Poetry in Motion

Two years before co-founding the White Oak Dance Project with ballet superstar Mikail Baryshnikov, choreographer Mark Morris hit the big time: He and his company were invited in 1988 to begin a three-year residency at the lavish Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels.

Morris’ first work for the Monnaie--”L’Allegro, il Penseroso et il Moderato” (The Cheerful Man, the Pensive Man and the Rational Man), which premiered in Brussels in ‘88--is a big, bright, inventive, full-length work that local dance lovers have been waiting nearly a decade to see.

Finally, our time has come.

Tonight through Sunday, the Orange County Performing Arts Center hosts “L’Allegro, il Penseroso et il Moderato,” which has played to audiences in Seattle (Morris’ hometown), New York, Berkeley, Boston and Minneapolis. It marks Morris’ first visit here since 1994, when his company brought a series of short works to the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

Morris spent three years finding movements to fit Handel’s brilliant setting of Milton’s two great poems (“L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso”) plus a third (now critically despised) text by librettist Charles Jennens, Handel’s collaborator in “Messiah,” “Saul” and “Belshazzar.”

“I’ve always loved Handel’s music,” Morris said by phone from Palm Desert, where his company was dancing just before its Orange County dates.

“I had heard a lot of it, but somehow I had not heard that oratorio.”

A friend suggested he listen to “L’Allegro.”

“Usually if somebody suggests a piece to me, I reject it automatically,” Morris said. “Why? I’d rather think of it myself. It’s very infantile, but that’s how I work. ‘How dare you suggest something to me! I know what I’m doing.’ ”

Indeed, the choreographer of such critically acclaimed modern dance works as “Gloria” and “The Hard Nut” (his pop art version of “The Nutcracker”) has seldom seemed at a loss for ideas.

In this case, however, “immediately I just loved it. It struck me because it’s not historical and not narrative. It’s not like [Handel’s] operas or biblical oratorios. That made it suitable for dance.”

His first thoughts for the piece, in 1985, while he was still working in Seattle, involved a collaboration with the Boston Ballet. “For various reasons, it didn’t happen. It was big and complicated and it didn’t work.”

But when Brussels beckoned, Morris saw his opportunity.

“They asked me, ‘What big project do you want to do?’ I decided that would be the piece.”

The result turned out to be huge: a dance about two hours long, with live orchestra, chorus and five vocal soloists. (It will get the same accompaniment in Costa Mesa.)

Set designer Adrianne Lobel came up with 21 scrims or drops in varying sizes and colors to reflect the subjects in the poems--the contrasting aspects of human character.

“I decided early on, the set would divide the [stage] space in different ways so I’d have different-size rooms,” Morris said. “That decided for me how to create [movement for] certain parts of the music. I tried many, many different manifestations of the set.”

Christine Van Loon designed costumes, which Morris said are “muted for the first act, brighter for the second.

“Originally, I was thinking [Merce] Cunninghamian. During the course of the show, one person at a time would change costume, so that the stage would be gradually infiltrated by the other palette. Then I decided against it. So the change happens at intermission.”

He worked with conductor Craig Smith to “decide what movements didn’t apply.

“We dropped sections from ‘Il Moderato’ because it’s not Milton. The text isn’t as good. Even Handel dropped ‘Il Moderato’ in later performances. With the two parts I got brilliant music.

“Also, I didn’t want a big finale about being happy or sad and you come out saying, ‘You should be regular all the time.’ ”

A notion of doubling permeates everything in the dance, Morris said. “There really isn’t any extended solo that doesn’t have someone else involved in it. There is a lot of mirroring, radial symmetry in the whole piece.”

Morris, who will not be dancing in Costa Mesa, has been occupied with more big projects recently. He presented a “big” new dance, “Rhymes With Silver,” to a commissioned score by Lou Harrison, last month in Berkeley. In August, he will direct and choreograph Rameau’s “Platee,” co-commissioned by the Edinburgh Festival and the Royal Opera House of Covent Garden.

But generating the biggest buzz is his work with pop singer-musician Paul Simon and Nobel Prize-winning author Derek Walcott on a Broadway musical, “The Capeman.”

The musical is based on the story of Salvador Agron, who became a writer while serving prison time for two New York City murders. Morris will direct and choreograph, Ruben Blades and Marc Anthony will star. The previews will be in October “out of town somewhere”--possibly San Francisco--Morris said; it is expected to open in New York in January.

“We’re working every minute, all the time,” he said.

Morris likes to focus forward. He almost never revises works after they’re done and has no plans to change “L’Allegro.”

“It was finished when I made it up,” he said. “I don’t look back at it. I look at it.

“We [perform] it all the time. It’s not a historical thing for me, although the cast has changed gradually over time. It looks great, beautiful. If I didn’t like it, we wouldn’t do it.”

BE THERE

The Mark Morris Dance Group dances Morris’ “L’Allegro, il Penseroso et il Moderato” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. today-Sat., 2 p.m. Sat. and Sun. $18-$59. (714) 556-2787.

* DANCE LISTINGS, Page 36