Music & Dance : Chorale to Give Voice to Ballet Premieres

Ballet Pacifica and the Pacific Chorale are seeking to appeal to wider audiences by collaborating on a program Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

“Movement can enhance music,” Pacific director John Alexander said last week. “I don’t think all choral performances should be that way, but once in awhile, I think it’s good for an audience to have something to see besides people singing.”

“I’ve always been interested in working more with live music,” said Ballet Pacifica director Molly Lynch. “Doing a joint concert sounded beneficial to us. Both groups were interested in giving a variety of musical styles and a variety of different choreographers.”

The concert will include three dance premieres--Michael Kane’s “The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manticore” set to Gian Carlo Menotti’s score by that name; David Allan’s “Come to Me, My Love” (music by Norman Dello Joio), and Lynch’s “The Settling Years” (music by Libby Larsen). James Jones’ “Liebeslieder Waltzes,” created to the Brahms score last year, completes the program.

Menotti called his work, choreographed for the New York City Ballet in 1957, a “madrigal fable for chorus, dancers and nine instruments.” Besides the music, the composer wrote the text, which tells the story of a poet who brings a different mythological beast to town on each of three successive Sundays. At first, the townspeople think he is crazy, but the countess adores the animals and insists that her husband get her one of each. Soon everyone begins imitating her. (Gorgons and manticores, incidentally, are part human and part animal.)

“The thing that interested me,” Kane said recently, “beyond just the fact that metaphorically the dreams of the poet are destroyed by the populace, beyond the plight of today’s artists, is that it’s a love story between the count and the countess, or rather of the lack of love between them.

“The man is so passionately devoted to the woman that he will do anything, go to any lengths to try to get her to love him, which she is incapable of doing. She is overcome with the desire to be the richest, the best dressed, the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. Nothing he’s interested in.”

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The countess actually kills off each animal as the next one appears, but she doesn’t tell her husband.

“There’s a fair amount of killing,” Kane said. “You see it. Yes, you do. It’s abstracted, but, yes, it’s certainly done.

“But the poet doesn’t kill his animals, because they’re a part of his being. The moral is that we cannot kill off the good things in our lives and that imitation is not necessary for us to have our own selves.”

The work, Kane’s first in Southern California, lasts about 45 minutes.

“I do big dances,” he said. “I like large pieces, big arcs.”

Allan, who created “Capriol Suite” for Ballet Pacifica last summer, described “Come to Me, My Love” as “a romantic pas de deux. I can’t read more into it than that.” The four-minute-plus dance is set to a piece for mixed chorus and piano by Dello Joio, based on the poem “Echo” by Christina Rossetti.

There is “an edge of mystery to the dance,” Allan added. “There’s a feeling of a journey on the edge of something--like hanging over the edge of a cliff and someone is holding on and won’t let go. Besides love for the sake of love, it’s more about trust, leaning off the edge and trusting the other person.”

He created the piece for Ballet Pacifica dancers Lisa and Edward Cueto, who are married.

“Nothing has ever been created on them before,” Allan said. “They just received contracts in Europe. She’s going to join (John) Neumeier at the Hamburg Opera. Ed will join the ‘Phantom of the Opera’ cast in Hamburg. They’re moving in May. I said we should change the title to ‘Come With Me, My Love.’ ”

Lynch’s work, “The Settling Years,” sounds like a cross between Eugene Loring’s “Billy the Kid” and Agnes de Mille’s “Rodeo.”

“It’s divided into three sections and based on some pioneer texts that Libby Larsen has taken,” Lynch said. “There’s a sort of Americana, prairie kind of feeling to the work. The first section, ‘Comin’ to Town,’ is a real up, barn-raising dance. Then ‘Beneath These Alien Stars’ is more lyrical, this feeling of twilight turning into evening as things slow down. The third section, ‘A Hoopla,’ has a square-dance kind of feel.”

Lynch said the first joint effort by her troupe and the chorale is “exciting, but scary too.”

“But I try with each concert performance to give ourselves new challenges, to do better than our last program,” she said. “I would like to do more collaborations with organizations like this.”

* Ballet Pacifica and the Pacific Chorale will collaborate on a program Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Curtain: 7:30 p.m. $15 to $90. (714) 556-2787.