Spellbound Contemporary Ballet's Carmina Burana finds beauty in the bawdy

    1 of 3 2 of 3

      A Spellbound Contemporary Ballet production. A Chutzpah Festival and Italian Cultural Centre presentation. At the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre on Saturday, March 4. Continues to March 6

      Can an artwork be bawdy and sophisticated at the same time?

      In the case of Carmina Burana, yes. That's the beautiful paradox of Spellbound Contemporary Ballet's fascinating and fun new dance work in the Italian company's second visit to the Chutzpah Festival. The episodic piece, like the medieval poetry and songs it's based on, is basically all about lust. But choreographer Mauro Astolfi stages it all with such fast, flickering, light-as-champagne-bubble movement, it's as gorgeous as it is rude and risque. It feels like the highest form of play.

      Set amid the kind of dramatic shadowy lighting you'd see in a Goya painting, the dancers splay their legs, stick their heads under skirts, and windmill their arms. The impression is of restlessly arcing, scissoring, tangling pale limbs.

      Astolfi, costume designer Sandro Ferrone, and set designer Stefan Mazzola give everything a sleek, contemporary look.

      The female dancers wear modern grey dresses emblazoned with stark red crosses on the chest—more like the appropriated symbols of today's T-shirts even as they're a nod to the clerics' wear of the 12th century.

      A monastic bench and long table, as well as a big cabinet, dominate the stage, and he moves, upends, and innovates with them throughout. At several moments, men tilt the tables so women slide down toward them; at others, they jump and reach at the females trying to flee over the top. Late in the piece, the cabinet becomes an even more fun device, almost literally referring to the skeletons we hide in our closet, the doors opening and shutting to reveal an ever-naughtier array of entwined, humping couples.

       

      Rome's Spellbound is known for its dancers, and the nine here show up with the balletic finesse, otherworldly suppleness, and endless energy needed to pull off Astolfi's dazzling, inventive movement. Stage-filling group numbers give way to solos and duets, set not only to some of Carl Orff's epic Carmina Burana cantatas but to Antonio Vivaldi's Dixie dominus. The dancers embody the melodies and harmonies in dizzyingly complex patterns. Nothing here is angular; limbs scallop through the air, and spines curve back into spectacular Cs.

      Yes, the guys get a bit handsy with the women, who spend a lot of their time either trying to flee them or pushing and high-kicking them away. You could read it as a nod to the puritanical times the Carmina Burana manuscripts were defying, and the way females weren't supposed to give in to their desires (maybe still aren't, to some degree). The original, 11th-to-13th-century manuscripts are really about religious hypocrisy and mockery, and our more base human urges. So is this rendition an elegant game of guys chasing girls, flirtatious fun, or the occasional slip over the line into harassment?

      Whatever the answer, and however naughty the urges on display here, you can't really go wrong with this much stunning dancing, beautiful music, and stage magic.

       

      Comments