Mark Morris’s arrival on the New York dance scene was spectacularly timed. George Balanchine died on April 30, 1983, leaving a company shaken, a following forlorn, and an art form facing a new era: classical dance post-Balanchine. Nine months later, on January 2, 1984, Mark Morris was born in the pages of The New Yorker, in a key-to-the-city review by Arlene Croce titled “Mark Morris Comes to Town.” The timing was elegant, just the kind of fateful precision that served Balanchine during a long life of ups and downs, decisions and revisions. And the timing was comforting, not least because it was so Balanchinian. New York dance—stripped of its genius, its prize, its lyric lord—needed a reason to keep going. And here he was: a new genius, chewy, cherubic, with pre-Raphaelite ringlets and a dimple in his chin. Morris wasn’t classical, he didn’t make ballets. He was a modern dancer who drew from a variety of disciplines—folk dance, clog dance, high modern, postmodern, and, yes, classical (he performed with the Eliot Feld company for a time). And he was mightily musical in a showy way, using canon and counterpoint with amazing authority for one so young, an authority that made you think of Mr. B. Indeed, Morris forged the link himself in 1982. Without ever having seen Balanchine’s Liebeslieder Walzer, Morris choreographed a dance to some of the same music and called it New Love Song Waltzes. Writing of the work in her 1984 review, Croce called it “the piece that most of Morris’s admirers love best, and the one that stunned me with its precocity.” Peter Martins, once precocious too, had ascended into Balanchine’s position at the top of New York City Ballet, but it was Mark Morris, a modern dancer, who was the darling of the dance press, its foundling prince. In his 1984 solo O Rangasayee, he even wore a diaper.

O precocity. Morris was fresh in both senses of the word. Certainly no classical choreographer would have made an attempt on Balanchine’s Brahms, a piece of music Balanchine came to in 1960, when he was fifty-six and in one of his glorious full-moon phases. His Liebeslieder Walzer is a drawing-room romance fit into a fine gold pocket watch, its four couples in white gloves circling their interior dramas—the erotic nature of each relationship—in 3/4 time. Morris’s Brahms is more like summer camp after lights out. It isn’t coupled, isn’t straight or gay, but instead has a hum of the polymorphous perverse, as if any coupling is possible in the bushes by the lapping of the lake. Side by side, the two Brahms dances embody very different orientations. Balanchine explores individuals, giving us eight close-ups, eight characters waltzing around their private truths. Morris creates a faceless La Ronde, a twilight tumescence; he cuts against the text of love with a subtext of lust, an articulation of Puck’s “what fools these mortals be,” only Morris, warmer, is saying, “what humans …” He might even be saying, “what children …” Morris dancers have always had the look of barefoot kids whose big bodies have developed before they quite know what to do with them (they’re costumed like kids too, in underwear or untucked jammies or skimpy shifts or baggy tops-and-bottoms).

Where Balanchine’s musical refinement was answered with dancing of like refinement—a classical technique of purring power and containment, cat-lick finish, and emotion sensitively pitched—Morris’s musical refinement served dancing that was blunt, earthy, purposely unpedigreed: legs unstretched, feet floppy and slappy, the upper body not lifted but just plumped there, undancerly, like any office worker. This very deliberate, often coarse, mind-body contrast could work wonderfully well, as in the early Gloria to Vivaldi, a dance where spiritual prostration and sexual frustration knot up ecstatically. It could also look camp, which was no problem because Morris was pretty campy himself, his humor sort of Loony Tunes (batting his eyes at the audience, Morris is as faux femme as Bugs Bunny in drag). And it could look like nothing at all, as in a dance called Behemoth, a big, heavy, empty Merce Cunningham knock-off that just stands there with a leg dangling in the air.

In the beginning, Morris was often compared to Paul Taylor, partly because Taylor has always liked robust bodies on his dancers (except Taylor dancers look like adults, not overgrown kids), and partly because Morris, like Taylor, was making dances that focused on the group at the expense of the individual. But there’s a big distinction between the two. Taylor approaches populations, genres, as an anthropologist or scientist might, with a keen eye for their prevailing rules and postures, pacings and clichés, the ingrown way of dealing with sex and dissent, whether it be a colony of insects (Counterswarm) or a religious congregation (The Word). Taylor is tough and he sees groups for what they are, not co-ops but tribes. Over and over he gives us the sacrificial lamb/maiden in his work: the crushing of the one for the good—the tradition—of the many. Mark Morris is into softer science. He’s not an anthropologist, he’s a sociologist, or, perhaps, a social worker. In the 1990s he did a dance called The Office, complete with clipboard authoritarian; one by one the dancers were removed. In Morris’s work, evil tends to come from without, not grow within, and so the group is an all-embracing place, a comfy commune, a pillow. This view hearkens back to Morris’s early years with the Koleda Folk Emsemble.

