Mark Morris has been a world-renowned choreographer for more than three decades. But he is now also well recognized as an opera director, a natural step for an artist who cares so much about music and how it combines with other art forms.
His production of Handel’s “Acis and Galatea” is one of the main events of the 20th International Festival of Arts & Ideas. Another Mark Morris-helmed myth-based opera, Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas,” played Arts & Ideas in 2009. His Mark Morris Dance Company performed at the festival in 2012. The White Oak Dance Project, which Morris co-founded with Mikhail Baryshnikov, performed at Yale in 1999.
“I don’t know a lot of my own history,” Morris joked in a phone interview last month from Houston, Texas, where he was world-premiering a piece he’d choreographed for the Houston Ballet. He recalls some great cultural Connecticut appearances and accepts The Nutmeg State as a part of “Greater New York.” It’s also close to his dance company’s home base of Brooklyn. “Brooklyn’s where I live, and I love it. What I have in Brooklyn is amazing.”
What New Haven has to offer in this instance are the ever-receptive Arts & Ideas audiences and an ideal venue, the Shubert on College Street. “An opera on this scale shouldn’t be in a 3,000-seat hall,” Morris declares.
This is quite a small piece. “Acis and Galatea” debuted last year and has played theaters ranging from under 1,000 to more than 2,000 seats. At around 1,500 capacity, the Shubert is in that sweet spot of not too large, not too small.
There’s not much that is “traditional” about Mark Morris’ work as a choreographer or director. Throughout his career he’s been challenging conventions — about what dancers should look like, about appropriate subject matters for ballet, about how music and dance should interact. But Morris does hold to one extremely high Old-World standard: That an opera should exemplify the best of every aspect of its production — acting, dancing, music, design — and not merely be a showcase for exquisite singing.
“It’s the whole product,” Morris says, “as opera’s meant to be. It’s fully choreographed,” of course, and Morris’ collaborators include fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, scenic designer Adrianne Lobel and lighting designer Michael Chybowski. Not to mention, Morris notes, that “the musical arranger is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,” who reworked the Handel original in 1788 at the request of baroque-loving patron Baron Gottfried van Swieten. “Acis and Galatea” will be sung in English, from the 1718 libretto adapted by British poets John Gay (of “The Beggars’ Opera” fame), John Hughes and Alexander Pope from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.”
In the time that “Acis and Galatea” has been playing around the country (it debuted in California more than a year ago and has since been staged in Missouri, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts and elsewhere), Mark Morris has created “The Letter V” for Houston Ballet, developed “Words” and “Whelm” for the Mark Morris Dance Group and next week will premiere “The” as part of the Tanglewood Festival’s 75th anniversary season in Lenox, Mass. “I have a big list of things I’d like to do,” he says. Big like Greek myths. Big like opera. Big like modern dance.
THE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF ARTS & IDEAS PRESENTATION OF “ACIS AND GALATEA” is performed 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, June 18 and 19 at the Shubert, 247 College St., New Haven. $20-$130. artidea.org
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