Time & Perspective Quote by Mark Morris

The “same room” is Mark Morris’s sly reminder that dance isn’t a product beamed at consumers; it’s a live, bodily negotiation among performers and the people watching them. He’s not romanticizing togetherness so much as insisting on the basic physics of performance: attention moves, energy ricochets, and choreography doesn’t land in a vacuum. In an era that trains audiences to sit politely, scroll mentally, and treat art as content, Morris frames involvement as the real medium.

The key move is his refusal to play auteur. “I want people to be involved,” he says, then immediately undercuts any fantasy of control: “you can’t decide exactly to what extent.” That’s not hedging; it’s an ethos. Morris’s work has long pushed against the sealed-off, reverent temple vibe of concert dance, borrowing from social dance, musicality, and theater without begging for permission. Here, he’s describing a porous boundary: the choreography sets conditions, but the audience completes the circuit. Some nights the room crackles; other nights it’s polite, or resistant, or oddly tender.

Notice the piling repetition - “it depends on the show… on the audience… on everything.” It’s casual speech doing serious work, widening causality until it becomes ecological. Context isn’t a footnote; it’s the instrument. The subtext is humility with teeth: if you’re making live art, you don’t get to freeze it into a single meaning. You tune it, you offer it, and you let the room answer back.