Mark Morris 'V' reviews 'Grand Duo' reviews 'Peccadilloes' reviews Morris in reviews recent Mark Morris reviews

I prommed for the first time at Sadler's Wells for Mark Morris last week, and a very different experience it was, too. (For those who don't know, the front 10 or so rows of stalls seats are removed to create a promming area for 400 people).

The audience was noticeably younger, and it was very warm, with so many bodies in such close proximity, but fascinating being so close to the performers, especially Morris himself in Peccadilloes, where his facial expressions were so much clearer, and in Grand Duo, where you could see so much better how intensely the dancers were involved in what they were dancing. (Not to mention the excellent musicians, in particular playing up a storm in Grand Duo).

The only problem was that despite the floor being raked, unless you stand in the front row you'll almost certainly have people's heads blocking your line of vision, which does adversely affect your perception of the pieces as a whole. In fact, it did occur to me during the first interval, when everyone was sitting down, that it might be better for sightlines to have the audience sitting on the ground as they used to do at the Royal Opera House Proms (NB: ROH, what about reinstating those?), although that would probably mean that fewer people could be accommodated as a result.

Morris' new work, "V", suffered slightly from being seen from such a low vantage point: to get the most from it, you really need to view it from above, as otherwise you can't see the patterns, made by two sets of dancers in different-coloured outfits, which are such a major element of the piece, but it was still sheer joy. Or, more accurately, 3 movements of sheer joy and one which was rather darker and more foreboding, with dancers proceeding across the stage at a funereal pace, cockroach-like on all fours, reminding me of a particular lithograph by Escher in which the animals become sharper and more real until they manage to crawl out of the picture altogether. It may just have been my original response to this section, but with the dancer's bodies blocking the view to a much greater extent I wasn't struck by the feeling of a struggle to drag themselves back from crawling to an upright position which I had noticed when viewing the work from above. It's one of Morris' more balletic works (it struck me that I could see English National Ballet doing it on one of their smaller-scale tours - after all, Matz Skoog is on record as saying that he'd like to include some Morris in the repertoire), and also one of his most responsive to the music.

I tend not to listen to chamber music, and don't think I'd heard the Schumann piece before, but because the choreography matched and drew such attention to the music, even after only two hearings I feel that I known much of it virtually note-perfect, and indeed I wonder if I shall ever be able to hear it again without seeing the choreography in my mind's eye, so clearly is the association imprinted on my brain. I gather it's not being toured in Britain, but if you get a chance to see it elsewhere you should take it!