Searching for Feeling in Morris’ New ‘V’

Extraordinarily clever but fundamentally soulless, Mark Morris’ newest large-scale creation provides a comprehensive index of his current capabilities and limitations as a mid-career modern dance master.

Titled “V” and set--with plenty of V-shaped group formations--to Robert Schumann’s Quintet in E flat, for piano and strings, the ensemble piece received its local premiere on Tuesday, performed by the Mark Morris Dance Group at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

As usual, Morris laboriously diagramed the score, with recurring dance motifs exactly matching repetitions in the music. But, happily, his deployment of 14 dancers adroitly varied his effects, with many of the repetitions going to different forces--to groups of men and then to women, for instance, or to dancers wearing sky blue (with bare legs) versus dancers in pale lime (with bare arms).

The first sudden color switch between the blues and the greens proved an exhilarating coup de theatre, and the onward rush of the piece continually camouflaged how arbitrary Morris’ motifs seemed. In the opening section, an overload of people swooning forward as others swooned backward and trios that formed and dissolved looked especially stale.

Later came an extended crawling sequence, with dancers periodically rising up to walk slowly away. Again, the movement itself proved less interesting than the way Morris highlighted Martin Pakledinaz’s contrasting costumes, and as the spatial field continually shifted and groups combined, Morris’ ingenuity and the dancers’ energy almost made you forget the big chill the choreography imposed on Schumann’s deeply emotional music.

Midway through, Julie Worden danced with Bradon McDonald, but their partnership never heated up enough to achieve the sense of communion that is the glory of the duets within George Balanchine’s formal music visualizations, the obvious model here.

So when duets popped out all over the stage, and the dancers hugged one another madly in the finale, all the embraces seemed just another imposed motif. When it came to real feeling, “V” stood for vacancy.

Fortunately, the program contained a number of superior earlier works. Danced strongly by Lauren Grant, the 1983 solo “Bijoux” (to Satie) displayed exactly the fresh, inventive movement ideas that “V” lacked, just as the 1994 dance drama “The Office” (to Dvorak) found emotional weight in both its folk dance vocabulary and in narrative metaphor: people being summoned into an office, one by one, and never returning.

Morris has always remained unbeatable at whimsy, and both his 2001 solo “Peccadillos” (to Satie) and his 1998 group romp “Dancing Honeymoon” (to pop songs of the 1920s and ‘30s) exploited gestural foolery and a playful, childlike animation with unfailing skill.

Some of the hand-flicks that Morris executed in “Peccadillos” recurred in the “V” scherzo, and passages in his solo that depicted his declining strength and fear of the world pressing in also suggested the possibility of an unpredictable new mix of the serious and comic Morris. That would be welcome from an artist who can manipulate dancers and audiences brilliantly but often nowadays appears to forget why.

Whether playing a toy piano for “Peccadillos” or leading Lisa Lee, Andrea Schultz, Jessica Troy and Wolfram Koessel in the Schumann quintet, Ethan Iverson justified Morris’ insistence on live music with great care and proficiency. Eileen Clark managed not only to interpret the briefest “Bijoux” songs artfully but to sound stylish even in the silliest “Dancing Honeymoon” ditties. Stefan Schatz contributed that work’s ricky-tick percussion.

Mark Morris Dance Company, tonight, 8, Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. $35-$40. (949) 854-4646.