morris and Eric Languet, Sky City Theatre, from Wednesday.