Mark Morris: 'Romeo must live!'

The story told in the build-up to the US première of Mark Morris's Romeo and Juliet last summer is good enough to bear repeating. The place was Bard College – no, not a homage to Shakespeare, but a distinguished liberal-arts school in New York State – and the time was two years ago, when Morris was receiving an honorary doctorate. Leon Botstein, Bard's president, asked him: "Are you interested in this original manuscript of Romeo and Juliet that we found?" Morris answered with what he intended as a quip: "You mean the one with the happy ending?" Replied Botstein: "How did you know?"

A Romeo with lovers who escape their destiny as entangled corpses? Unthinkable! But it exists, as audiences at the Barbican Theatre this week will see. In fact, it was the ending that Sergei Prokofiev wrote for the original 1935 version of his now-ubiquitous score, and it was discovered by a Princeton musicologist, Simon Morrison, in the dusty depths of a Moscow archive. Morrison, the author of a book on Prokofiev's Soviet years, was scholar-in-residence for the 2008 Bard Music Festival. With all those connections in place, Morris agreed to choreograph the piece's world première, 72 years after its creation, retaining Prokofiev's title – Romeo and Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare.

Convention with a sharp twist; iconoclasm with a splash of sobriety: these are two aspects of the unpinnable Morris, performer and creator. An arch-American libertarian, he has always danced – chunky frame notwithstanding (see box) – down his own path, taking material from here, there and everywhere. "I didn't go to a dance conservatoire," he says. "I just did the classes I wanted and so did stuff I wouldn't have come across otherwise."

There are no laws for him, apart from the law of hard work. He drives his dancers mercilessly, and then like a father calls them "very great artists". He is a delinquent with discipline, whose panache seemed outré 28 years ago when his company first exploded on the scene, but is now embraced with no problem. He hasn't tamed with age; rather, we have caught up.

Morris finds art in vulgarity and lowlife, and the result is a backlist of huge eclecticism, ranging from The Hard Nut, his kitsch rewrite of The Nutcracker, to the boggling, tribal stomping of Grand Duo, and on to the rich resonances of Mozart Dances, shown last year at the Barbican. He has set many pieces to sung music, most famously Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, in which he played an unforgettable Dido, and Handel's L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, in which the words of Milton's poem came alive in pictures of startling freshness. He is admired for his musical sensitivity, and insists on live performance, everywhere: "Nothing is more disheartening than recorded music. You don't go to the opera and have the music canned."

That attitude makes Morris the perfect executor of Prokofiev's original wishes, which had been blocked according to American commentators, by the icy hand of Stalinist censorship. The reality is more complicated, though it is true that Prokofiev fell victim to a wave of conservatism that purged formal experimentation and disapproved of any tampering with a figure as iconic as Shakespeare.

Enticed back to the USSR in 1935, Prokofiev had in fact imagined, with the dramatist Sergei Radlov, a reinterpretation of Shakespeare that highlighted the theme of an old feudal order confronted by the victorious morality of the young. It was, to all appearances, a politically correct rereading, although the happy ending had a deeper subtext inspired by the Christian Science Prokofiev had embraced in America, which held that love is transcendent. Yet the score was shelved until the choreographer Ivo Psota staged it in Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1938, with the tragic finale Prokofiev had been forced to compose.

The Brno production spurred the interest of Leningrad's Kirov Ballet. Here Prokofiev was harassed not just by socialist-realist taste, but artistic demands. The choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky insisted on extra bravura numbers and the excision of incongruous exotic dances. He also wanted a new first-act group dance, threatening to add music of his own choosing.

The score used by Morris, then, is very different. The exotic dances have been reinstated; the star-cross'd lovers dance their happy-ever-after duet in a star-studded chamber. For Morris: "They go to some place we've never seen before, where they have some kind of life, or love beyond life. What it does for me is open the ending, and I like that."

He came to the ballet free of the previous multitude of ballet (or contemporary-dance) productions – "I haven't seen them for many years and I don't like them very much" – and he encouraged his dancers to look at Renaissance sources, in particular Giotto's paintings, and strove for vivid dramatic detail.

"With big ballet companies you rarely get the chance to do any more than sketch 'general peasantry' or 'aristocracy'. But we worked to make the characterisation personalised for everybody. There are complicated relationships going on that people will see, I hope." There was freedom for everyone to find their own way into a character. "So the two couples who alternate as Romeo and Juliet have a very different take on their situation."

Inevitably, the scale is small, and this would not be a Morris production without several unique touches: there is no balcony; the bedroom duet is nude-ish (but tasteful); and, the ultimate Morris touch, Mercutio and Tybalt are played by women – a neat inversion of Shakespearean theatrical custom. It was a crafty solution to the prevalence of male roles, "but it was also because these two women [Julie Warden as Tybalt and Amber Darragh as Mercutio] are great actors and I wanted them to have difficult, challenging parts".

Although former members of Morris's core troupe will be playing the feuding parents, the 52-year-old himself will not be dancing. His last performance was last Christmas, in The Hard Nut. He aims to continue in occasional roles, but he has long been diversifying. Directing opera was a natural extension of his choreographic work and he has a long list of productions to his name. And last April he became a conductor, waving his baton at performances of Dido and Aeneas. How did it feel? "Well, you're facing the other direction for one thing! It's scary but the show starts and you just have to do it. It's not a new career – I'm not running off to join a symphony orchestra. It's just something that I'm better at than I thought I'd be."

Ironically for a Romeo with a cheery ending, this production will remain a sad memory for Morris. Two hours before the July première at Bard, his 90-year-old mother, always his closest ally, died in his home town of Seattle. As a result, arrangements for our interview were subject to the understandable issue of "scheduling". But speak we finally did. What are his future projects? "Two Beethoven and Ives pieces next year with Yo-Yo Ma [the cellist with whom he has collaborated on an award-winning film] and Emanuel Ax, the pianist." There are also opera projects in the pipeline. "But," he adds, "whatever is coming up, I'm doing what I like!"

'Romeo and Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare' is at the Barbican, London EC2 (0845 120 7550), from Wednesday to Saturday

Why Mark Morris takes on all-comers

Burly yet delicate on his feet, flamboyant yet serious, Mark Morris from the start adopted a DIY approach to dancing and choreographing.

A son of Seattle (like Jimi Hendrix), his own training was a wild patchwork: tap, flamenco, Balkan folk, ballet, contemporary. His tastes range from baroque music to Yoko Ono, from Schubert to Indian music. (He likes to spend his holidays in India.)

From 1988 to 1991, his company was based in Brussels, as the dance troupe of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Belgium's national opera house. The raucous Morris manner ruffled Belgian traditionalists, but he created three of his best-known pieces there: The Hard Nut, L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, and Dido and Aeneas.

His committed musicality means he always insists on performances to live music and singing. Enormously productive and versatile, he has worked with many opera and ballet companies, including the Royal Ballet and English National Opera.

In 1990, he founded the White Oak Dance Project with the Russian star Mikhail Baryshnikov. His own company has regularly appeared in London and was for several years a consistent feature of the Edinburgh Festival.

His dancers look like the average person on the street and perform dancing that seems like the sort of thing anybody could do – but isn't. At the company's headquarters in Brooklyn they teach young and old all kinds of styles. As he says, the only codified Morris technique is: "Here is some dancing – try it out!" And then practise, practise ...