A Midsummer’s Seduction

Most new Shakespeare ballets prove so relentlessly intent on recycling solid-gold titles, familiar plots, preexisting scores and standard classroom step-combinations that they exist in a little world of their own--irrelevant to the way the plays are staged by major directors.

In contrast, Aterballetto’s millennial “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (a.k.a. “Il Sogno di Una Notte di Mezza Estate”) dares to take Shakespeare seriously. The leaders of this groundbreaking Italian ballet company assume that Shakespeare’s plays still dominate the dramatic repertory for some deeper reason than force of habit. So they enlist a constellation of contemporary artists to create a bracingly sardonic dance interpretation of one his most popular comedies.

At the ballet’s American premiere, Friday in the Orange County Performing Arts Center, a program note by choreographer-company director Mauro Bigonzetti spoke of desire as the driving force of the play, “a mysterious power that judges and controls.”

A red-caped Puck, danced with menacing glee by Veronique Dina Jean, becomes the embodiment of that power, a lord of misrule who can capriciously derail even the conventionally celebratory finale by giving everyone in the cast one more outbreak of that overwhelming inner itch.

A recent modern-dance “Dream” by Bejart Ballet Lausanne choreographer Philippe Saire is even more radical in depicting the power of nature to overthrow rational behavior, but Bigonzetti’s large-scale version preserves more of the play’s structure and characters. Classical ballet may form the technical base of his choreography, but the style is notably twisty, twitchy, eclectic and off-center, with lifts initially serving as a symbol of male attempts to own or control women--until those women rebel.

A female Puck reinforces the sexual politics of the work by making the relationship with Oberon (the charismatic Cyril Griset) more complex, but you can usually rely on Bigonzetti to seek out the darkest implications of his Shakespearean source and turn them into potent movement theater.

Puck’s magical transformation of Bottom, for instance, here becomes a painful process that terrifies the superbly malleable Walter Matteini the way a sudden, drastic body change would frighten anyone. And after Bottom has become an ungainly beast, Ina Broeckx plays Titania as initially repelled by him but inevitably consumed by lust.

If you want a cute donkey mask and coy mime flirtations, there are plenty of other “Dream” ballets to serve you. This one, however, is comedy from the culture that produced “The Divine Comedy,” not exactly a compendium of mirth. And its expressive ambitions are superbly reflected in a complex, varied symphonic score (on tape) by rocker Elvis Costello.

Evoking Baroque pomp in the court of Theseus and jazz riffs in the forest of Oberon, it is most of all poignantly involved in the plight of young lovers lost in the woods and torn by emotions they cannot control or understand.

The physical production, however, causes problems. Initially sheeted in silver, Fabrizio Plessi’s arrangement of lashed logs (five horizontal, one vertical) require too many intimate scenes to be played far upstage. Worse, Guglielmo Capone’s costumes keep everyone except Puck in the same colors (black and white up to the finale, then beige), making it extraordinarily difficult to tell apart the characters in the darkness, enforced by lighting designer Carlo Cerri.

The 21-member company, however, generates its own luminescence, whether dressed in workmen’s clothes and unveiling the major characters as a kind of living waxworks (not one of Bigonzetti’s most purposeful ideas), or dressed in asymmetrical black bodysuits as willful, and dangerous, forest creatures.

Duets for the young lovers dominate the choreographic text, with Hermia (Macha Daudel), Helena (Sveva Berti), Lysander (Adrien Boissonnet) and Demetrius (Thibaut Cherradi) integrating a daunting array of choreographic and expressive priorities with spectacular flair.

As in many stagings of the play, they are progressively stripped of their illusions and their clothes as the forest confronts them with their basic needs and natures. However, after their relationships are sorted out, Bigonzetti rewards them (and the audience) with a scene in which Plessi’s giant, priapic oak rises in the air and they bathe in the gentle shower issuing from its base.

If there’s anything more alluring than naked Italians, it’s got to be naked wet Italians, so this “Midsummer Night’s Dream” not only depicts desire, but generates plenty of it during its memorably probing, sensual and adult reinvention of the Shakespearean story-ballet as a vehicle for major artists and companies.