One/the body’s grace/Carmina Burana
Bass Concert Hall, Oct. 2
Ballet Austin’s artistic director and chief choreographer is, of course, Stephen Mills. The theatre program for the company’s season opener has this to say about his contribution to the production’s Carmina Burana: “Mills’ choreographic work does not seek to tell a narrative story but rather to capture what he feels is the dominant element of this important piece of music: rhythm.”
My own words here do not seek to tell a narrative story or to provide a point-by-point critique of what transpired, but rather to capture what I feel is the dominant element of experiencing such a living spectacle of sound and motion: pleasure in what it means to be human.
One/the body’s grace, which was the show’s first half, shaded more than a few gymnastic tropes (and a turn or two from swing dancing, as it was pointed out to me) into the classic forms of ballet. These hints of more familiar, more contemporary kinesis are what brought smiles of appreciation to the lips below my mustache. I, who had never seen live ballet before, and who had watched only Giselle on video only because I was interested in the depiction of those supernatural creatures known as the Willies … I would have been lost (though still admiring) with nothing but strict ballet techniques to observe. Here, in dance after dance, the bodies’ grace and the relational possibilities of objects in motion were exhibited in both rarefied and more down-to-earth terms, as if to acknowledge that the vernacular, when rendered with skill and passion, is no less effective a vehicle for beauty than is the high-toned jargon of what’s called classical.
Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, rendered by Ballet Austin in magnificent collaboration with Craig Hella Johnson’s Conspirare choir and the Austin Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Peter Bay, was the second half of the afternoon’s marvels and my main reason for attendance. A bunch of 13th-century German monks playing hooky from their monastic duties to frolic and cavort and run shitfaced rampant among the foothills surrounding Munich, and then capturing their debauchery and insights in dozens upon dozens of celebratory poems and songs? Which are then, hundreds of years later, culled and set to music by Orff and enjoyed by music-lovers the world over and eventually heard for the first time by yours truly, thoroughly drunk on wine and new friendships, at an outdoor concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Ravinia in 1985? This is where the profane becomes sacred, where divinity is born again (and better) through the mundane: in the meaty chambers of a heart sodden with music and wine and camaraderie.
Ballet Austin’s dances served as a sort of upstage music video to Conspirare’s inspired performance, providing colorful visual enhancement where before had been only the figures of the vast choir – mostly still but for their song-shaped mouths. Good stuff, the dances, well planned and executed, delightfully evocative of the song cycle’s more obvious elements and, yes, rhythms. Thinking about the amount of work that went into the creation of this balletic element raises almost as much sweat as was covering, I imagine, those brightly clad bodies.
But as I sat among the concertgoers in the cavernous Bass hall, I could also imagine others closing their eyes, now and again, against the orchestrated field of color and motion before them. Perhaps to envision their own personal, interior tableaux, perhaps to return to a wine-flooded park in a Chicago long gone, yet ultimately anchored to the present by the restraints of memory and the glad pressure of one hand in another: surely a large part of the pleasure in what it means to be human.
This article appears in October 7 • 2005.