Mark Morris, Sadler’s Wells

The Mark Morris Dance Group returns to London with seven works new to the United Kingdom and a company of mostly unfamiliar faces. There was a time in the 1990s when Morris and his dancers appeared so regularly at the Edinburgh Festival (for six years in succession) that they were greeted in the streets, cafes and bars as old friends. These days, they tour around the world as well as performing in their base in Brooklyn, the Mark Morris Dance Center.

Morris relishes creating works on very different scales, from intimate pieces for just a few dancers and musicians to operas and oratorios. He’s been commissioned by music festivals and ballet companies and has collaborated with greats including Yo-Yo Ma and Mikhail Baryshnikov. At 57, he’s (probably) stopped dancing himself, preferring to perform on occasion as a conductor. So this time around we’ll be deprived of his memorable cross-gender appearances as Dido and the Sorceress in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, along with other roles now taken over by members of his own company.

The great pleasure of his choreography is its seeming spontaneity, as though the performers can’t help dancing to the music he chooses, from Bach and Handel to country and western, hard rock and corny love songs. Morris, who has always challenged preconceptions about body shapes, makes it look as though anyone could accomplish his barefoot choreography if they really tried. Yet beneath the seeming simplicity is his fascination with structure, his games with numbers.

The two programmes in the London season range from a solemn formal piece, Socrates, to Erik Satie’s austere vocal work Socrate, to the celebratory Festival Dance, set to Hummel’s Piano Trio no 5. Morris is a master at conjuring love and loss, whether as intimations of mortality in Socrates or the courtship rituals of The Muir, to Beethoven’s arrangement of ballads and folksongs. Both programmes are essential viewing.