The
Morphoses, choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon
Carmina Burana, choreographed by Septime Webre
Kennedy
Through April 1
In either creating or viewing dance to Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, the first encumbrance is the crust of camp that adheres to the music from every horror-film preview that’s featured it, plus its unseemly Nazi associations. (Though Orff’s own stance toward the Reich is murky, he had the misfortune of being one of its favorite composers.) I confess that I can’t hear Orff’s “O Fortuna” without recalling Cherry Red Productions’ 2001 show Seven Deadly Dwarves, in which one mini-play, Carmina Pirhana, featured a sexy pet fish that went bonkers every time she heard that overripe choral concoction.
It’s doubly—or maybe even triply—impressive, then, that Septime Webre’s Carmina, originally choreographed for American Repertory Ballet in 1999, cagily eludes our intellectual firewalls to gradually but memorably touch our hearts. It does so by theatrically embracing both the jackboot and related camp associations, then deconstructing them while simultaneously critiquing Teutonic culture. If that sounds like a lot to pull off in a ballet, it is. Then again, Webre’s got 24 musical sections to do it in, not to mention a company in fine form, and the talented Cathedral Choral Society, with the Children’s Chorus of the
In Regan Kimmel’s powerful set design, the singers, in monks’ robes, line stories of rafters around the stage, facing out at us and creating a space that one might associate—through the work’s figurative epochs, and depending on Vandal’s superb costumes and Chenault Spence and Joshua Michaels’s mercurial lighting—with a dungeon-like monastery, a coliseum ground, a cabaret stage, a circus ring, and a ballroom. (Associations may differ by background and age. Consult your analyst before viewing.) Orff’s text was discovered in a monastery. At first thought sacred, it turned out to be, as Webre put it in brief pre-performance remarks, “dirty songs by wayward monks” celebrating springtime, love, and sex. Amen.
Rui Huang (on the Thursday night performance under review here) descends as Fortuna in her chain-suspended steel wheel, at once goddess-like and captive (there’s a Fritz Lang-tinged S&M frisson to much of the staging). From there, Webre plays off the text’s origins and the context of Orff’s work, and takes us on an odyssey from robed self-flagellation to fairly disrobed slap-happy beer-garden hooliganism, bending, on the way, both genders and genres. Oversized Elizabethan hoop skirts and paned balloon breeches, along with orange and pink and jet-black wigs feature prominently in the fun, as do quasi-Vaudevillian broom and chair routines.
But while good gaudy diversion, that all functions primarily to disarm and deconstruct the Orff and strip it to its—Who knew? Or rather, who remembered?—potent emotional core. There we find the superb athleticism of principals Jared Nelson and Jason Hartley, among others, in their punishing aerial and floor work; Brianne Bland in a heartbreaking, disturbing rag-dollish solo before a group of brutalizing men; and wonderfully tender pas de deux between Elizabeth Gaither and Runqiao Du, and Laura Urgellés and Chip Coleman. Those are just a few of many highlights. Soprano Laura Lewis, tenor Robert Baker, and baritone Stephen Combs not only sang gorgeously, but did so at times under somewhat perilous and distracting circumstances, wheeled around on their own (slightly creaky) risers. (If they have weird dreams over the next several months about serenading construction crews, it will be no mystery.)
Ultimately, in her chained wheel, Fortuna ascends—again, reigning but also seemingly bound (O, images of Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, be gone, ye foul pop-culture detritus!)—leaving us to wonder whether we’re constricting her, disappointing her, or evolving toward her, however inevitably or wisely. But in this spectacularly imaginative work, Orff’s fortune is a more definitively happy one. Webre revives, if not redeems, him. And maybe it’s just the spite of one generation removed from an Austrian refugee, but the degeneracy the Nazi critics might have spied here looked all the more lovely and liberating to me for that presumed disapproval. And who’s to say, but I think those monks drinking late into the night and scribbling away by candlelight would have enjoyed it too.
*
First but not least, the evening began with the company premiere of Christopher Wheeldon’s Morphoses. Sona Kharatian and Luis Torres, and Jade Payette and Jared Nelson were excellent, though the women somewhat heavy-footed in their pointe work. Violinists Tom Chiu and Conrad Harris, violist Wendy Sutter, and cellist Danielle Farina performed György Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 1, a chilly but intriguing work that takes vaguely Romantic tropes and classical chords, setting them on edge with scratchy dissonances and rhythmic jokes. That’s fitting accompaniment to the couplings and uncouplings among the four dancers. From their start, lying on the floor in a crossroads pattern, each couple passes energies back and forth, one partner rigid when the other’s slack, catching each other sometimes anti-classically by the abdomens, tumbling through and over one another in connection and disconnection. Each unit of two at times seems to pass its energies to the other duet, doubling the ocular bets by coupling the couples.Further, the simple orange and brown costumes themselves couple with timidly venturing and retracting Etch A Sketch lines formed on the backdrops in Kathleen Tracy’s staging under the blood-warm lighting designed by Mark Stanley and Joshua Michaels. The result, overall, is a quite fascinating living linear abstract art work. Ballet with modern synapse, modern with balletic discipline, it’s an absorbing curiosity that teases us to see more as the acclaimed former New York City Ballet choreographer himself morphs into entrepreneur and his own troupe morphs into Morphoses: The Wheeldon Company.
-A.C.K.
Photo by Richard Greenhouse: Jason Hartley in Carmina Burana. Courtesy of the Washington Ballet.
