A Mark Morris show is always worth the trouble, if only for what the choreographer does with the music—his principal partner, always live. The unsung maverick of the stride piano, Fats Waller’s teacher James Price Johnson provides the decoratively delightful and rhythmically tricky tunes for the recent You’ve Got To Be Modernistic. Expect Morris’s musical punning, which can be fun and funny. For the 2025 Northwest, the choreographer turns to the composer and longtime Alaskan John Luther Adams for an adaptation for harp and percussion of indigenous Alaskan dances. In their walking pace and the glow that the notes sustain long after they’re struck, the short numbers bring to mind the late composer and gamelan devotee Lou Harrison, whose music drove Morris to forge an unlikely but bewitching bond between force and poignancy. Two early pieces—to Gershwin piano preludes and popular song—complete the program. —Apollinaire Scherr