The extravagantly talented Mark Morris has a dashing lack of filter

By Jane Shilling

Acts of expressiveness: Mark Morris in 1984

© DEE CONWAY / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

In 1988, newly installed as the director of dance at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels at the age of 32, the choreographer Mark Morris gave his first press conference. What, asked a journalist, was his philosophy of dance? Morris’s predecessor, Maurice Béjart, had been a prodigious philosophiser, providing “30 pages of programme notes for every new dance.” But Morris’s answer ran to far fewer than 30 words: “I make it up and you watch it. End of philosophy.” It was the first of a series of pungent obiter dicta that would infuriate the Belgian press and audiences. But in his memoir, pointedly titled Out Loud, Morris defends his one-liner: “It was looked upon as a snub or a provocation, but… it’s the truth.” Throughout his career, Morris has always spoken his mind with a dashing lack of filter on everything from the Belgian Queen Fabiola’s coiffure (“the Maggie Thatcher hairdo of death”) to the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott with whom he worked on Paul Simon’s Broadway flop The Capeman (“ham-fisted, bigoted, lecherous, dismissive, patronising and belligerent”).

On his own work, he has been less expansive: “Art shouldn’t need translation. If the artist has to explain things, then he or she may be working in the wrong form.” But at 63, with his dancing (though not his dance-making) days over, Morris is in a more reflective mood: “I now find myself less reluctant to share secrets, happier to let people in on what goes into making up a dance, the workings of my company, my choreographic imagination, and the way these are all aspects of who I am.”