Sopranos Hei-Kyung Hong, Sarah Coburn and tenor Barry Banks fell short. Despite the soloists’ ethereal renderings, only bass-baritone John Relyea got his mouth around Milton’s words. There was humor, like the dogs finding relief on stage, so predictable you laughed in advance. Dancers embodied trees, and the boys played hound dogs, not a very far stretch for young men. The infamous hunt scene ensued, but it all felt very far away with the orchestra interceding. Ingalls’ luminous high-contrast lighting signaled new moods. Morris then swapped to the work’s other prime modality, the bucolic mise-en-scène, transformed into a classical painting by set designer Adrianne Lobel’s sharply rectangular stage frames.
#SCITE ZOOMED IN SKIN#
Even before intermission, the disempowered troupers didn’t seem to have any skin in the game. Hands tucked on waists, elbows out, faces in profile, the dancers shuffled in fiendish patterns, bah-dump, bah-dump on the downbeat, and a deadpan look emerged. Further, the episodes rolled out sideways, with no particular arc. But impatience mounted as the choreographer never loosened his grip. Morris’ fascination with the duality of his material found form in his use of mirrored dance shapes, and in his oscillation in tonality between darkness and light. An impressive softness in the barefooted pitter-patter added to the work’s initial serenity, and Morris’ circular, zig-zagged and flat-lined patterns pleased. On Thursday night, Morris showed his best known pure-dance mode by moving his 24 dancers through stage patterns suggestive of Busby Berkeley with Central European folk-dance roots. (Are you getting all this, children?) The unutterably ambitious Morris united all this heady content when he was a 32-year-old dance director of Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. Enter a librettist, Charles Jennens, who authored the ‘il Moderato’ text, which advocates a middle path between extremes. Based on these truly lovely poems (as program inserts, unreadable in the dark theater), Handel spun his sublime score. The ‘L’Allegro’ bit connoted the vivacious, actively led life the ‘Penseroso,’ the contemplative and introverted.
Morris delivered his big meal in dollops that illustrated a paired set of odes by English poet John Milton. The work’s nice-and-easy pacing came as a blessing to the jumpy, text-messaging generation: OMG, Handel rocks!
‘L’Allegro,’ restaged in honor of Mark Morris Dance Group’s 30th anniversary, unfolded in two generous halves, the first lengthier. In Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center performances at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion this weekend, the lucky dance maker had as his collaborator the Los Angeles Opera - its orchestra, choir and four gifted solo singers. ‘L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato,’ choreographer Mark Morris’ highly regarded dance work set to George Frideric Handel’s sprawling baroque score, zoomed to ‘masterpiece’ status at its debut in 1988 it’s a biggie, a must, we’re told. This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links.
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