Music : CalArts Fest Opens With Fire and Ice

A glassy opera probably better read than heard and a spirited dance that sounded better than it looked were the opening salvos of the 1992 Spring Music Festival at CalArts.

Since its first weekend event back in 1978 as the CalArts Contemporary Music Festival, both quantity and quality at the annual affair have been subject to wild swings. The current edition, however, seems to have much of the ambition and energy of some of the peak years, as well as the characteristic mixed results.

Robert Ashley, much celebrated in other parts of the world for expansive music theater and video projects, has been locally known largely by report in recent seasons. Saturday, on the composer’s 60th birthday, CalArts introduced his chamber opera, “Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)” to local listeners. On Tuesday, it will present his “eL/Aficionado.”

“Improvement”--on Ashley’s own libretto--is a play of ideas rather than characters, with the titular Linda a deadpan Everywoman. Spiritual alienation and cultural assimilation are the topical touchstones, developed through unlikely social inquisitions over airline tickets, pasta, golf and bridge.

It is every bit as wordy as you might expect, 90 minutes of mostly monotone chant, the amplified and processed voices blending well with allusive tape tracks. Given the references of the text, Ashley may mean to suggest various types of cantillation with his recitatives, but the effect is often that of an anemic, academic rap.

Jacqueline Humbert intoned the philosophical plaints of Linda with sweet agility and ironic flair. In accomplished subsidiary roles and chorus doublings were Thomas Buckner, Sam Ashley, Joan La Barbara, Adam Klein, Amy X Neuberg and the composer himself.

All were comprehendible, if you listened closely. Ashley gave you little incentive to do so, however, until too late, extending his musical gestures and textures in the second half.

The stark oratorio staging was as uncompromisingly detached as the music, dramatized only by the suggestive lighting of Aubrey V. Wilson. Tom Hamilton was in charge of the sophisticated electronics.

Standing in sharp contrast to the polished surfaces of “Improvement” was the joyfully untidy performance Friday of the CalArts African Music and Dance Ensemble, also in the campus Modular Theater.

And for cultural comment, Ashley’s patter sermons couldn’t compare to the sight of those college kids, grass skirts over bicycle shorts, rolling their shoulders and hips in earnestly awkward accounts of contemporary West African social dances.

Directed by Alfred and Kobla Ladzekpo and Beatrice D. K. Lawluvi, the performances actually gave some intriguing insights into how these type of dances look on a communal group of enthusiastic amateurs, rather than on professional entertainers such as, say, the superbly trained gymnast-dancers of Les Ballets Africains.

Following an invocation by Kobla Ladzekpo came five dances from Ghana and Benin, basically line and circle dances with the formations based on couples, with appropriate changes in costume.

The real power here was in the vivid, rhythmically contrapuntal music, particularly in the lengthy, stylized war dance, “Atsiagbekor,” which closed the formal part of the program. The audience was then invited onstage for a participatory encore, which quickly dissolved into a happy, crowded melee.