Mark Morris Returns, and Keeps It a Little Vague

When choreographer Mark Morris last visited the Southland in October, he brought us an ugly frog, vain gods and goddesses, enchanting natural creatures and magical staging effects.

Morris was appearing in his role of director and choreographer for the all-but-forgotten opera “Platee” by Rameau, which Morris had staged for the Edinburgh International Festival in 1997.

He returns this week in the more familiar but stripped-down guise of director of the Mark Morris Dance Group, which will present five works at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, Thursday to Saturday.

Four of them are new to Southern California. Morris will be dancing one of them, “Peccadillos,” a solo he created for Mikhail Baryshnikov as part of Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project in 2000. The other new pieces will be “Dancing Honeymoon” (created in 1998), “Bijoux” (1983) and “V” (which premiered in London in October 2001). Completing the program will be “The Office,” created in 1994 and seen that year at the Irvine theater.

“I won’t describe any of the dances,” Morris said in a recent phone interview from Detroit, where he and the company were performing. “I will talk about the music and my dancers.

“We’ll be doing ‘Dancing Honeymoon’ which is for seven of us, to music that was popular between the [world] wars. It’s for violin, piano, soprano and drums. It’s choreographed to recordings of Gertrude Lawrence and Jack Buchanan, transcribed and arranged for this combination. I didn’t do it. My music director [Ethan Iverson] did it. He’s a genius jazz musician.”

“Bijoux” is “a little solo for a woman [dancer], soprano and piano to songs that are not very often heard, by Erik Satie.”

“Peccadillos” is another solo, also to music by Satie, “played on a toy piano. It’s piano and me. I do it. Misha still does it. Basically, it’s the same steps. It’s the same dance.”

The newest piece, “V,” is set to the Schumann Piano Quintet in E flat, Opus 44. “This quintet is one of the great pieces of chamber music,” Morris said. “I’ve known it for 25 years. It just turned out to be time to make a dance to it. It’s four movements, quite substantial. It’s an unbelievable work.”

Using 14 dancers, the work is “as big a dance as my company can do and still have covers. We haven’t performed it very much.” Does the title have significance?

“I don’t know. It’s a quintet for one thing. It doesn’t make much difference. There are some V [formations] in the dance. The title came after the dance. There’s no secret text to it. It was the first dance I did in my new building. I worked about a month and a half, two months on it.”

The new building is the 30,000-square-foot Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn that opened last year. “I feel thrilled and shocked that we actually got this done,” Morris said. “It’s a great, unbelievable, fabulous place. We’ve been rehearsing there since June.

“It means there is someplace where we actually work and it’s our own headquarters and a home instead of rented studios all over town that are really [awful]. My offices and the studios are in the same building, which we haven’t had since [the company was in a three-year residency at the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in] Brussels.”

The space will be shared with other companies and will include a school that teaches all kinds of dance, as well as yoga.

“We’re teaching dance so that people get a chance at it and get to know if they like it or not,” Morris said. “I’m not trying to breed people to dance with my company. It’s already going very, very well.”

After Detroit, the company went back to New York for a few days then flew out to Irvine. After this engagement, the troupe goes to Scottsdale, Ariz., and St. Louis.

“Traveling is a horrible nightmare,” Morris said. “It takes security five times as long as it used to. But for the last few years, we’ve been touring for about six months a year. Touring is quite a big mix now of what we do.”

Another constant is live accompaniment. “It’s a very important thing for me,” he said. “It makes the shows real-er and better, and I think that’s wonderful. We take our own musicians. It’s a lot more work. But it’s so much better.”

Returning to his new base is different since Sept. 11, however. “New York is still shocked, and everybody goes on with what they do,” he said. “Of course, everything is new.... Works of art look different. Everything has changed a little bit. The meanings of things have changed a little bit. I can’t say how.”

*

Mark Morris Dance Group, Thursday to Saturday, 8 p.m., Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. $35 to $40. (949) 854-4646.