Ballet Can Be Butch : MARK MORRIS, By Joan Acocella <i> (Farrar Straus Giroux; $27.50; 306 pp.)</i>

Modern dance, since its earliest heroic days, has suffered from a chronic and painful irony deficiency. Anyone who has politely daydreamed through concerts in which well meaning young people in unitards walked, ran and occasionally danced through 40 or more minutes of anonymous electronic noise, is invariably shocked and delighted by the Mark Morris Dance Group. Morris, a 37-year-old choreographer and dancer, dispenses with both synthesizers and small talk. His works are movement operas to complex scores in which difficult themes--suffering and redemption, the nature of love--are explored with patience and humility. But what most clearly distinguishes Mark Morris’ work from that of his predecessors and most of his contemporaries is that his performances are orchestrated by peals of audience laughter.

Joan Acocella, author of “Mark Morris,” describes the Christmas party that opens “The Hard Nut,” Morris’ updated “Nutcracker,” this way.

The Stahlbaum living room is a perfect suburban fright: white vinyl couch, white plastic drink caddy, white plastic Christmas tree. . . . Mrs. Stahlbaum is a big, fussy, hyper-femme redhead--she is played by a man, Peter Wing Healey. . . . As for the Stahlbaum children, the eldest, Louise, is a horny teen-ager in go-go boots; the youngest, Fritz, is a truly loathsome little boy. . . .

While all this is certainly a welcome addition to the much belabored Ballanchine choreography, which in our time haunts American ballet in much the same way that annual alumni giving haunts university life, there is the danger that Morris’ “Hard Nut” will sink to the level of kitsch parody. It does not. Morris’ grounding in ballet, Balkan folk dance, classical flamenco and what he himself calls the “several flavors” of modern dance technique available in New York, is eclectic even by the standards of today.

Joan Acocella’s book, “Mark Morris,” is to conventional dance biography what “The Hard Nut” is to “The Nutcracker,” and has the same invigorating impact. Acocella has written about dance for 15 years, but her background is in comparative literature. She does not confine herself to the backstage haunts of traditional dance criticism.

A thorough analyst of the structure of Morris’ long dances, Acocella is also an insightful cultural historian who situates Morris in the context of contemporary dance and of modern dance throughout our century on both sides of the Atlantic. More ambitiously, Acocella places Morris in that impossible to describe American world--two parts TV, one part school or office life, one part family romance--which is all around us. In Acocella’s devoted but never wide-eyed biography, Mark Morris becomes exotically ordinary. We begin to understand how rare a thing has happened here.

Acocella has three stories to tell, really: the first, a life story; the second, a critical account of 10 years of choreography; the third, a tale of an innocent abroad. Her opening chapter is a brief, horrifying account of Mark Morris meeting the press for the first time in Belgium:

As a French journalist once put it, (Morris) was part diva, part truck driver. . . . There was much about him that was effeminate, and he had the usual fun with this. (During his first season in Brussels, Belgium’s Queen Fabiola attended one of his performances. “Vive la Reine!” people shouted as she came through the foyer. “I thought they meant me,” Morris later said to a reporter.)

At the same time, rather unnervingly, he was also very butch--a big hairy guy who lumbered around noisily and waved a beer bottle at you as he spoke. . . . He was asked what he thought of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, the leader of Belgium’s young, anguish-ridden dance-theater movement. “All you have to do here,” he said, “is not wash your hair for a week and then sit on stage and act depressed and you’ve got it. ‘Magnifique! Formidable!”

Needless to say, life did not at first go smoothly for young Mark in the Old World. He was, at age 32, artistic director of his own company with a budget of several million dollars a year from the aptly named Theatre Royal de la Monnaie, Belgium’s state opera house. Morris must have been saying to himself, “This is not our rented Soho loft space. How did we get here?” As if in answer, Acocella begins Chapter 2, the biography proper.

Mark was born is in Seattle in 1957. Acocella writes of his childhood with a Dickensian appetite for the picaresque and the anecdotal. Maxine Crittendon Morris, Mark’s mother, says, “I always picked my boyfriends for how they danced. . . . That’s how I got together with (Mark’s father) Bill.” When Mark was eight, Maxine took him to a performance of Jose Greco’s flamenco troupe. “That night he decided that he too would . . . be a (flamenco) dancer.”

By 13, according to Mercer Junior High classmate, cartoonist Lynda Barry, Mark had the lifestyle of a bohemian. “It was clear that he was staying up way too late. You could see it in his face. He looked like he never slept. And it looked like the thing that was keeping him up was exciting.” Mark Morris was spending six evenings a week with the Koleda Folk Dance Ensemble, a locally grown Balkan folk dance commune. “I fell in love with the group,” Mark says.

In her book, Acocella often returns to this moment in Mark’s life. His aesthetic of movement, his insistence on rhythmic, athletic dance, was shaped by the Koleda Ensemble. The folk dancers, all at least 10 years older than Mark, became his intimate circle. A profound sense of well-being, of enclosure, forged Mark’s philosophy of composition and performance--his love of community, his belief in transcendence through shared experience.

