Mark Morris' epic love story, Layla and Majnun, comes to Melbourne Festival 2018

Leyli and Majnun, to use the Persian spelling, is about a boy and girl who fall passionately in love but are kept apart by their parents. In life, their commitment never wavers: they are eventually united in death. When I meet Morris, the morning after seeing his interpretation of the story at the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C, I mistakenly refer to it as a myth.

"It's legendary. I don't know if it's mythological," he says. "You can have that argument with some people about the Bible, but not me!" He lets rip a witchy cackle. "Everybody knows it. Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, all of the Middle East, all of North Africa, all of Central Asia, all the 'stans… the fact that we're not familiar with it doesn't mean much."

At 61, Morris has a puckish energy. He hums self-consciously as he potters around the hotel suite, then sits cross-legged on the floor. In his blue wraparound beach trousers, his belly straining at a white geometric print t-shirt, he makes a mischievous Buddha.

In 1788, British philologist Sir William Jones translated Layla and Majnun into English. Romantic poet Lord Byron, with a dash of imperial arrogance, described it as "the Romeo and Juliet of the East," although the legend predates Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers by almost a thousand years.

As Morris points out, this analogy also ignores the Sufi message at the heart of Layla and Majnun about the primacy of spiritual love. The boy, Qays, is nicknamed Majnun – "possessed" – for his absolute devotion. "True love means sacrificing one's life for his beloved," he concludes, before expiring, joyously, at her grave, to join her in the hereafter.

"Romeo and Juliet have sex, it's implied. Layla and Majnun don't need to," Morris says. "It's a human tragedy, but it's a religious and spiritual triumph. In Sufism, that's great. It's Buddhist too, that earthly things don't matter. It's just a little period on earth, and I think that's what this is about."

In 2008, Morris choreographed Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, based on a faster, leaner score with a happy ending – "they vanish and their love lives forever, but they still got laid" – unearthed in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art. His Layla and Majnun also speeds up the action, from childhood sweethearts to eternal bliss in 50 minutes of extravagant sorrow.

The show opens with a burst of mugham, performed by two younger singers, accompanied by virtuosos on the kamancheh (spike fiddle) and tar (lute), to accustom western ears to the nuances of Azerbaijani music. The Silk Road Ensemble then assume their positions, and the Qasimovs enter, Alim in royal blue, Fargana in vermillion. Hajibeyli's score, a fusion of east and west, rearranged for chamber orchestra and Azerbaijani instruments, sounds almost classical by comparison.

Romeo and Juliet have sex, it's implied. Layla and Majnun don't need to.

As in Morris's adaptations of Purcell's King Arthur and Handel's Acis and Galatea, the musicians, singers and dancers share the stage. The backdrop is by English artist Howard Hodgkin, an old friend and repeat collaborator (and an avid collector of Mughal miniatures). He painted Love and Death, a gorgeous swirl of green and red, with the production in mind, and lived just long enough to see its premiere in Berkeley last year.

The lovers, played by a different pair of dancers at each stage of their lives, are identified by long scarves around their necks. Their love is chaste but desperate, their arms constantly reaching out but rarely making contact. They spin like dervishes, and frame each other's faces with their hands, caressing the air as if it were skin, creating the intensity of a tango without touching.

"It's not citations from actual dances in Azerbaijan or Georgia. There are references to that kind of dancing because I like it, and it makes sense," says Morris. "We're not religious, but the style has a dignity and chastity that I liked very much."

Putting on a pre-Islamic folk tale in Donald Trump's America has predictably been greeted as a political act. Morris wants no part of it: "I have very strong political feelings, but I don't feel that very many pieces of art work as both art and politics."

Typically, though, he cannot resist an opportunity to put his oar in: "Entering the United States is the most depressing, miserable experience… I come in to Kennedy Airport and it's filthy dirty and it's disgusting, and they're yelling in broken English. 'Welcome to the United States' is like 'f--- you!' So of course it's timely, but it would be any time."

Since 2001, the Mark Morris Dance Group has been based in a Brooklyn building with studios for hire and a school teaching an eclectic curriculum to children, amateur and professional dancers, and older adults suffering from Parkinson's.

A decade ago, the building was a scrappy sibling to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in a relatively affordable, unfashionable neighbourhood. These days, there is an Apple Store across the street, and towers for the rich to park their money. "It's like Shanghai. It's horrific," Morris says.

In 2013, he was asked to define his legacy by The Guardian and replied, flippantly, that he'd enjoy having a speed bump named after him, to be a daily irritant to commuters. Expecting him to shut the discussion down again, I am surprised to find that in the ensuing five years, he has been thinking hard about how he wishes to be remembered.

"I'm doing what I'm calling Dances For The Future, which is dances that I'm working on now, at least one a year, that nobody sees until I'm dead," he says. He got the idea from Scottish artist Katie Paterson, who has planted a forest in Norway and is commissioning an author a year to write a novel, to be published in 2114 on paper made from the trees.

The first dance in the series has been designed, notated, learned and rehearsed, but won't be performed until Morris dies (or changes his mind). "People will have to wait. I can change it, I can throw it away, I can turn it into a living dance if I want. This year I made up a dance I'm almost finished with to premiere at Lincoln Centre, and another dance to premiere some time in the future, post-mortem. Some people find it grisly and morbid, but I know I'm going to die."

This will necessarily involve ceding creative control. As Morris is a man of famously strong opinions about his fellow choreographers, and almost never licences his dances, I wonder if this concerns him.

"I'm leaving it in the hands of people from my company, who are trained in how to do my work. It'll be rehearsed, and when people move on from the company they'll teach it, just like the oral tradition that informs all companies," he says. "Also, once I'm dead, who cares? I won't. But I want to leave people something to do, not something to remember."

Layla and Majnun is at the State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne, October 10-13. The Melbourne Festival runs October 3-21; festival.melbourne