Double Slice of Stage Verismo

At the start of “Pagliacci,” composer Ruggero Leoncavallo has a character describe the opera as “a slice of life”--”Uno squarcio di vita,” as Tonio puts it in the famous “Prologo.”

Audiences are in for a double slice at Opera Pacific’s presentations this week of the ever-popular tragedy of the crying clown.

Usually, “Pagliacci” is paired with Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana,” another one-act verismo, or realistic, opera. But Opera Pacific will be pairing it with a danced version of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana.”

Orff’s 1937 work can also be considered a slice of life, however--the life of 13th century wandering, wayward monks as recorded in their often bawdy poems.

Orff originally conceived it as a staged work, the first part of a trilogy. (The other rarely performed parts are “Catulli Carmina” and “Trionfo di Afrodite.”) But even when done by itself subsequently, “Carmina Burana” sometimes has been choreographed, most famously by John Butler for the New York City Opera in 1959, among other versions.

The trick facing the team responsible for Opera Pacific’s pairing--dancers-choreographers Ashley Roland and Jamey Hampton and stage director Christopher Mattaliano--was to link the ballet to the opera. They created it in 1997 for Portland Opera, and all three are participating in the production opening tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

“We are playing ‘Carmina’ almost as a kind of sequel of ‘Pagliacci,’ ” Roland said recently over coffee with her two collaborators. “A theme is carried through. But we don’t want to give away too much about it.”

“It definitely follows the major themes of the work--love, fate, lust, debauchery, trying to control life,” said Hampton. “The differences are that in ‘Pagliacci’ they are very literal. They get much more abstract in ‘Carmina.’ They’re not involved with specific characters and jealously and star-crossed lovers and a murder and all that. But they have the same themes.”

*

Roland and Hampton are members of innovative modern dance troupes ISO and Momix and have been collaborating for about 14 years. They typically rely upon improvisation as a starting point, but even after finishing a work, improvisation sometimes remains in the piece, as in their “Carmina.”

“There’s one duet that is pure improv,” said Hampton. “The first number of the ‘Tavern’ section. It’s a pure, unbridled, energetic improv.

“We like to keep an element of improv because it just makes a sense of liveliness to [the work] that would not exist otherwise,” he said. “It’s a dangerous thing to do. You just put yourself out on the edge. It’s almost like a moment of mischief that I think the piece really calls for. It calls for a kind of unbridled abandon.”

“Anything could happen,” added Mattaliano.

Including, apparently, a dance with a boa constrictor.

“Originally, when we choreographed ‘Carmina,’ one of our dancers had the snake,” Roland said. “Jamey and I are always looking to do something new, and really, your resources are all around you. We don’t look for them only in the dance studio. So we asked [her], ‘Is it friendly enough to roll around your neck while you’re dancing?’ It played perfectly with the themes of ‘Carmina’ because of fate and the other reference to Original Sin and the Garden of Eden.”

The original boa constrictor was named Lou. The one local audiences will see is named Sarah.

“We lost the dancer from the last production,” Roland said. “So now we’ve rented [the snake]. It’s very nice. We’ve worked with it already.”

“It eats once every three weeks,” added Hampton. “It ate a few days ago, so apparently it’s going to be OK for the run.”

For his part in finding a link with “Pagliacci,” Mattaliano looked for common themes.

“One could say the whole idea of someone trying to modify or control their destiny, which is what the opening chorus of ‘Carmina’ is about, could apply to Canio in ‘Pagliacci,’ ” the director said. “He knows his marriage is in crisis, and he is determined to keep his marriage intact. [His wife] Nedda and [and her lover] Silvio dream of running away and creating a life together, and obviously fate has a very different part for them.

“Without straining too much, one can say that the pieces share that,” Mattaliano added. “Then the idea that kept coming to me was the idea of a journey. We have these monks going from tavern to tavern and living their life, and in ‘Pagliacci,’ we have a traveling group of artists that go from town to town. That led me to ‘La Strada’ of Fellini.

“Knowing that ‘Carmina’ was composed in 1937, I thought that might be a setting. Certainly, there’s nothing in the libretto of ‘Pagliacci’ that says it has to be the 1870s, literally nothing in the text that says it can’t be set really anywhere,” he said. “I thought, ‘Well, maybe we can set it in the world of “La Strada.” ’ I thought that was something that would enhance the piece.

“You’re dealing with a very impoverished and a war-ravaged time in which a group of performers, however seedy they might be, like Canio’s players . . . their coming into a village would be an event. It would be like adding a little bit of poetry in these very harsh lives. I thought that having that as a background, as an environment, would only enhance the staging.”

Both opera and ballet will make use of projected English supertitles, but Hampton cautioned expecting literal representation.

“We don’t take the words and literally reenact them,” he said. “We’re very careful that there is a relationship but that it’s not literal, because we don’t want the audience to look up there and go, ‘Oh, monks drinking’ or ‘monks playing dice.’ There’s none of that.”

“Again, not to sound like we’re being intentionally evasive,” said Mattaliano, “part of the device of the piece is that we found a way to go from the end of ‘Pagliacci’ dramatically and emotionally to the beginning of ‘Carmina’ that I think we’re all very satisfied with. But that’s really a surprise in the theater.”

* Opera Pacific will present Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” and Orff’s “Carmina Burana” beginning tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 7:30 p.m. Also 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Saturday and 2 p.m. on Sunday. John DeMain will conduct all performances. $28-$93. (714) 556-2787.