“All the forms of happiness that he found in Koleda—artistic, social, emotional, physical—reinforced the communal vision,” writes Joan Acocella in her 1993 biography, Mark Morris. “Utopianism is a constant theme of Morris’s work, and that utopianism comes from Koleda.” Morris’s utopia is a charmed circle of equality and diversity, all body types and colors, no hierarchy of beauty, no stereotyping of gender. Basically, it’s nurture versus nature, not the world as it is, but as it should be, an improvement upon it. This is not a metaphysics, it’s a form of politics. And it is unique to the Mark Morris Dance Group.

It’s important to remember that when Morris’s company arrived in New York, something else had come to town, an epidemic called AIDS. People were terrified, nervous, depressed. As the eighties pulled on, the sadness in the dance community over Balanchine’s death was joined to a greater, darker, deeper bereavement, the devastation of so many young lives lost, mostly men, many artists, with dancers and choreographers among them. Openly gay from the start, with a musical gift that seemed Balanchinian, and a fondness for Baroque music—the voice of the cathedral—Mark Morris was like a flame on the altar, a savior, a future, and it was during these years that he became a cult. Editors and critics fanned the flame, covering anything and everything he did. I fanned too. In fact, it was a curious phenomenon in which many dance writers let slip their critical distance so they might be just that: fans. There was safety in numbers, and the elation in the theater on those big BAM nights felt almost manic; those who did not join in were killjoys. “Lead us,” was the strange subconscious wavelength on the aisle. It was a huge and unfair burden to place on one artist.

Soon “us” was the Mark Morris audience, a clan that watches in high appreciation, brooks no criticism, and gets the Bloomsbury–Barthes–No Exit–Romper Room wit, or rather, wink. Susan Sontag is its godmother; Sharon Delano its consigliere; Threepenny Review, the family paper; Isaac Mizrahi, its burbling bon vivant. It’s an audience politically in tune with the whole utopia ethic, pleased with itself for being so in tune, ready to be pleased still more by whatever should happen onstage, surprisingly anti-analytical for a New York audience (despite Sontag, or maybe because of her), and always ready to laugh—I mean at anything. For some reason Twyla Tharp can twitch ’til she’s blue in the face and no one finds it particularly funny. But if Mark Morris flips his hand spastically, as he did at predictable intervals in the recent dance Foursome, the audience guffaws. Every time. You can feel them ready and waiting, gathering for the next guffaw. In “The Latest Rage,” a dead-on deconstruction of Morris’s audience that ran in Ballet Review, Summer 2001, Michael Porter notes the “distinctive air of aggressive-passivity” and the “too facile embrace.” Take that spastic hand flip. One sees that it doesn’t relate to the music, doesn’t correspond to a musical spasm. So it must be funny, because if it isn’t funny then it’s just … meaningless? A whim? Well, that’s funny too: The Absurd. This audience invests heavily in these dances. As Porter reports in Ballet Review: “In the new illustrated monograph Mark Morris’s L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed il Moderato: A Celebration, the commentators on this particular work do not restrain their honorific comparisons. Among the artwork and artists invoked are Persian carpets, Beethoven’s Fifth, Ulysses, Keats, Dante, Attic sculpture, Botticelli, Wagner’s Ring Cycle, The Four Temperaments, Pasternak, Pushkin, The Sleeping Beauty, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here empathy turns riot.” In sixty-three years of dance-making Balanchine never knew such empathy.

So it’s nineteen years now since Mark Morris “came to town,” nineteen years of prolific dance-making, partnership with Baryshnikov in the White Oak Project, work with ballet and opera companies, and the building of his own school in Brooklyn. In short, Mark Morris is a brand and a business. But what about the dances?

I became disenchanted with Mark Morris in the 1990s. I tired of a gender neutrality that yet left women with the short end of the stick, mainly because the dances showed so little interest in la femme (these girls are kind of like Anybodys in West Side Story, heartfelt tomboys). And Morris’s gift for metaphor began to seem played out, or perhaps abandoned, as if he was no longer interested in his most fundamental poetic device. Metaphor, after all, is artifice. It was increasingly clear that Morris’s early work was his best work, and it never got better than Dido and Aeneas. Fascinating too, because Dido is the one big piece in which he plundered his hippie-dip utopia—in this case, Dido’s kingdom—and did it with the joie de vivre of Don Giovanni adding another dumb broad to his list. It was a work in which Morris’s dancers looked like adults—ironic, actually, considering Purcell wrote the opera for a girls’ school performance—and in which Morris’s sensitivity to Baroque music, his folk shapes and sturdy spatial constructions, not to mention his full-bodied aptitude for drag, all these talents dovetailed neatly to make an airtight expression: a work, a world, that contained its own seas and bed chambers and wind-snapped sails and gravity. It was a Greek myth built in one of Bruegel’s beer bottles. Even Morris’s use of mime, so often kindergarten simple, took flight as if against burnt-brown skies.

