by leaps and bounds; Mark Morris celebrates 25 years of glorious, groundbreaking work.

Byline: Liesl Schillinges

Twenty-five years ago, a young choreographer named Mark Morris rented space in a Manhattan dance studio and presented his new company to the public. His dancers did not look like ethereal beings; they looked like flesh-bound humans. And his pieces were charged with fertile contrasts-awkwardness mingled with grace, grandeur with humility, pathos with irony. The dances shocked and excited audi_ences. They still do. "I notice a different reaction every night from every audience," Morris says. "I can't ever predict how people will respond."

This March, the Mark Morris Dance Group celebrates its quarter century with a month of lavish, stage-filling productions at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Pieces include Gloria, from the early eighties, set to Vivaldi's Gloria in D, in which soloists take turns rising up joyfully from a line of dancers who creep across the floor; the sexually charged opera Dido and Aeneas (1989); and the New York premiere of Cargo, in which dancers interact with long wooden poles to Darius Milhaud's jazz ballet La Creation du Monde. At the same time, a connoisseur's selection of solos, duets, and trios will be presented in the Group's $7 million Brooklyn headquarters. The oldest work, Dad's Charts (1980)-a solo Morris performed at ...