Dancing for Joy

At the Mark Morris Dance Center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a conservatory feel is conspicuously absent. “Stop scratching your head! Stop picking your nose!” dance teacher Misty Owens told her introductory modern dance students on a recent Saturday afternoon.The lack of formality, however, isn’t keeping Mr. Morris up at night. Nearly 500 children take classes at the school, which was founded by one of America’s most recognized dance choreographers in modern dance. If the majority of those children are not aiming for a job with the Mark Morris Dance Group – which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this season – that’s just fine.“I went to a dancing school in Seattle and wanted to have one like that,” he said. “Not a conservatory and not directly feeding into the company, but just about learning how to dance.”Since December 2001, the three studios of this glossy, $7.4 million center have been a place of learning for children and adults, as well as the home of Mr. Morris’s professional company. In the world of modern dance, that is a rare thing, indeed. The Paul Taylor Dance Company still leases a single-floor space in SoHo and offers limited classes for professional teens and adults. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company rehearses and teaches class in a spare West Village studio. Modest conditions are generally expected in the New York City dance community. The exception is the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, one of America’s most financially secure modern dance companies, which in 2004 built the Joan Weill Center for Dance on Manhattan’s West Side. That state-of-the-art facility houses the professional troupe, the pre-professional school, the Ailey Extension (a school for the general public), and a black-box theater.Ailey aside, Mr. Morris’s operation is almost luxurious compared with most modern dance companies. And by concerning himself with the children’s experience, instead of with the final outcome, he may cultivate the sort of dancers he wants anyway.Mr. Morris believes in a kind of innate dance intelligence: “Children start dancing immediately. All children dance.”The school is as welcoming of a 15-year-old who’s never set foot in a studio as it is of a gifted 7-year-old. “I know professionals in many fields who should have stopped a long time ago. Musicians who hate music, dancers who hate dancing. I want the opposite of that,” he said.Of course, in order to make it into the company, years of professional training are required, but a particular sense of freshness and joy are pretty much mandatory for Morris dancers, too. It’s that levity that the school may be able to corral, encourage, and shape.Mr. Morris’s work is known for its unusual attention to musicality, and music is among the school’s priorities. His own early dance teacher,Verla Flowers, taught class and played the piano simultaneously. At her Seattle school, Mr. Morris was trained in a vaudevillian grab bag of techniques ranging from “Spanish dance” to hula to ballet.That diversity of dance styles has also found its way into Mr. Morris’s dance center. Even though there is a certain amount of fidgeting and sneezing among the 8- to 10-year-old participants Ms. Owens teaches, a gentle order reigns. The accompanist plays a medley of improvised tunes on three instruments: a maraca, a percussive instrument strapped around his ankle, and piano. He veers from Cage-like abstractions to the theme from “The Simpsons.” When the children are stumped by a complicated rhythm, Ms. Owens leads them in a clapping sequence to get them back on track.“We don’t ever really say we have a Mark Morris technique,” the school’s director, Eva Nichols, said. She added, however, that “inevitably when our company members teach, they’re influenced by his choreography and style.” This self-effacing description might seem like just another example of Mr. Morris’s reported contrariness. In fact, it signals his respect for the variety of dance styles and choreographic predecessors that shape his work.The school’s inclusiveness is also at least in part a result of circumstance.”We changed our curriculum to fit our students,” Ms. Nichols said. “Most of our teens were new to dance.” That situation might change as the school logs more years of training. “We’re kind of hoping that when the students that started with us get to be teens, they’re going to be at the pre-professional level,” she said.The majority of the students come from Brooklyn neighborhoods surrounding Fort Greene.The center does not have a scholarship program and is currently seeking funding to create one, but prices are kept low: The fee for a semester-long weekly class is $200. (A similar program at the Ailey school includes two classes a week but also costs $545. There, however, scholarships are frequently awarded – and are funded by gifts like the $1 million Oprah Winfrey gave to the school last year.In other ways, too, Mr. Morris’s school hews closer to a community center than one might expect. In collaboration with the Brooklyn Parkinson’s Group, it hosts and runs Dance for Parkinson’s, a free weekly workshop for people afflicted by the disease. The company also does extensive outreach in Brooklyn schools.Regardless of whether the school generates a fresh crop of dancers who absorb the Morris approach to dance, it will undoubtedly keep his legacy going. It has already succeeded in giving the preteen set something to gossip about.“She didn’t even know who Mark Morris was!” As an indignant 9-year-old recently muttered in one of the center’s dressing rooms. “I mean, he’s only, like, the greatest choreographer alive!”“Except maybe for Alvin Ailey …” another girl said. “Is he still alive?”

Dancing for Joy

Dancing for Joy

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