On Good Behavior : What happens when Mark Morris, known as the bad boy of dance, choreographs and directsthe elegant 18th century opera ‘Orfeo ed Euridice?’ Hint: think ‘beauty’ and ‘simplicity.’

Mark Morris wants to be interviewed in an uptown tavern.

It looks like a dive from the outside, but it’s not. The nachos are just as Morris describes them--fabulous. Morris is known here, so the bartender is already pouring a pint of Anchor Steam from the tap as the choreographer walks in the door.

“Glug, glug, glug,” Morris greets him.

His company also hangs out here, after rehearsals in a nearby borrowed studio for the new production of Gluck’s wondrously elegant and, for its time, radically refined 18th-century opera “Orfeo ed Euridice.” Morris is directing and choreographing the opera in collaboration with the Boston early music band, the Handel and Haydn Society, and taking it on the road.

The conductor, Christopher Hogwood, is already at the bar. So are Orpheus and Euridice--countertenor Michael Chance and the soprano Dana Hanchard--as are some members of the Mark Morris Dance Group.

Morris joins them (it has to be at the bar, because only there is smoking allowed) and treats his interview as a performance. He says he would just as soon the reporter turn off the tape recorder so that he could just chat. He’s not interested in formal questions. He answers with a defiantly minimal yes or no (and sometimes both) when he can get away with it, but he always adds a friendly laugh. He exclaims, “Shoot,” when he is ready for the next question; “Another one, please,” means beer.

But he also wants this publicity. The Gluck opera is an ambitious undertaking that, following its Iowa City premiere and performances in Boston, travels to Orange County and Los Angeles before heading on to Berkeley, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Edinburgh Festival. But although Morris is now the biggest name, and for a large segment of the public the only name, in modern dance, he has had very little exposure in Southern California during the past decade. So when “Orfeo” arrives at the Orange County Performing Arts Center (Wednesday and Thursday) and, under the auspices of UCLA, at the Wiltern Theater (Friday through next Sunday), Morris understandably wants the seats full.

Besides, he has a lot on his mind. He can’t and won’t keep from saying provocative things, even if he doesn’t want them published. “I’ll kill you, if you write that,” he threatens after having criticized someone else’s work.

Morris has arranged to talk right after the first run-through of the show and is still unwinding. He seems to physically pounce on thoughts, as if they too can be choreographed. He pays attention to the interview but also plays to the crowd, gesturing grandly. He knows he is entertaining and delights in being brilliant and irritating at the same time.

When it is suggested, for instance, that it’s unusual for an opera director to have absorbed the score as thoroughly as he has Gluck’s, the response is exaggerated modesty. During the rehearsal, Morris had sat on a stool next to Hogwood and sang the choral parts, in a small but accurate voice, along with the conductor. “I turn the pages when I hear other people turn the pages,” he jokes.

But the joking is also a defense. In fact, Morris, who turned 40 this year, takes himself, his work, and particularly this project, very seriously. And even a compliment about his respectfulness toward music can make him touchy, serving instead to remind him of all times he has been accused of being self-indulgent and camp.

“Some people freak out because I seem to treat some things casually or cavalierly, and it’s not true,” he suddenly exclaims. “It’s like the people who--” he breaks off, holding his empty glass aloft, “May I have another, thank you,” and then picks the thread right back up--”people who thought that my ‘Nutcracker,’ ‘The Hard Nut,’ is like a camp, sarcastic sendup that is based on anger or frustration or something.”

Morris’ “The Hard Nut,” his ‘60s-based interpretation of the Tchaikovsky ballet that begins seeming like a hilarious parody but ends up being dark and downright disturbing, has, in fact, been one of his great hits. But once Morris gets started, he seems to have to get it all out.

“I’m not going to spend that much time figuring something out and working really hard on it, and studying the music and spending a million and half dollars. It has a giant cast and giant orchestra. And it’s Tchaikovsky!

“I’m not going to use that to jerk people around. That’s so insulting to even think that. You don’t have to like it, of course. That’s a totally different topic. You can say I have no talent, but you can’t say it’s not legit.

“Also, I’m responsible; I’ve always been responsible. If I say something that gets me into trouble, maybe I shouldn’t have said it. But I also mean it. I say what I mean. And sometimes people don’t want you to answer a question that they ask you in an interview. They want, like, ‘Oh, it’s lovely,’ instead of, like, ‘I’m exhausted; I’m having a nervous breakdown; you woke me up; you called five minutes early.’ ”

Morris’ reputation as the bad boy of dance comes, in fact, from just such performances for the press more than it does from his work, and there is certainly no sign of disrespect--or self-indulgence--in his treatment of “Orfeo.” Indeed this is Morris at his most mature and restrained.

There is, moreover, little here of the elaborate scene painting in movement that marks “L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed il Moderato,” his glorious interpretation of a Handel oratorio, and perhaps his most successful and highly praised work. There is even less of the hyper-emotionalism or daring of his choreographed version of Purcell’s opera, “Dido and Aeneas,” in which the singers are in the pit and the dancers mime the roles, with Morris, himself, portraying the Carthaginian queen. There is no place for the humor or flamboyance of “The Hard Nut.”

Those large-scale works were created during the three years, starting in 1988, that the Morris Dance Group was the resident dance company at La Monnaie in Brussels. They are works that reflected his access to a European state-supported opera house’s resources, something unknown in America.

