Morris: I'm an expert in choreography, but that doesn't mean people should do it the way I do it or even like it, you know?

It's absolute free choice.

The only thing I encourage people to do is take the opportunity, if you can, if you live someplace where you can do that, watch and listen.

[ Music plays ] Narrator: Mark Morris is, without question, one of the most celebrated choreographers of our time.

He's collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma, John Adams, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and one year, with both Paul Simon and early music pioneer Christopher Hogwood.

We met the choreographer in his colorful office at the Mark Morris Dance Center, right across the street from the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Morris: I'm a choreographer because of my relationship with music.

For me, there's no other real reason to do it.

And as a musician, I'm a choreographer, and as a choreographer, I have a dance company and I make up dances to music.

So, I have a music ensemble, and I have a dance group, and they work always together because that's my number-one priority and value is those things together, which were always together through all human history, and I still think they should be.

Fowler: His dances are all so different, which I think also is in response to the fact that his musical inspiration is so different.

He's choreographed to Monteverdi and to The Beatles and basically almost everything in between.

Narrator: Mark Morris's take on Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" is both disturbing and funny.

It's called "The Hard Nut."

[ Music plays ] A recent work, "The Look of Love," is set to the music of Burt Bacharach.

Chorus: [ Lyrics ] It won't be long Till happiness steps up to greet me Narrator: "Spring, Spring, Spring" is based on an arrangement of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" by the jazz trio The Bad Plus.

[ Music plays ] "State of the Arts" interviewed 30-year-old Mark Morris in 1988.

He was living in Hoboken, and his career was taking off.

Morris: I want to do pieces that I haven't done before.

And so, that's why, you know, that's why I'm not, like, a downtown postmodern or something like that.

I mean, I just make up these pieces.

I'm more of a modernist, constructivist, neo-anti-something, you know?

And the convenient and serendipitous bit was that when I decided to put on a concert of my own, my first concert as the Mark Morris Dance Group, I applied for a grant with the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and got it.

And I put on my first performance.

I mean, I'm not exactly modeling my career on anybody else's because, you know, it's unprecedented.

It's never happened to me.

I don't know what it's like.

I don't know what happens next.

You know, I know that I like how this is going and I'd like to continue it.

I mean, there are other things I'd like to do, but this is it.

You know, I could do this for a very long time if I hold out.

[ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] Black: I think the one of the first things that people notice about the work who aren't familiar with it is that it looks easy, it looks like anybody could do it.

And that's sort of a trope that people have said about the company.

We look like a bunch of people who are just waiting at the bus stop.

And that's certainly a tribute to the diversity of body types that we have in the company.

We don't really care what your body type is or what you look like, as long as you can do the dances.

Fowler: The most common phrase that people use is, "Oh, it looks like anybody could do that," which I can guarantee you, having been in the room, is 100% not true, and a lot of effort goes into making it look that way.

Woman: What do you mean?

Narrator: Over the years, the Mark Morris Dance Group has performed dozens of times at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton.

A recent performance featured works that spanned four decades -- the first set to music of Ivor Cutler.

Morris: That's a recorded piece because the person who wrote it and speaks it and sings it, Ivor Cutler, a great, great Scottish personality and poet and songwriter... Ivor Cutler is dead.

And these recordings were made in the, I don't know, probably '60s and '70s, and they're wonderful sort of verses and little songs, distinctly Scottish, and I just love them.

Cutler: [ Lyrics ] Once I was a little girl My head was in a whirl I-I-I-I'm a girl I climbed a slippy tree for all the boys to see And they gasped at how clever I was Black: I was an original understudy in "A Wooden Tree."

I was specifically understudying Mikhail Baryshnikov.

That was quite a trip, of course, to be in a studio with him.

He and Mark are long-time friends.

They've worked together a number of times.

But Mark, you know, because they're long-time friends, Mark didn't want to give him any notes.

So, any time Misha did something wrong, I had to be the person to give Misha his notes.

Um, of course, that was a very surreal experience because he's Baryshnikov.

Narrator: "Castor and Pollux," an early work first performed in 1980, is set to music by Harry Partch.

Morris: Harry Partch was a brilliant West Coast homosexual, alcoholic composer of great, great imagination and talent and skill, and he wrote astounding compositions.

When he pulled away from European music, he spent quite a bit of time as a hobo, an actual hobo, riding the rails of America and collecting music and stories.

But he worked with an octave, divided into, I think 47 pitches, probably, microtonal.

He built all of his own instruments that were mostly percussion and string, plucked strings, and built all the instruments with his students and his friends.

And in this case, "Castor and Pollux" is a representation of the twins of Gemini.

[ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] The importance, the urgency in civilization, not just in American culture, is for the arts.

That's also reading.

Literacy is super, super important.

From there, you can go to poetry or songs or stories or...

But all of that stuff, that includes music and dance, art of any kind, which scares a lot of Americans, and there's no reason for it to.

It's your friend.

[ Music plays ] [ Music plays ]