By Richard Covington Bounding up the stairs backstage at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre, balancing a glass of lager and a cigarette, Mark Morris unintentionally displays the exuberant grace that characterizes his choreography. Even with his fullback's girth, the 6-foot-2 Morris, whose dance group was just wrapping up a triumphant week's performances at the Edinburgh Festival, seems light on his feet -- "like Fred and Ginger dancing in the same body," one reviewer marveled. In an empty upper room, he perches behind a desk, takes a drag on his cigarette, flicks aside tendrils of his long black hair with his fingers and says, "Shoot." In a flash, he jumps back up to open the window. "Can't smoke here," he quips, with an exaggerated grimace. "Wouldn't want to set off any alarms now, would we?" Ever since founding his own company, the Mark Morris Dance Group, in 1980, the 40-year-old choreographer has been setting off alarms all around the world with dances exploring an extraordinary range of subjects: lust and childhood fears, cowboys and Tamil Indians, the archetypal suffering and purgation of myth, heartaches and Gershwin. Long before multiculturalism became an aesthetic buzzword, Morris was merrily shoplifting moves from Spanish flamenco and Balkan, Israeli, Russian and Balinese folk dances. An inspired chameleon, Morris is as much at home clogging to Michelle Shocked's twangy country laments as he is with Handel's shimmering paean to the Enlightenment, "L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato." Born and raised in Seattle, Morris fell in love with flamenco when he saw a José Greco show. He was all of eight years old. At 13, he joined a folk dance group, and later went to Spain intending to become a flamenco dancer. After a brief apprenticeship, Morris realized that flamenco was too limiting for him and moved to New York at age 19. Except for a painful stint as director of dance for the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels, Morris has lived in New York ever since. The sharp-tongued choreographer pulls no punches in talking about his likes -- Balanchine, Cunningham, dancing in pink silk pajamas, kilts or his underwear -- and his dislikes -- Disney and other manipulative artists, gossipy journalists, gutless homosexuals and anyone who calls his work "zany." After an initial meeting backstage at the theater, we continued our conversation at Morris' rented apartment. He had just taken a day's break from the Edinburgh festival to visit London, where he had dropped in on Mikhail Baryshnikov. The legendary dancer was performing with the White Oak Project, a group Morris and Baryshnikov formed in 1990 to encourage emerging choreographers and dancers. Morris was seated on the floor when I entered, simultaneously listening to British music hall tunes from the 1940s -- part of his endless, ongoing search for sources to inspire new pieces -- and stretching his long legs in limbering-up exercises.

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