Day of blooming transformations

Who says librarians don’t know how to party? On Friday, the L.A. Central Library hosted a vibrant multimedia celebration of life that spilled from the platform stage of the Mark Taper Auditorium into the aisles.

By no coincidence, the event took place on the exact date depicted in James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” the seminal 1922 novel featuring some very proletarian counterparts to the heroic figures in Homer’s epic “The Odyssey.”

At the end of this Joycean saga comes a groundbreaking stream-of-consciousness soliloquy for Molly Bloom, and that text served as the basis for the library’s hourlong music, dance and video collaboration titled “Blooming, Re-Joyce-ing.”

An open-weave net hung adjacent to the stage and from it the cast took many of the costume pieces that helped make the work a dance of transformations.

Very early, a large bed center stage turned out to be an illusion created from fabric and wooden chairs, and an adjacent bureau suddenly became a keyboard on wheels played by composer Alan Terricciano.

A stained-glass window at the back of the stage also kept turning into a video screen on which Kate Johnson’s images complemented the spoken texts and dancing.

Three women portrayed Molly Bloom -- usually grouped together when executing Loretta Livingston’s restless and sometimes satiric choreography -- stuffing bed pillows into pants, for example, to create fantasy partners for dancing, simulated sex or acts of retaliatory abuse. The trio also appeared in artful solos exploring different facets of character and consciousness. Rachel Lopez exuded strength and respectability; Alyson Jones-Cartagena, sensuality and vulnerability; Heather Gillette, a powerful commitment to impulse.

Watching them, occasionally joining their dances and periodically adding her vocalism to Terricciano’s score, improvisational artist Claire Filmon brought another layer of interpretation to the experience. If the choreography sometimes seemed an experiment in free association, Filmon’s responses grounded it as a complex but never arbitrary gloss on Joyce’s novel.

In one sequence, the dancers wore hollow, life-size body casts of naked female torsos: quondam nudity in keeping with the piece’s focus on women’s perceptions and sexuality.

However, Johnson’s reading of the text often sounded inappropriately ladylike, missing the earthiness of, for example, a classic recording of the Molly Bloom soliloquy by the late Siobhan McKenna. The oft-repeated word “yes” became nearly a “maybe” here, as if this Molly were essentially undecided about accepting everything life had offered her.

Perhaps acceptance is harder for millennial American Mollies than for the antique Dublin original. Perhaps “Blooming, Re-Joyce-ing” represented a critique of the author’s view of women as much as a tribute of how far everyone has come since the first “Bloomsday.”