Mark Morris Dance Group feels the music, at the Wilson Center

Saturday night, as Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys played and sang Yearning Just for You, three of Mark Morris’ men bent a knee, extended their arms toward a partner as they reached back with the free leg. Thus, the men became the very image of yearning. Three women complemented the men by extending their arms to nearly brush fingertips; but arched  backs suggested that unseen forces held them away.

Yearning is one of nine Texas Playboys songs in Morris’ suite. When the women matched the men’s shape and tucked themselves in beside them, the poignant turned comic. From that wedge, they could advance only by thumping along with a certain studied, weighty awkwardness. Three couples managed this funny and not so easy step with absolutely perfect ensemble, to lend the whole sequence an odd sort of virtuosity. Morris’ dancers were touching, goofy and impressive all at once.

In the suite, called Going Away Party (1990), seven loose-limbed dancers wear cartoonish western garb, with couples color-matched (William Smith III was the odd man out). Morris gives the party an arc. We get to know characters, they get a little drunk and tired as the party goes on. Morris adds color and context by drawing expertly but never literally on two-step, line dance and square dance. He doesn’t borrow, he alludes, clearly and always creatively.

Morris grew up folk dancing. He choreographs to the music in ways anyone can feel, in the way of folk dance. But the music doesn’t push him around, not even when it’s Bach. The Mark Morris Dance Group opened this program, presented by the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center, with Italian Concerto (2007), to Bach’s BWV 971. Pianist Colin Fowler, who tours with the company, played extremely well. Morris structured the fast-slow-fast concerto as pas de deux, male solo, pas de deux, plus a crucial full-cast finale near the end of the third movement.

Morris is playful with Bach’s playful music. The choreographer subdivides the beat in all sorts of nifty rhythms, in flurries of clever, speedy steps and gestures, and in brisk canting of hips and shoulders. Sometimes, though, dancers stand still and wait, as if to simply enjoy the music. The stillness cleans the palate and readies you for a key recurring device: the simple extension of an arm and the opening or closing of a fist. Framed by stillness and couched just so in the musical moment, this nothing of a gesture becomes strangely compelling.

The two duets and the solo in between looked completely distinct. Yet the three parts cohered as a whole. In the finale, we find out why. When everyone gets together we realize that they all have a couple of phrases in common. In the finale,  they dance and develop them together. Suddenly the whole piece makes even more sense. The ending satisfies in the way of a clever and convincing solution to an Agatha Christie novel.

Morris hears and understands Samuel Barber and Lou Harrison as lucidly as he does Bach and Bob Wills.

In Excursions, to Barber’s piano work of the same (Fowler, excellent again), dancers gravitate toward a square, defined by both light and by tape on the floor. It’s maybe 15 by 15 feet at center stage. The three couples come and go, but are always drawn to it. In one engaging bit, a man dances a corner-to-corner diagonal solo so eccentric in both rhythm and shape that I wondered what was going on. Then two men reproduced that solo, nutty as it was, precisely in unison. That’s the surest way to establish intent in dance.

Lou Harrison’s Grand Duo for Violin and Piano is epic despite the humble titles of its components: Prelude, Stampede, A Round, Polka. Morris responded by turning his dancers into a tribe.

The tribe’s liturgy begins with the company reaching up from semi-darkness to poke index fingers into a horizontal beam of light. This charges them, and the dance builds and builds not to a frenzy, but to ever more fleet, complex and intense formation dances. When upstage, downstage and in-between lines of dancers cross while in counterpoint, far more than 14 people seem to be on stage. What begins as meditation rises to climax and catharsis.

A beautiful thing about this company is that dancers project distinct personalities even when 14 of them dance together in the tightest unison. They have absorbed Morris’ love for music, and they feel its impetus together. These dancers don’t indicate and they don’t show off; they’re genuine, and that is very appealing. They would just be a list of names here; honor them by finding out a little more about them.