Dido and Aeneas was premiered in 1989, four months after L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed il Moderato, the dance Morris’s fans acclaim as his masterpiece. I suppose it comes down to cups of tea. To me, L’Allegro is another Morris dance that looks like it was made at summer camp on the Great Lawn. (Made at Jacob’s Pillow would be better.) It has good things in it—some tight little pantomime sequences, very filigree—but so much of the rest is flat and runny pastel, like over-diluted watercolors being tilted on a board. Coy (I can’t forget the circle of boys smacking each other’s fannies), its garlanded gambols and euphoric running in rows become oppressively repetitive. If this is utopia, forget it. Maybe even Morris was sick of the softness; Dido seems to be made with wood beams and whalebone. Still, I agree that there’s more invention in L’Allegro than in anything Morris is making today.

Most of what I’ve seen of Morris’s choreography in recent years has been work outside his company. It isn’t cheering. His stagings for opera often lack coherence. And his dances for ballet companies have been openly contemptuous of classical ambitions. Are ballet directors so hard-up for choreographers, or just totally clueless? In A Garden, premiered by the San Francisco Ballet in 2001, Morris holds the dancers to the ground as if pinning down the corners of a canvas tent. He allows them insipid leitmotivs that have no metaphorical spin or even juice and instead just leave you scratching your head: That spindly tendu with arms hovering waist level, stiff like a Barbie doll—why do we keep getting that pose? He shaves away hierarchy as if it were a wart. It’s not only painful to see a willow like Muriel Maffre attempting to blend with the daisies in the corps, it’s perverse. Sandpaper Ballet, worse still. Let’s sand down the dancers, sand down distinctions. Everyone’s dressed in green unitards, the grade-school green of molding clay, and in drill formations they prance and wag rump en masse to the kitsch music of Leroy Anderson—Gumby does the Conga—all the while smiling like fools.

Morris’s Gong, premiered at ABT in 2001, is utterly baffling, a piece of chinoiserie for the corner cabinet, a better showcase for Mizrahi’s costumes—tutus stiff as ceramics, and tights with gold Hindu cuffs—than for dancers. They comes out in rows and rows and rows, Morris’s favorite spatial strategy these days, and take turns hitting the same pose, one of those acutely mute positions Morris now specializes in, and that’s the ballet. The only real dancing is in Michael Chybowski’s lighting—séance-like glimmers, the feel of things stealing in the night. In a way, Morris’s performance on the PBS documentary Born to be Wild: The Leading Men of American Ballet Theatre says it all. He clowns around. He doesn’t act like a serious choreographer, but like a kid, and he doesn’t choreograph like a serious choreographer either. The piece he made for these four premiers danseurs was bitsy busy-work that said nothing about any of them, and didn’t say much about Robert Schumann’s music. It turns out that this little dance became “choreographic material” for the final movement of a larger dance, V, which makes you wonder if it ever had anything to do with ABT’s men—and how deeply, for that matter, it has to do with V. Mark Morris, beloved for his endless invention, plopping a pièce d’occasion for ABT into a company work for his own dancers. How very communal.

I caught up with V—premiered in 2001 and pinned with critical corsages—at BAM last March. It was the last dance on a program that left me, one dance after another, acutely mute. Where to begin? With the audience I guess, that same creepy tone of self-congratulation. Hey everybody, group hug!

The first dance, Resurrection, got reviews invoking film noir, murder mysteries, and Balanchine’s Broadway ballet Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (both dances use the same music by Richard Rodgers). There is a couple, a backdrop with stars, and hands miming gun shots. But you have to imagine a noir wash over a sixties slumber party that’s set, say, in a game-show studio. The dancers wear black-and-white pajamas in Op Art patterns (harlequins, squares, stripes, etc.); knowing toothpaste smiles are plastered on their faces; and then they’re on the floor doing clumsy Busby Berkeley. A love story with no love, a murder with no death, it’s a dream ballet with no dream, a Mark Morris so-what send-up.

Something Lies Beyond the Scene. If you would like to play skittles with Edith Sitwell, this one’s for you. The music is William Walton’s Façade: An Entertainment with Poems by Edith Sitwell (Sir Frederick Ashton choreographed the orchestral suite in 1931), and in this dance arch meets antic. See the boys and girls rushing about in T-shirts that sport cutesy symbols: duck, fish, suitcase, ear, cross, bird, boot, etc. Sitwell’s verse (read by Morris and friends in the pit), grotesque and tongue-twisty, but every now and then sliding for seconds into grace, is mostly pretentious and unpleasurable, and so is the dance that goes with it. It’s like an obscure semiotic scavenger hunt—the T-shirts, the Sitwell, the chesty air of understanding among the dancers—but what that semiotic something might be “lies beyond the scene.”

