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.