Moondance

The Mark Morris Dance Group, now celebrating its 45^th anniversary, visited the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a quick late-March run with two topical dances that were new to New York: one heavy and one light. (They also brought Morris’s harmonious “V,” from 2001.) “Via Dolorosa,” a dance inspired by the stations of the cross, was aptly timed for the week leading up to Good Friday and Easter. But the troupe opened this short run with the New York premiere of the playful “Moon,” a subject that is evergreen, though NASA’s exciting Artemis II launch made it feel quite timely.

Performance

Mark Morris Dance Group and Music Ensemble: “Moon,” “V,” and “Via Dolorosa” by Mark Morris

Place

Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY, March 26, 2026

Words

Faye Arthurs

Mark Morris Dance Group in “Moon” by Mark Morris. Photograph by Steven Pisano

From the get-go Morris was in prankster mode, always a strong suit of his. Over a dark and empty stage, a band of stars curlicued dramatically on a backdrop scrim to form the US Presidential Seal. A partially obscured lectern floated up behind it. Which president would it hold? When John F. Kennedy’s handsome grin emerged, the audience chuckled and broke into applause. Phew, we were traveling back in time to the dawn of the American space program. No Space Force quests for galactical domination here. Instead, this was a dance about mystery and wonder. The 1969 moonwalk was a prominent theme, but so was 1977, the year NASA’s Golden Record was released into the void. Morris spliced the multi-lingual greetings from the record into several “Moon” numbers. As he noted in the program, this famed disc, still presumably hurtling past distant stars, is “an enduring message of peace, curiosity, and the richness of human culture.” The same could be said of “Moon.”

Like a 3D Lapham’s Quarterly magazine, “Moon” was a multi-media pastiche of artistic representations of Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor. Morris cobbled his score together from pieces of music with “moon” in their titles, from several genres. Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” (played live by the always-terrific MMDG Music Ensemble, headed by Colin Fowler), was sandwiched between grainy recordings of old-timey lunar odes like Henry Hall’s “Honey-Colored Moon” and Al Bowlly’s “Blue Moon” and “Roll Along Prairie Moon.”

However, two compositions without lunar ties were threaded throughout the work: Gyorgi Ligeti ‘s “Musica ricercata” and Marcel Dupré’s “Vingt-Quatre Inventions” for organ. I could see why Morris included the Ligeti pieces, with their eerie airlessness. Morris set a few of them before desolate moon craters, with his cast divided into probing teams. The dancers’ cautious, hovering squats suggested both primitive mankind and alien encounters. I also loved how the dancers manipulated the tiny spaceman statuettes lining the stage to some of Ligeti’s urgent piano trills. They scurried like gremlins and scattered the figurines with speedy purpose. It was hysterical.

Mark Morris Dance Group in “Moon” by Mark Morris. Photograph by Julieta Cervantes

The Dupré selections also felt tonally apt, as the organ evoked both ritual and majesty. These passages were used for a series of silhouetted interludes (Mike Faba designed the lighting) during which dancers glided around the stage on wheeled stools. At first these interruptions were clever and charming. The dancers spun like ice skaters, but on their tummies, to approximate the weightlessness and freedom of astronauts in zero gravity. But as “Moon” wore on, these sections grated. Like bad movie sequels, they accumulated personnel instead of invention. Also, the Winter Olympics recently taught everyone how to track side-by-side twizzles, and these twirls were not sufficiently synced.

The other problem with these interludes was that they lacked Wendall K. Harrington’s creatively shifting projections. From the jokey Seal reveal to barren moonscapes, graduated rockets, and mathematical orbit calculations, she expertly collaged lunar-themed images. By including shimmering full moons over grasses and tropical beaches as well as clips from famous moon moments in film, like Georges Méliès’s “A Trip to the Moon,” she proved her great range (especially considering her work in Lar Lubovitch’s stark “Othello” and Ratmansky’s creepy “Firebird” for the American Ballet Theatre the week prior).

The costuming took the opposite tack: instead of a blend of sartorial ideas, Isaac Mizrahi boiled moon dressing down to its essence: two-toned onesies. The front halves were white, the backs black. These clever rompers nodded to pyjamas (what else does one wear when the moon is out?) as well as space suits, and they beautifully abetted Morris in his many oppositional games: light vs. dark, fast vs. slow, baseline vs. melody. When the dancers paired up, they sometimes resembled black and white cookies or the yin yang symbol.

Mark Morris Dance Group in “Moon” by Mark Morris. Photograph by Steven Pisano

Harrington and Mizrahi’s polar tactics—accumulation vs streamlining—perfectly encapsulated Morris’s entire oeuvre. He is always mixing the complex with the deceptively simple, and “Moon” was no different. However, in “Moon,” he sometimes erred too much on the side of simplicity. Along with the recurrent stool scenes, there were too many overly basic step canons. Somehow, the same crawling-on-the-note that is sublime in “V” felt tedious here.

But in “Moon’s” best moments, Morris wittily subverted expectations. For example, to Bill Monroe’s bluegrass tune “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” Morris had many of his dancers partner up. But instead of square dancing or country line dancing vocabulary, he skewed towards the minuet. And he matched the music’s twangy accents not with heel digs but with surprising, lanky reverberations. While daintily holding fingertips up high, the dancers yanked their torsos under their arms in wild spirals. Or they jerked their elbows to the side and let them dangle there like marionettes. Our understanding of the moon and its many forces is still primitive, but Morris’s understanding of musical texture is often NASA-level.

Faye Arthurs

Faye Arthurs is a former ballet dancer with New York City Ballet. She chronicled her time as a professional dancer in her blog Thoughts from the Paint. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in English from Fordham University. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their sons.

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Moondance

Faye Arthurs

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