FACES FOR THE NINETIES : ...

Currently the Director of Dance at the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels (former home of Maurice Bejart’s Ballet of the 20th Century), Mark Morris, 33, is a dancer and choreographer with extensive folk, modern and ballet experience. In the 1980s, he choreographed for companies including Batsheva Dance Company of Israel, Boston Ballet, the Joffrey Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and his own Dance Group, formed in 1980.

In 1984 his company appeared in the prestigious “Next Wave” series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In 1986, he received a “Bessie” (New York Dance and Performance) Award for choreographic achievement and, the same year, became the youngest choreographer to be given an entire episode of the PBS “Dance in America” series.

Morris has already been influential in the decentralization of American dance, in encouraging more open (less hypocritical) attitudes towards homosexuality in the dance world and, most recently, in championing music-based movement values to a European modern-dance scene often hostile towards actual dancing.