At 13, Mark was also a scholarship student and part-time teacher at Verla Flowers Dance Arts, where the versatile teacher had taken his dance education firmly in hand. Mark choreographed 20 dances in high school. His father, Bill, had taught him to read music when he was 7. Since then, Mark played piano badly but inexhaustibly. He graduated high school, spent six months in Madrid before deciding that he didn’t want to be a Spanish dancer after all, returned to Seattle for a year and a half, then flew to New York.

From 1976 to 1980, Morris danced with Eliot Feld, Lar Lubovitch, Hannah Kahn, and Laura Dean. In 1980, he began to present his own work while still dancing with Dean and Lubovitch. He worked his up through the usual strenuous channels for young choreographers--a concert at the rented Cunningham studio in 1980, the next year a two-night spot at Dance Theater Workshop. But he gathered momentum quickly. In 1983 Morris choreographed nine dances, then 10 more in 1984. That year he appeared at the New Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music where he performed a 23-minute solo, O Rangasayee, in the tradition of Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis. He wore a “dhoti or loincloth, (and had) the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands stained red, in the Indian manner.”

Morris was “handsome and large, (and) possessed of a brilliant technique.” His group danced Championship Wrestling After Roland Barthes, which Acocella characterizes as a “brilliant pop study of the teeth-gnashing, floor-pummeling, Kabuki-like histrionics of TV wrestlers.” The evening was a huge success. Morris had demonstrated his range as a performer and a choreographer, who broke new ground for dance while drawing upon the treasures of the past.

But how did he get from Brooklyn to the opera house in Brussels? Despite Acocella’s careful development, there is an air of necromancy about Mark Morris’ story. On the surface, it’s simple. Morris friends with theater director and fellow prodigy Peter Sellars; Peter Sellars pals around with Brussels opera house director, Gerard Mortier. Mortier quarrels with longtime Belgian favorite and opera dance director, Maurice Bejart, who leaves for Lausanne in a huff with all his dancers. Sellars quietly suggests Morris as a replacement. Mortier, in a tight spot, watches one Morris dance concert in Stuttgart, takes Morris out to dinner, and offers him the dance directorship of the Monnaie. It’s a kind of modern dance “Beverly Hillbillies,” with Morris as Jethro, Mortier as banker Drysdale and Brussels as Beverly Hills.

But beneath the surface, the story is a frightening and moving one. Mark and his friends--the company in 1988 was made up of close friends . . . underwent a painful translation from their adopted New York home to a new and deeply conservative city, which reviled them. In the process, they pulled together as they never had before. Eventually their tightknit frontier community was torn apart. Morris discovered resources that he had only glimpsed before and became, during three years of hard labor, one of foremost choreographers of our time. But this transformation had enormous costs for Mark and those he loved.

If “Mark Morris,” Acocella’s ambitious and scrupulously researched critical biography, has a flaw--and for me it does not--it is this: She insists on writing at length about dance. While aware that the sensational Mark Morris, the story of his catastrophic arrival and triumphant departure from Brussels, will keep us reading, Acocella refuses to let any of us ignore the dancing for the dancer. Six of 11 chapters, set squarely in the middle of her book and illustrated with dance photography, are about Morris’ work.

“The Body” explains the choreographer’s unique movement vocabulary and the technique that he and his group--a term intended to convey the collective nature of the dance ensemble, rather than the hierarchical company--developed together. “Love and Sex” discusses dance and gender, arguing that Morris is the first major choreographer to give women and men solo roles that are not limited by false gander idealizations. Morris puts it simply: “My guys are articulate and my gals are brutish. And they’re both both. They can all do everything.”

The third of the dance chapters explores Morris’ spiritual identity, his use of liturgy, and his religious dances; the fourth chapter discusses Morris’ fusion of narrative and abstraction, elements of composition which in contemporary modern dance are, sadly, often viewed as incompatible. Acocella shows that, in the work of a powerful literalist and symbolist like Morris, narrative and abstraction are inseparable.

The fifth dance chapter concerns Morris’ reliance on highly structured, rhythmically textured music, from Couperin to Nancarrow, and his unusual preference for vocal scores of all eras. This chapter becomes a fascinating essay on the uneasy marriage of music and movement, Acocella pointing out that many of the founding mothers and fathers of modern dance believed they had to free dance from music altogether. Morris is, she thinks, a neoclassicist mistaken, at times, as a terrorist.

Her final dance chapter “Irony and Sincerity,” focuses on Mark’s penchant for thematic indirection. Acocella persuades us that while ironic, even campy, Mark Morris is never frivolous. His dances, which defamiliarize our tired world with Swiftian humor and power, are the most solemn of revelations.

Today Mark Morris is 37. Acocella ends her book with a blessing. “It is wonderful,” she writes, “to think what he may do.” And wonderful, too, to travel with Joan Acocella through Mark Morris’ first, fleet-footed years.