Reveling in Earthly Delights of ‘Carmina Burana’ : Dance: Pacific Chorale, Oakland Ballet and Pacific Symphony team up for a staging of Carl Orff’s bawdy work.

The ballet world boasts some 10 interpretations of Carl Orff’s bawdy “Carmina Burana,” including one by Oakland Ballet founder Ronn Guidi.

Ego, however, hasn’t prevented Guidi from allowing his company to dance someone else’s version. New York choreographer John Butler’s treatment, the one preferred by Oakland and many other troupes worldwide, “is the definitive production,” Guidi says. “It’s a visual delight.”

Pacific Chorale, Oakland Ballet and Pacific Symphony will perform Butler’s “Carmina Burana” on Saturday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. The chorale also will give the premiere of Minnesota composer Stephen Paulus’ “Voices.” The contemporary piece is based on poems by German writer Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926).

Butler, who died two years ago, created his “Carmina” for the New York City Opera in 1959. Orff took his inspiration for the 1937 work from poems by 13th-Century Bavarian monks. These very busy monks believed in relishing life’s earthly delights--eating, boozing and making love--as the irreverent, Medieval-folksy composition makes thumpingly, humpingly clear.

“We have done ‘Carmina’ many, many times,” said chorale music director John Alexander, who will conduct. “But to my knowledge, it’s never been done in Orange County with chorale, ballet and orchestra, and Orff states in his score that the work should be a dramatic blending of song and staging.

“It’s one of those wonderful crossover pieces that affects an audience used to classical or pop music,” Alexander said. “It’s harmonically conservative, which makes it approachable, yet Orff uses a lot of energetic jazz rhythms. And it’s definitely inventive. Many compositions are repetitions of ‘Carmina,’ but there wasn’t a piece like it when Orff wrote it. It’s also sensual. Often in chorale music we deal with very high platitudes but don’t get down to the sensual level of mankind.”

The chorale teamed with Ballet Pacifica in February for the first of two dance collaborations this year. In “Carmina,” 20 dancers will have to compete with 160 singers (including some from the chorale’s Children’s Chorus). How’s that going to work?

No problem. “The power of the choreography,” Guidi said, enables the dance to “hold its own.” To cut down on visual clutter, Alexander said, the singers, draped in black monk’s robes, will form a solid wall behind the dancers. A slight acoustic problem arising from that arrangement should be solved by placing a shell behind the singers to project sound outward, he added.

“We did not use that in the Ballet Pacifica performance,” Alexander said, “which made the sound on the stage go up to the ceiling.”

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Guidi took a somewhat literal tack with his “Carmina,” which the 30-year-old Oakland Ballet hasn’t danced since the ‘70s. (The troupe is well-known for its preservation and re-creation of early 20th-Century and later modern ballets.) Butler, however, who studied with Martha Graham, aimed for “an abstract landscape of movement, not a realistic retelling of the poems.”

Guidi said that Butler “chose a very abstract view. For instance, in ‘Forest in Spring,’ the dancers become trees and people run under them. It’s like a playful, sensual mating dance.

“At times, the movement is so minimal, it’s a wonderful contrast to the sound. At other times, the music and the dance are parallel. I find that Orff’s choral piece was crying to be expressed through dance, and when he saw Butler’s work, it was a revelation to him.”

Paulus’ “Voices” was a logical choice for Saturday’s program, Alexander said. “Both the text of ‘Carmina’ and Rilke’s poetry deal with the fate of man, with accepting our fate in life, and the positive things that come out of that.”

The first commercial recording of “Voices” will be made by Albany Records at the center Sunday. The recording session will not be open to the public. The work will be paired with “Songs of Eternity: In Memory of David Lee Shanbrom” by James Hopkins of Los Angeles on a CD targeted for release in the fall.

* Pacific Chorale, the Oakland Ballet and Pacific Symphony will perform “Carmina Burana” Saturday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 7:30 p.m. Composer Stephen Paulus will discuss his piece “Voices,” also on the chorale’s program, at 6:30 p.m. $18 to $45. (714) 556-2787.