Foursome. Four guys; Erik Satie; Judson Churchy; that spastic hand twitch. At this point I started wondering what people fifty years from now would make of these dances, the peculiar blend of humble pie and highfalutin’. Will they see the affectless tone, arbitrary gestures, emotional void as wit?

V is set to Robert Schumann’s Quintet in E flat for piano and strings, Op. 44, a rather narrow and repetitive score. Morris answers that score with his watercolor formations, loose lines, kaleidoscopic, and he can still be good with canon. V is in the vein of Gloria and L’Allegro, but it doesn’t have a vocal text to swing on, and no gestures that catch and grow. The slow movement has dancers crawling across the stage like creatures pulling heavy loads—man as beast of burden—and it’s another rough opposition. Yet Morris has done this so many times before. The dance goes on, the vision thins, running out long before the music is over. How weak Morris has become. Way back when, his work was defined by what it was: musically communicative, metaphorically alive. Now it feels like the sum of what it isn’t, all those house rules against aesthetic conventions, cultural expectations, dance “lies” (his word) Morris won’t tell. Funny how omissions have a way of growing into lies (never truths). So much effort to empty out, yet nothing much put back in. Morris could do a dance called O.

Two weeks before Morris’s engagement at BAM, Paul Taylor’s company performed at City Center. I won’t go into the volcanic brilliance of Last Look, a dance from 1985 about humanity’s last minutes on earth, a Spielbergian skyride though the final inferno, Taylor’s dancers proving you don’t need digital technology to show rolling backdrafts and gleaming meltdowns when you have a technique of such sandblast power and polish, and Michael Trusnovec the last man to see his face in a mirror, devolving before our eyes, Narcissus in Hell, a performance that was an assault on Patrick Corbin’s alpha-stature within the company, and the dance a smoldering assault on euphemisms like “collateral damage,” not because Taylor made it that way, but because that’s what art does, it speaks without being spoken to.

I won’t go into Taylor’s premiere Dream Girls, set to barbershop quartet songs, a piece so un-p.c. in so many directions it almost seems to be tweaking earnest downtown dance, but spinning out with such complete mastery of turn-of-the-century vernacular—high vaudeville and low burlesque—it’s bliss.

I only want to mention one moment in the other premiere, a dance that could have been called “V” for the way it begins in V formation and continually returns to that V—but is titled Promethean Fire—a dance that looks like the inside of Radio City Music Hall, curve-on-curve Art Deco reverberation, and the outside of the Chrysler Building, aspiration piercing the sky; the dancers one minute heavy as chunks of marble, the next blizzarding into a fugue state (the music is Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor), and Taylor playing fast and loose with heavy and light, sculpted and blurred, order and chaos, life and death and life. Patrick Corbin and Lisa Viola are the lead couple and in the middle of the dance they perform a leap and catch unlike any I’ve ever seen. It’s the size, the scale, of something pair skaters do, the man tossing the woman up into the air and she spinning and landing a good ten feet away on one blade, only here it is done in reverse. Viola runs toward Corbin, throws herself into a jeté en tournant of such flying height the entire audience lifts with her, then lands low in Corbin’s arms in a sweeping stag position, her leg folded neatly. The exhilaration of it; the arc and turn in the air; the swaying kiss of the catch; the bravery of them both; the audience’s answering gasp of pleasure; and the dance completed in a flash, a flight, its themes of reach, fear, and faith caught up, written on air as only dance can do—there was more generosity, more lived life, in that double dare than in all four of those Mark Morris dances. And there was happiness in the theater.

Happiness—artistic, social, emotional, physical—is palpably absent from Morris’s recent work. Sadness is missing too. In truth, there’s no real emotion. Does Morris derive pleasure making these dances? One doesn’t see it. Add up all the arch absurdities, patty-cake postures, formalities dumbed-down, genres camped-up, nonsense pretending to insight, Pepsodent grins patronizing the music, and you have a choreographic realm that is completely artificial, a hybrid of the very artifice Morris originally sought to avoid. Only a self-congratulatory audience could enjoy this stuff, as it’s the only audience that won’t see what isn’t there. Those who all these years have supported Morris with unconditional love—extravagant praise for middling effort, qualified praise for bad work—have hurt him. The boy’s in a bubble. It’s time for Mark Morris to bounce out of his sterile utopia and get some damned life back into his dances.