Mark Morris

Dancer and choreographer, born in Seattle, Washington, USA. His training included ballet, flamenco, and Balkan folk dance. He danced for several important modern choreographers before making an informal New York City debut with his company in 1980. He has devised dances for his own and other companies, as well as for opera, and in 1988 the Mark Morris Dance Group began a permanent residency at Theâtre de le Monnaie in Brussels. In 1996 the company performed at the Edinburgh International Festival's 50th anniversary celebrations. The company's own 25th anniversary tour in 2005 featured a number of UK premieres, including the work Candleflowerdance.

Morris is popular among dance aficionados as well as mainstream audiences.

Morris grew up in a family that appreciated music and dance and nurtured his budding talents;

Morris subsequently moved to New York, where he established his own company, the Mark Morris Dance Group, which debuted in 1980.

In 1990, Morris and Mikhail Baryshnikov established the White Oak Dance Project, a group formed to choreograph and perform new dance.

Since 1994, Morris has created six works on the San Francisco Ballet. He has worked extensively in opera, directing and choreographing productions for the New York City Opera, English National Opera, and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, most recently directing and choreographing King Arthur for English National Opera in June, 2006.

Notable works of Morris include "Gloria" (1981), set to Vivaldi, "Championship Wrestling" (1985), based on an essay by Roland Barthes, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, ed Il Moderato (1988), Dido and Aeneas (1989), "The Hard Nut (1991), a campy version of The Nutcracker set in the 1960s, The Office (1995), Greek to Me (2000), a dance version of the Virgil Thomson–Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts (2001), the ballet The Garden (2001), and the modern dance pieces Grand Duo (1993), V (2002) and All Fours (2004).

Morris and his Dance Group also collaborated with cellist Yo-Yo Ma in Falling Down Stairs, a film by Barbara Willis Sweete available on Ma's Inspired by Bach series, volume 2. In casu, Morris choreographed a dance based on Bach's Third Suite for Unaccompanied Cello, which Ma performs.

Though now largely retired from performing, Mark Morris was long noted for the musicality and power of his dancing as well as his amazing delicacy of movement.

Morris is the subject of a biography, Mark Morris (1993), by dance critic Joan Acocella.