Mark Morris’s arrival on the New York dance scene was spectacularly timed. George Balanchine died on April 30, 1983, leaving a company shaken, a following forlorn, and an art form facing a new era: classical dance post-Balanchine. Nine months later, on January 2, 1984, Mark Morris was born in the pages of The New Yorker, in a key-to-the-city review by Arlene Croce titled “Mark Morris Comes to Town.” The timing was elegant, just the kind of fateful precision that served Balanchine during a long life of ups and downs, decisions and revisions. And the timing was comforting, not least because it was so Balanchinian. New York dance—stripped of its genius, its prize, its lyric lord—needed a reason to keep going. And here he was: a new genius, chewy, cherubic, with pre-Raphaelite ringlets and a dimple in his chin. Morris wasn’t classical, he didn’t make ballets. He was a modern dancer who drew from a variety of disciplines—folk dance, clog dance, high modern, postmodern, and, yes, classical (he performed with the Eliot Feld company for a time). And he was mightily musical in a showy way, using canon and counterpoint with amazing authority for one so young, an authority that made you think of Mr. B. Indeed, Morris forged the link himself in 1982. Without ever having seen Balanchine’s Liebeslieder Walzer, Morris choreographed a dance to some of the same music and called it New Love Song Waltzes. Writing of the work in her 1984 review, Croce