One of the most heart-tugging sounds in American music is the voice of the country singer George Jones. In “Say It’s Not You,” he pleads with his lover to dispel the rumors that she’s been spreading her love around. For a man to dance to that recording in a dress — as happens in Mark Morris’s 1983 work “Deck of Cards” — could be a cheap joke. But Morris’s dance is serious: seriously affecting, seriously beautiful.
The return of “Deck of Cards” after 25 years is the highlight of “Dances to American Music,” a series of three repertory programs that the Mark Morris Dance Group is presenting at the Joyce Theater. It comes on “American Heartbeat,” the one dedicated to country and western music, which includes another Morris rarity, whose title could apply to the whole evening: “Songs That Tell a Story.” These are works that show how Morris, famously attentive to music, also has a way with words.
In “Deck of Cards,” “Say It’s Not You” comes between two other tracks. Jones sings the song from the man’s perspective, but the dancer (here the excellent Billy Smith, the first person other than Morris to take the role) wallows in the swirling motion associated in modern dance with women. At the same time, some of his gestures allude to or act out the man’s words, the man’s pain. The dancer is both betrayer and betrayed.
This idea is audacious and simple — audacious in its simplicity — and emotionally complex. The parts of “Deck of Cards” that flank it don’t work at the same level of compression. A remote-control toy truck takes up the first song. The last, a Trisha Brown-style accumulation dance to a monologue about how playing cards in church can have Christian meaning, makes clear Morris’s attitude: Even if the dancer bends over to moon us when the speaker mentions months, sacrilege doesn’t preclude sincerity.
There’s a lot of Jesus in the Louvin Brothers tracks of “Songs That Tell a Story” (1982). Morris treats the religion and the storytelling semi-abstractly, with much use of canon form, the dancers doing the same steps starting at different times. In “Robe of White,” a Louvin Brothers song about a mother receiving a letter informing her that her son is dead, the echoing patterns keep sentimentality at bay, opening up access to the grief.
The program has a hit-or-miss frame of excerpts from “Home” (1993), with sections of clogging that can be too simple — and rhythmically ragged, to boot. But the more familiar closer is the culmination of Morris’s love for country and western: “Going Away Party” (1990), which finds both raunchy humor and pathos in tracks by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.
Another program, dedicated to jazz and pop music, isn’t as strong. It contains the sole New York premiere of this repertory season: “Pizzica” (2025). Set to Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “Grande Tarantelle,” it plays with the tarantella, an Italian folk dance that, legend has it, is the cure for a tarantula bite. Deploying tambourines and stereotypical Italian gestures, it nods to George Balanchine’s “Tarantella,” but despite some fun propeller-like arms and legs, it never takes off. It feels thin, too close to paint-by-number.
There are similar problems with “Dancing Honeymoon” (1998), which draws on pop songs from the 1920s and ’30s (transcribed and arranged by Ethan Iverson, who joins a live ensemble on piano). Some of the tunes are by Gershwin and Jerome Kern, but others are British and the whole sensibility of the music is that of the British West End stars Gertrude Lawrence and Jack Buchanan. The combination of that style and Morris’s miming of the lyrics, potentially witty, is too often twee.
Last year’s “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic” is better, though the match between the music and Morris’s response still isn’t ideal. The music in this case is 1920s stride piano by the great James P. Johnson, transcribed, arranged and played by Iverson. Morris squeezes variations out of the Charleston — even as Iverson wickedly alters the Johnson song that helped popularize the dance into a bumpy 5/4 — and he borrows heavily from the booty-first, slow-churn turns of Snakehips Tucker.
In typical Morris fashion, he weaves these and other period steps together with his own touches (pearl necklace swinging, butt slapping) into an intricate composition. Yet the result is more quaint than modernistic, picking up on some of the comedy in stride-piano frenzy but out of touch with the music’s lowdown blues.
The jazz and pop program is still well worth attending, though, just to hear Iverson play this underappreciated music. So is the third program, which joins the others next week and collects some of Morris’s responses to the West Coast composers Lou Harrison and Henry Cowell, including his masterful “Grand Duo.” Even when Morris’s choreographic inspiration falters, his ear for good music is close to infallible.
Mark Morris Dance Group
Though July 25 at the Joyce Theater; joyce.org.
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