‘CEREMONY OF CAROLS’: VOCAL CHOREOGRAPHY

While the performing arts have turned the Christmas season into big business, they have hardly taxed their collective imagination in the process. The seasonal offerings are woefully predictable: countless stage adaptations of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” a succession of “Messiah” sing-alongs, and the usual balletic assaults on Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker.”

This year Pacific Chamber Opera and Three’s Company and Dancers have joined forces to produce something new for Christmas, a choreographed performance of Benjamin Britten’s choral gem, “Ceremony of Carols.” According to Three’s Company co-artistic director Betzi Roe, who choreographed the piece, it is the first time in the United States that a company has danced the Britten Christmas cantata for treble voices and solo harp.

Roe rejected outright the usual manner of dancing a choral work--simply stacking the chorus at the back of the stage and allowing the dancers to work in front of them. “From the beginning, I saw the singers embracing the dancers and passing among them as they sang,” Roe said.

To carry out this vision, Pacific Chamber Opera’s Anne Young chose a small vocal ensemble of seven women singers to complement the six dancers. Roe put the singers and dancers in the same garb to stress their unity, but she admitted that she had to sell the singers on the idea of moving on stage with the dancers. “They would have been content to stand near the harp at one side of the stage and sing with their feet firmly planted,” Roe said.

Although the 20th-Century British composer had scored the cantata for unchanged boys’ voices, it is usually sung by women’s voices in countries that do not cultivate England’s traditional boy choirs. Using women’s voices suited Roe’s view of the cantata.

“It is a woman’s work,” she said. “The piece itself is a hymn to the Virgin Mary. It shows the changing images of Mary--her maternity and purity as well as her sacrifice.”

Although Britten’s cantata has a liturgical, slightly mystical feel about it, it was not written for a church, and its first performance, in December, 1942, was not in a cathedral but in a museum, East Anglia’s Norwich Castle. But the late medieval carol texts that Britten used as his text and the fervor of his musical style give it a religious cast.

“I did not want the work to be too churchy,” said Roe, even though she kept the opening processional and has her dancers and singers enter the auditorium carrying votive candles. “I wanted to stress the adult part of Christmas--to be serious, but beautiful; to have magic, but not just surface glitter.”

Roe not only designed the dance for “Ceremony,” but she also performs in the work with her partner, Tony Callagagan. One of the founding dancers of Three’s Company, she has been with the local ensemble for 12 years. A slender tower of nervous energy, Roe is as adept at building sets and sewing costumes as she is in creating choreography. In a low-budget operation such as Three’s Company, her versatility is a necessary virtue.

Taking her cue from the medieval poetry of the cantata, Roe studied medieval dance and painting to arrive at an appropriate style for her choreography.

“From the paintings I took the graceful curve of the figures, which seem to emanate a kind of joyful sorrow,” she said. “Projecting this attitude was a challenge for my dancers, since most are used to the energy and angular poses of modern dance and jazz idioms. I wanted them to find in the piece elegance rather than technical prowess.”

To learn about the medieval basse dance, the branle and the galliard, Roe contacted UCLA dance expert Carl Daugenti.

“I discovered that these dances had little physical contact and that they used a different foot position than we now use,” she said. “Unlike the Renaissance dances, in which the toes first were pointed out, medieval dance steps kept toes demurely pointed straight ahead.”

“Ceremony of Carols” is being presented in tandem with Menotti’s one-act Christmas opera, “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art Sherwood Auditorium. Three’s Company dancers Sandra Mangusing and Bruno Esparza will perform the shepherds’ dance in “Amahl” as well as dance in the “Ceremony of Carols.”

Soprano Kellie Evans-O’Connor directs Pacific Chamber Opera’s second “Amahl” production, and Michael Chipman returns this season to sing Amahl. The double bill opened Thursday night and will be given at 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday and Dec. 18 and 21.