Mark Morris Dance Group: Pepperland

Choreographer Mark Morris loathes nostalgia, and composer Ethan Iverson, a former member of jazz trio The Bad Plus, says that nothing’s worse than a Beatles cover project. So what are these two doing making an evening-length concept dance piece about Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a work widely regarded as the first concept album? Answer: They're making it their own. Iverson’s score juxtaposes elliptical new music with idiosyncratic reinventions of the album’s classics, from a theramin-infused version of “A Day in the Life” to what The Guardian calls a “wonderfully arthritic” take on “When I’m Sixty-Four.” Designer Elizabeth Kurtzman clothes the company’s fifteen dancers in mod, neon-colored suits and miniskirts. Morris’s buoyant lifts and leaps and crisp, balletic, high-energy variations on period dance fuel a prismatic study of a work that engaged the culture’s imagination, if not always engaging the thorniest social dilemmas of its time.