Program B opened with the stage premiere of “Tempus Perfectum,” which was created and livestreamed during the pandemic. So many Covid specials were despairing and ominous, but not this one. The title is predictably impish. It is Latin for a medieval musical term meaning triple meter time, which was apt given that the work was set to Brahms’s Sixteen Waltzes, Op. 39. Many of these piano pieces, beautifully played live by Colin Fowler, are famous lullabies, to which Morris set lots of lilting steps and rocking motions. The dancers’ night gowns and baggy separates, designed by Elizabeth Kurtzman, added to the soothing vibe. The Latin could also translate as “perfect meter” (perfect because threes are associated with the holy trinity) or “completed time,” “past-perfect time.” Leave it to Morris to use a reference to perfect timing and the past in the abysmal middle of a modern-day plague, though the dancers certainly kept perfect time throughout. I especially liked a dance for Courtney Lopes and Karlie Budge which matched subtle hand-flicks to dainty notes. 

“Tempus Perfectum” was not all feel-good tunes and comfy clothes, however. Lopes performed awkward, splayed attitude ronds de jambe sautés coming straight at the audience. Dallas McMurray introduced a tense turn motif—its momentum cut by the abrupt flinging out of his working leg to à la seconde, his torso overwinding from the force of it. McMurray and Noah Vinson danced linked at the waist like conjoined twins (a theme that was echoed later, aptly, in “Castor and Pollux”). They frequently spread their fingers behind their heads, as if making crowns—or like the Siren’s power pose in Balanchine’s “Prodigal Son.” But the gesture read as less royal and domineering here; instead, it looked foolish, as if they were giving themselves coxcombs. These were among the oddball notes Morris sprinkled about. All was lovely and calm—you could even mistake Budge for Isadora Duncan at times, so wild and free was she in her flowing dress—except for the moments when the dancers appeared to be slightly uncoordinated, stuck in ternary purgatory and perhaps losing their sanity in their jammies.