A ‘Dream,’ Long Deferred, Gets Interrupted This Midsummer

Training his dancers carefully, Aterballetto choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti waited three years before he felt they were ready for his first full-length narrative ballet, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

“Once I had taken the direction of the company,” Bigonzetti recounted by e-mail recently from the company offices in Italy, “I thought it was better to focus on first creating a style, starting from pure dance energy. Then I found it was time to approach this ‘Dream’ I had in my mind.”

Aterballetto will dance the first United States performances of “Dream,” set to a commissioned score by Elvis Costello, today and Saturday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

There were supposed to be more performances. A four-day run at UCLA was canceled, however, and the company’s original three-day engagement in Orange County has been cut to two.

UCLA had planned the ballet as part of a Costello residency that was supposed to have extended into the summer. “Unfortunately, his plans changed,” said David Sefton, UCLA performing arts director.

“His new album [‘When I Was Cruel’] exploded and it occupied all of his life. Things he intended to do he ended up postponing, which left Aterballetto hanging on its own. Nothing had sold on them, to be honest. It’s not a known name; it wasn’t part of our dance series; and it’s high summer. We didn’t want it to play to empty houses.”

Ticket sales in Orange County were so slow “it just made sense to condense the run into two performances instead of three,” said Judith O’Dea Morr, the performing arts center’s vice president of programming.

“It’s a brand-new company to the West Coast. No one here has had an opportunity to see them yet. They need a chance to see the them.”

Yet local audiences have seen Bigonzetti’s work danced by other companies. Balletto di Toscana danced his “Mediterranea” in Orange County in 1998. Lewis Segal, Times dance critic, called it “a vision of dance theater with deeper values than merely displaying steps, styles, stars or stories.” Stuttgart Ballet danced his “Kazimir’s Colors” in Orange County in 2000. Segal called it a “zesty tribute to Russian artist Kazimir Malevich.”

There’s every reason to believe that the combination of this company and Bigonzetti will work just as well. He got his start as a choreographer while he was a dancer with Aterballetto (the troupe’s name reflects its origins in the Associazione Teatri Emilia-Romagna or Assn. of the Theaters of the Emilia-Romagna region).

He performed with the troupe from 1982 until 1993, then worked with Italy’s Balletto di Toscana until he returned to Aterballetto as artistic director in 1997. His “Midsummer’s Night Dream” received its world premiere--and decent notices--at the Bologna 2000 Cultural Festival.”For me, Shakespeare’s ‘Dream’ is one of the most visionary plays ever written,” Bigonzetti says. “It’s a world swirling with intrigues, strange surroundings and interwoven story lines that end up bewildering even the most attentive reader.”

In fact, he says, “the biggest difficulty was to bring on stage three stories that go on in the same time, but each using a different expressivity and gestural language.”

The characters--the fairies, the nobles and the actors (think Bottom) in the play within the play--represent “three different levels of reality,” Bigonzetti says, “three worlds that I have decided to specify with different costumes, choreographic languages, settings. But at the end, all of them represent a different expression of the same hidden driving force: desire.”

Although he knows the Frederick Ashton and George Balanchine ballets based on the play, Bigonzetti regards his as quite different. “Their versions are more classical--in the costumes, narration and duration, too,” he said. “They were created in other periods and reflect the ideas of their time. My idea was to create something with a lighter and softer mood, that could be also amusing and easy to follow.”

A fan of Costello’s “The Juliet Letters,” a 1992 collaboration with the Brodsky Quartet, Bigonzetti asked the Dublin-based pop star to try his hand at writing a ballet score for a full orchestra.

“He said, ‘OK, I’ll try. But I’m not sure if I can.’ After I heard three or four minutes of his music, I understood, yes, it’s possible. He had a fantastic sense about the characters and the story.”

Costello, in Australia on a world tour promoting his latest record, admitted by e-mail that he had not had much interest in dance until he saw an Aterballetto performance of Bigonzetti’s “Paradiso,” based on Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” It was “impressive and inspiring” enough to persuade him to take the commission. And he found that Shakespeare gave him plenty of familiar material to work with.

“This ballet contains many fundamental elements of human existence: desire, transformation and the humor to withstand it,” Costello says. “Most music-making shares just a few themes. Most songs are ‘I want something’ or ‘I want someone,’ ‘I lost someone’ or ‘I believe in something.’ I hope and believe that this piece of music contains elements of this longing and a degree of humor.”

Working from written descriptions of each part of the dance, Costello wrote most of the piece “straight out of my head into full orchestral score with a pencil.”He’s pleased with the result, and Deutsche Grammophon will release a revised version of the score next year, partly reorchestrated and recomposed, played by the London Symphony led by Michael Tilson Thomas. Still, Costello doesn’t have high expectations about the response from critics or even his usual fans.

“The critical debate often seems numbingly predictable,” said Costello. “The argument runs: Popular musicians crave the validation of art music for self-aggrandizement or because they aren’t having any hits. This trivializes a serious point and is so far behind the actual experience of musicians. I need no additional help in being taken too seriously; I’ve never had any ‘hits.’

“I do these things out of love of music, curiosity and because I can. People may recognize my voice or fingerprints in this unexpected context, but it is not essential that they do so. It is enough for me to have imagined something outside the confines of my own performance.”

Both composer and choreographer would like further collaborations.

“I hope we shall work together again,” said Costello.

“We were looking forward to both of us doing things at the same time at UCLA,” said Bigonzetti. “That was the point. But we will try at another time.”

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Aterballetto, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” tonight and Saturday at 8 p.m., Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $15 to $55. (714) 556-2787.