Choreographer Mark Morris has never worn his politics on his sleeve. He hasn't had to. Decades ago, after he established himself as a late baby boomer choreographer who loves music to distraction, he built not merely a dance company but a village whose residents stay with him for years. His life itself was political.

Now, in a Cal Performances program Thursday night at Zellerbach Hall and continuing through the weekend, politics comes into sharp if quiet focus, signaling that Morris has evolved into a mature, often disquieted artist who sees the inextricable link between tragedy, pleasure, chaos, beauty and the political state.

While Morris has always cared about society and has a deeply humanist point of view, in the last half-dozen years he has become increasingly eloquent about the enduring values of a Republic. In this current program he meets us with images of both a sweet, balanced society and of stirring visions of unhappiness, war and death. Iraq is never far from consciousness, nor are all the follies of the warmakers, not to mention internal extremists and the rabble.

In the night's most stirring piece, "Empire Gardens," with deliciously bright parade costumes by Elizabeth Kurtzman, Morris does what he does best — draws from early modern dance to interpret contemporary conditions in the same way a modern musician might take a phrase of an old master and reconfigure it.

It is set to the dissonant,

multilayered "Trio for Piano, Violin and Cello" by Charles Ives, played brilliantly in the pit by Michi Wiancko, Wolfram Koessel and Colin Fowler. Morris dresses the corps in whimsical military stripes, moves them in angular semaphoric patterns, and simultaneously evokes early German modern dance, military bandstands and commedia dell'arte.

Like Ives, who layers melodies and dissonant tonalities, including snippets of "Rock of Ages," Morris is fearless in knitting together disparate elements. In the sheer jumble of conflicting audio and visual impulses, he presents a portrait of a childish, silly, but destructive brood unable to see their own folly.

The evening's closing number, "V," choreographed to Schumann's "Quintet in E Flat Major" for piano and string, had some similarly arresting visuals, especially when the dancers scrabble along the ground like athletes/beasts/soldiers trying to escape the battlefield while elegantly attired in deep blue shorts and sexy Japanese hopi coats.

Avian formations abound, and flocking V patterns appear and reappear, as do beautiful couplings between the dancers dressed in white pants and tops and those clad in blue. As Schumann veers from the elegiac to the funereal and back, Morris follows; late into the piece, Morris seems to run on automatic, his ideas thinning before Schumann's music runs out.

"Visitation," set to Beethoven's soul-searching "Cello Sonata No. 4 in C Major," began the evening. Here Morris offers up another, quieter dance of loss and attachment populated by ghosts and memories in which partners are sucked away from one another as by a soft gravitational pull. From loss and dream of loss, the figures repeatedly assert a heroic response, one leg angled over the other, hands together on a hip as Beethoven lets the French song of revolution, the "Marseillaise," leak into the flow.

The company danced like a democratic tribe, moving with unaffected athleticism and joy, embodying through their attack, their commitment and their joy the humanism Morris so deeply prizes.