It is unusual, perhaps even unique, for a choreographer who started out as part of the downtown loft-theater experimental-dance scene to end up as head of the resident ballet company of one of the royal theaters of Europe; yet Mark Morris has gone from Dance Theater Workshop to the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels in less than a decade. The move was greatly mourned, and its necessity—basically financial—decried, by Morris’s champions among the American dance community. But the residency in Brussels has also allowed Morris to work on an opera-house scale, one of the results of which, his setting of Handel’s L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed Il Moderato, was given its U.S. premiere in October as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.

Morris has by no means abandoned his downtown roots, however. Also part of the BAM season was a mixed bill which included some new works that would not have been out of place on West Nineteenth Street, though they were in fact created for a chamber touring company that the choreographer has formed with Mikhail Baryshnikov. The former danseur noble became a confirmed fan when, as artistic director of American Ballet Theater, he commissioned from Morris Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes. Choreographed in Morris’s quirkily inventive ballet style to rather banal piano music of Virgil Thomson, Drinkgave the middle-aging superstar, weary of the standard repertory of ballets and the standard adulation of balletomanes, the challenge of conquering