Making The Right Moves: MARK MORRIS

After more than 90 minutes of nonstop kicks, leaps and turns, the 27 dancers, sweating through their leotards, are beginning to drag. But Mark Morris, the precisionist putting them through these paces, is unmoved by their exhaustion. "A little dynamism would help," he drawls, drawing on the Dunhill cigarette he has been using to tap out the beat.

The dancers try again, but their taskmaster is notoriously difficult to please. Cigarette dangling from his hand and his Tiny Tim-style ringlets bouncing on his shoulders, he strides to the middle of the floor to show them how the steps should be done. Morris, 35, is tall and bulky. There is more than a hint of flab around his waist, an authentic beer belly, the result of a , prodigious thirst that can cause him to put away as many as four bottles within an hour. No one in the room looks less like a dancer. But as he performs the individual steps, they suddenly coalesce into a transcendent mix of movement, music and soul-stirring emotion.

Having accomplished this alchemy, Morris takes another puff and nods for the dancers to start again. "Be expressive," he commands. "Milk it. When it's expressive, it's a lot more interesting. When it's just steps, that's bad news. And when you're embarrassed about doing the steps, that's really bad news. You can't be a performing artist and be embarrassed."

Richly expressive and almost never embarrassed, choreographer Mark Morris has been one of the most interesting and original artists in the modern-dance world for more than a decade now. In recent years he has gained wider fame through his association with Mikhail Baryshnikov, with whom he co-founded the White Oak Dance Project. Their sold-out shows across the country have introduced new audiences to the choreographer's work. Now, after three years of voluntary -- and controversial -- exile in Brussels, this wunderkind of American dance has returned to the U.S.

Morris' offstage performances have sometimes been as outrageous as his onstage productions. He first caused tongues to wag in 1984 when he jumped up in the middle of a performance of Twyla Tharp's Nine Sinatra Songs and shouted his displeasure at the stage before walking out. "I think she's a great choreographer, but I hated that dance. It was horrible," he says now. "You know, a lot of people go along with things. But if I don't like something, I'm like 'Yech, come on, everybody, let's open our eyes.' " Morris provoked an eye-opener of a different sort three years ago when he appeared in a series of photographs in Vanity Fair wearing lipstick, eye shadow, earrings and not much else.

An open homosexual who customarily wears the pink triangle of gay liberation on his lapel, Morris regularly criticizes others in the dance community for failing to come out. "I'm tired of choreographers who are gay pretending that they are straight," he says. In his dances, duets are often performed by dancers of the same sex and androgynous dress is pushed to the point where men have worn tutus. Says Morris: "Passing is a way of agreeing with the prevalent culture that gay is a bad thing. I'm out partly because it's the way I am as a guy and partly because it's my responsibility in the public eye to be gay."