From the most brilliant and audacious choreographer of our time, the exuberant tale of a dancer’s rise towards the pinnacle from the performing arts globe, as well as the triumphs and perils of creating focus on his own terms-and staying true to himself

Before Tag Morris became “probably the most successful and influential choreographer alive” (The New York Moments), he was a six year-old in Seattle cramming his foot into Tupperware glasses in order that he could practice taking walks on pointe. Often the only boy about ALOUD: A Memoir in the dance studio room, he was known as a sissy, a term he wore like a badge of honor. He was unlike other people, deeply gifted and spirited.

Moving to NY at nineteen, he came to one of the fantastic booms of dance in America. Audiences in 1976 had the luxury of Merce Cunningham’s finest experiments with time and space, of Twyla Tharp’s virtuosity, and Lucinda Childs’s genius. Morris was smooth broke but discovered several likeminded artists that danced together, travelled jointly, slept together. Nobody wanted to break the spell or miss something, because “in the event that you missed anything, you skipped everything.” This collective, led by Morris’s fiercely primary vision, became the famous Mark Morris Dance Group.

Instantly, Morris was making a fast ascent. Celebrated by THE BRAND NEW Yorker’s critic as one of the great youthful talents, an androgynous beauty in the vein of Michelangelo’s David, he and his business had came. Collaborations with famous brands Mikhail Baryshnikov, Yo-Yo Ma, Lou Harrison, and Howard Hodgkin implemented. And so did controversy: in the circus of his tenure at La Monnaie in Belgium to his work on the biggest flop in Broadway background. But through the Reagan-Bush era, the worst from the AIDS epidemic, through rehearsal squabbles and backstage intrigues, Morris surfaced among the great visionaries of contemporary dance, a push of nature using a dedication to beauty and a like of the body, an designer as joyful as he’s provocative.

Out Loud could be the bighearted and outspoken tale of a guy as formidable for the web page as he’s on the planks. With uncommon candor and disarming wit, Morris’s memoir catches the life of a performer who broke the mold, an excellent maverick who found his house in the collective and liberating world of music and dance.