U.S. choreographer Mark Morris is bringing his acclaimed troupe to Toronto's Luminato festival. (Amber Darragh/Luminato)

Let it be known: Mark Morris is no longer aspiring to be the Napoleon of the dance world. “I gave up on world domination,” jokes the erstwhile bad boy of American choreography. “It’s too exhausting.” Besides, he adds pointedly, “I’ve seen that people who are after world domination turn into real assholes.”

At 51, Morris is prepared to settle for being one of the great contemporary choreographers, with an internationally acclaimed company and a successful, self-titled dance centre in Brooklyn that is the envy of his peers. On June 6, the Mark Morris Dance Group will help open Toronto’s second annual Luminato arts festival with Mozart Dances – a 2006 Morris work that the New York Times declared “a masterpiece.”

In his dancing heyday, Morris had the critics scrambling for metaphors. Tall, big-boned and with a Medusa’s mane of raven curls, he looked like John the Baptist and moved like Salome.

It all sounds very respectable – a far cry from the days when the impudent young Morris and his “freak show” troupe were shaking the pillars of dance tradition. It’s not that the man has become any less iconoclastic; it’s just that the times have caught up to him. In the era of Dove body-image ads and supermodel backlash, it’s no longer surprising to see a dance company that flouts physical ideals. Nor does Morris’s gender-bending work seem so outrageous. In fact, much of it has proved durable. The Hard Nut, his kitschy ‘60s spin on The Nutcracker, has been remounted regularly since its 1991 debut. Dido and Aeneas (1989), in which the burly Morris originally danced the principal female roles, recently enjoyed an acclaimed revival, this time with Morris conducting the music.

Morris was in Boston, preparing to conduct another series of Dido performances, when I spoke to him by phone. Although he has picked up the baton in recent years, he doesn’t harbour any secret dream of being Leonard Bernstein. “It’s something I will do as needed,” he says. “It’s interesting, but I’m not doing what I always wanted to do when I grew up.” That, of course, was dance. As a kid in Seattle, Morris studied flamenco and Balkan folk dancing. The flamboyance of the former and the earthiness of the latter would later inform his striking performances.

In his dancing heyday, Morris had the critics scrambling for metaphors. Tall, big-boned and with a Medusa’s mane of raven curls, he looked like John the Baptist and moved like Salome. But even the unflattering reviews – one writer compared him to the “pirouetting pachyderms” of Disney’s Fantasia – acknowledged Morris’s precision and grace. His company was equally unconventional; at the time, it seemed a deliberate jab at a dance culture that insisted on slim princes and willowy swans.

“It’s not on purpose a freak show — it never was,” Morris says. “I’m not looking for, like, the red-headed lesbian – that’s not what I do. It’s, ‘You’re a fabulous dancer, come work with me.’ That’s how I do it. And it’s not just the bald and the bespectacled, and the gigantically tall or minutely short – it’s also everybody. There are also the scary-gorgeous model types. It’s a big mix of people. It wouldn’t be interesting to travel with a group of people who all looked and behaved exactly the same way.”

The Mark Morris Dance Group is performing Mozart Dances as part of its Luminato engagement. (Stephanie Berger/Luminato)

Morris won’t be dancing in Toronto, but he will be giving audiences a large helping of his work. Luminato is his company’s first Canadian gig in 10 years; he’s making up for the absence with a festival-long residency. In addition to Mozart Dances, the troupe will be doing two other programs for a total of seven performances. “I love that we’re going to be there for so long,” Morris says. “It’s a feast, so come hungry!”

The menu consists of Mozart Dances (June 6-8), All Fours/Violet Cavern (June 10-11) and Liebeslieder Waltzes/Grand Duo (June 14-15). Although the selection runs from recent dances to ones he created in the 1980s, Morris didn’t intend it to be a retrospective. “It’s just a big variety,” he says. “The idea is that anybody could come to one show – or preferably to all three shows; God knows, everybody should do that – and see a big, wide range of what we do.”

The latest work is Mozart Dances, created for Peter Sellars’ New Crowned Hope festival in Vienna to mark the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. “I worship Mozart, like anyone with half a brain does,” cracks Morris, who jumped at the offer to be part of the celebration. His muse for the occasion was the Winnipeg-raised piano virtuoso Emanuel Ax. “I’d met and adored him,” Morris says, “and he said to me, ‘If you ever want me to do something, just call me up.’ So I did.”

Morris came up with a triptych of dances, centred on Mozart’s Sonata in D for Two Pianos and flanked by two piano concerti: Concerto No. 11 in F and Concerto No. 27 in B flat. “The intention was for the evening to radiate out symmetrically from the sonata in both directions,” says Morris. Ax and his wife, pianist Yoko Nozaki, played the original performances. In Toronto, Morris’s troupe will be accompanied by pianists Ursula Oppens and Amy Dissanayake and the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra.

"It’s not on purpose a freak show — it never was. I’m not looking for, like, the red-headed lesbian – that’s not what I do. It’s, ‘You’re a fabulous dancer, come work with me.’ That’s how I do it."— Mark Morris

The two Liebeslieder, or Love Song Waltzes, set to Brahms, hark back to an earlier Morris style that he now regards with amusement. The older of the two, New Love Song Waltzes, premiered in 1982. “It’s harder and weirder and more active and dramatic than the way I set up dances now,” Morris says. That evening’s program is topped off with a Morris favourite: Grand Duo, set to a violin and piano duet by the late U.S. composer Lou Harrison.

All Fours/Violet Cavern also uses modern music. All Fours, one of Morris’s critical triumphs of the last few years, is danced to Bartok’s String Quartet No. 4. Its companion piece, Violet Cavern, is set to an original score by the jazz-pop trio the Bad Plus, which play it live at the Toronto shows. “Everything I do is with live music,” says Morris, whose 19-member dance corps tours with its own 15-piece musical ensemble.

Now in its 28th year, Morris’s company spends much of its time on the road and the remainder in rehearsal at its Brooklyn digs. The Mark Morris Dance Centre, which opened in 2001, boasts studios, offices and a school. (Given that Mikhail Baryshnikov, Morris’s old friend and collaborator, recently opened his own arts centre in Manhattan, I asked if there might be a friendly rivalry going on. “His place is fabulous,” says Morris. Dramatic pause. “Mine’s better.”)

Morris won’t be spending much time in his studio this summer. “Right now I’m on a long stretch of work,” he says. After Luminato, it’s off to Tanglewood to debut a piece set to Samuel Barber’s Excursions for the Piano. In July, he’s staging a much bigger project, the world premiere of Prokofiev’s original Romeo and Juliet ballet at New York’s Bard College. Then, in August, he takes Mozart Dances to New Zealand.

At some point, Morris also hopes to create a new dance for himself. “Right now I’m just performing in The Hard Nut every year. But there will be something else,” he promises. “I’m just not sure what it is yet. I’m threatening to not quit dancing yet!”

The Mark Morris Dance Group performs at Toronto’s Luminato festival June 6-15.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.