Mozart Dances, Mark Morris Dance Group, photo by Gene Schiavone

Over the weekend Mark Morris Dance Group returned to the Kennedy Center for the first time since 1999, although we last saw the company at George Mason a year ago for their production of Dido and Aeneas. This was also my first chance to see the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater since its much needed
renovation, which was concluded this past fall. That dingy old theater, which badly needed a face lift, looks and sounds like a new space, and it was a delight to see it play host to Mark Morris’s airy, sunny Mozart Dances on Friday evening. Premiered only in 2006, a commission for Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, this graceful, bouncy choreography appealed on a purely visual level, with movements that corresponded to the Rococo whorls of some of Mozart’s most aesthetically pleasing scores.

The production combined two Mozart piano concertos, in a competent if somewhat pedestrian performance by the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra under the capable baton of British conductor Jane Glover. The crucial piano parts, which Mozart generally wrote for himself, were played by a pianist who normally specializes in contemporary music, the veteran Ursula Oppens. Morris often hewed close to the score for the shapes of his choreography, matching the three quarter-note motif of the F major concerto (K. 413) to three bounces by dancers throughout the first act, Eleven, giving many of the piano-only sections of music to a solo female dancer (the pixie-like Lauren Grant), and creating raised-arm gestures to correspond to sforzandi in the piano part. Some of the costumes (designed by Martin Pakledinaz) were inspired by the 18th century, too, but like the set backdrops (large, plain swaths of paint by Howard Hodgkin) they had a simplified, minimalistic feel.