Mark Morris 30th Anniversary, New York

Women at work: ‘Festival Dance’

Mark Morris fans enthuse about his musicality and clarity of expression, his inspired choice of score, his wit, contemporary sensibility, storytelling genius and diverse lineage, from Isadora Duncan to Balkan folk dance. But at the 150-seat James and Martha Duffy theatre where his company is celebrating its 30th anniversary until March 27, his singular movement style strikes hardest.

At close range, you notice how much force the dancers put into their steps for the sake of precise shape and character. The skilled wielding of so much power focuses on the dancer’s will, making him seem as “real” as anyone. The Morris dancer does not disappear into the dance.

In the three premieres here the women stand out. In the charming, inventive The Muir, to Beethoven’s settings of Scottish and Irish folk songs, and the slight Festival Dance, to the kind of bland classical score that reduces Morris the poet to Morris the patternmaker, the women overwhelm their scrawny male partners by sheer meatiness. The long La Sylphide tutus for The Muir and the 1950s poodle skirts for Festival Dance underscore how unlike a sylph or girl next door these women are; the astounding Petrichor – created for the company’s eight women – describes what, in a better world, they might be.

For Petrichor, Morris has tuned in to the swoopiness of the Villa Lobos score (played live magnificently). Over four distinct movements the dance ebbs and flows but never stops. The choreographic patterns resemble flocks and herds and tides that materialise and grow dense before disintegrating. This elusive structure allows us to sink into sensation. “Petrichor” means the fresh scent of rain, and the dance is fragrant.

As for the women, they undulate, wind backwards, dive or spring into space. They may dance with an archetypally feminine sensuality and fine modulation of texture, but their approach to the movement is not delirious or swoony. It is implacably objective. They do not cast a spell any more than a rain shower does over the blade of grass it releases from the soil. The women simply do their work, which gains from their unswerving commitment a dreamlike wholeness.

Mark Morris Dance Group