Nor is there room for such extravagance in this “Orfeo.” Eight years ago, Morris was showier when he choreographed the dances for a later, French version of Gluck’s opera, in a production for Seattle Opera directed by Stephen Wadsworth. Many of the dances were set to numbers that the composer created for Parisian tastes. But this time around, Morris is utilizing the exquisitely direct, original 1762 Vienna version. “It’s better, it’s to the point,” Morris insists, and so the choreography is entirely new and, he also insists, more to the point as well.

Gluck’s opera was written at a time when opera had become, ironically, the kind of thing that Morris has sometimes been accused of doing, mainly foppishly parading about the stage Greek gods as contemporary dandies. (Morris does, in fact, indulge in this slightly, himself, wearing a skirt to the rehearsal.) Gluck and his librettist, Ranieri de Calzabigi, sought to strip away all decorative artificiality, striving for “beautiful simplicity,” in the composer’s words. Melodies were direct and unadorned. Costumes and acting styles are aimed at realism. Dance and choral music are meaningfully integrated into the drama, not treated as separate diversions.

Morris has followed Gluck’s prescriptions closely. In fact, there seems absolutely nothing musically or scenically extraneous in the new production.

“Yeah, I’ll say,” Morris blurts out when asked about this. “My God, it’s also like the world’s tightest budget. So it’s all on purpose. Which is great. The set is all soft goods. We send somebody on a Greyhound with a suitcase full of the set a week early so they can set it. There is a minimum of lighting.

“But it’s still big--a big band, a big chorus and lots of dancers to move around. So it has to be simple and cheap. And cheap is, of course, never cheap enough for a producer. It’s like eating in a restaurant. ‘I won’t pay that 50 cents for that sour cream,’ and yet you have, like, a $90 meal.

“Oh, come on!”

But, Morris readily admits, cheap is not the point. The point is to find an integrated style that allows everyone to function at their best level. Instead of trying to gracefully move the chorus, for instance, Morris leaves it stationary on the sides of the stage, and choreographs the choruses for his dancers.

“I’ve tried to make up this whole piece with the dancers,” he explains. “With the dancers you can choose whether or not to do something, or to do it on whatever leg or whatever arm. The timing’s usually prescribed.”

For the soloists, the main characters in the opera, movement is trickier. When asked about them, Morris reacts in mock consternation. “They’re sitting right there!” he says pointing to Chance and Hanchard. But he continues without missing a beat.

“With the singers I make very specific moves and paths and then everything else is open. I set down milestones, musically, spatially, gesturally. It’s all based on the text and music, of course. But really what I want is for them is to sing fabulously. Stand-and-sing never bothers me. I have no problem with that. You don’t have to be lying on your face so I’ll believe the situation. You don’t believe the situation, you understand it.”

Morris half-jokingly calls the flowing choreography of “Orfeo” his “Arcadian style.” But like all of his jokes, it helps defuse another touchy issue: How should he be defined?

“When people ask me to describe my style--like postmodern or something--I say classical, but that’s just so that they have something to say,” he explains. “It’s like behavior modification. It doesn’t bother me if you call me that, but it bothers me if you call me avant garde, because there’s no such thing.

“It’s also that people are really surprised that I know what I’m doing. A lot of people don’t see how things are built. Which is fine. If they’re satisfied, they’re satisfied because of what happened to them watching it. And that’s because of how it’s built. Not just how it’s performed, or not what music it is, or the lights or something. It’s the deeper structure that, of course, is what evokes the response in people. Usually the ugliest dances have the strictest structure.”

Even his most extravagant works from the Brussels era share this concern with structure. And the smaller-scale repertory pieces he created for his company before the Brussels residence and those he makes for the company now that it is independent again and back in New York showcase a variety of styles, but the movement is always meant to be clear and the proportions carefully balanced.

Morris has regularly claimed that the music comes first. And whether he is creating what seems like a scary office scene in a bureaucracy from hell to Dvorak or simply dancing heart-on-sleeve to Mozart, he always takes his cues from the music. Which is part of why he’s hard to categorize.

Born in Seattle, Morris has demonstrated something of a West Coast openness to music, and also a specific love of the music of the West Coast experimental school. His first good work (his evaluation) was to a score by Harry Partch (California’s most non- conformist, one-time hobo, but outright genius composer). He is devoted to the dean of San Francisco composers, and America’s most illustrious multicultural composer, Lou Harrison, and has just commissioned a new work from him which cellist Yo-Yo Ma will play. And besides Baroque and early classical music--his favorite choices over the years--there is room for Dvorak, a variety of folk musics, old (not new jazz), some pop, Schoenberg, you name it.

Like most artists, Morris simply won’t be defined by a lot of vague labels. When it is suggested that maybe there is no pinning him down stylistically, he exclaims, “Trrrrryyyyy!”

Then, turning tough guy, he proposes stepping outside.

But first he must consult with his costume designer, who by now has joined Morris and the others in the tavern. And there’s also that fresh beer that’s being poured.

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“Orfeo ed Euridice,” Mark Morris, director/choreographer, Christopher Hogwood, conductor, with the Handel and Haydn Society Orchestra and Chorus and the Mark Morris Dance Group, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, Wednesday and Thursday, 8 p.m. $10 to $100. Information: [714] 740-2000). And at the Wiltern Theatre, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday 2 p.m. $13 to $45. [310] 825-2101.