Songs blossom at garden
Milwaukee Opera Theatre, Danceworks have animals cavorting in ‘Handel’s Bestiary’
Just to be clear, Handel never wrote an opera entitled “Bestiary.”
But in his 42 operas, Handel included an ark’s worth of animals, mostly used as caricatures of human qualities and foibles, such as a courageous lion, a scheming snake and so on, as documented in Donna Leon’s book “Handel’s Bestiary: In Search of Animals in Handel’s Operas.”
If you’ve seen the work of Jill Anna Ponasik, Dani Kuepper and their creative colleagues at Milwaukee Opera Theatre and Danceworks, respectively, you can imagine where knowledge of “Handel’s Bestiary” might lead.
That knowledge led the two collaborating companies to the Lynden Sculpture Garden on Friday evening, with singers, dancers and instrumentalists leading their audience through the landscape and sculptures, presenting creature-filled, freely interpreted arias performed by singers, chamber ensembles and lots and lots of dancers.
The dancing contingent of the evening included athletic, modern-dance pros, young students and ensembles of a wide age-range of community members. They added visual spectacle, charm and whimsy to the various arias, as well as to the time the audience spent strolling from one venue to the next.
Some of the most charming moments of dance came from an adorable troupe of vigorous, young bumblebees and their delightfully silly, singing beekeeper Nathan Wesselowski, while the evening’s more spectacular moments were delivered by an ensemble of creatively costumed dancing elephants and a wonderfully splashy, vividly costumed phoenix number, which featured about 25 dancers performing in a large meadow.
Singers and instrumentalists moved from venue to venue, popping out of the weeds and woods to add their own charm and whimsy and to mingle with the audience between their performances.
The outdoor setting, while lovely, created acoustic issues and challenged instrumental intonation.
It also provided some lovely happenstance moments, such as birdsongs woven into various arias, and a particularly insistent bullfrog on the pond, whose croaking ostinato synced up in perfect rhythm with the instrumentalists for a couple of bars.
The decidedly family-friendly event wasn’t about hearing pristine opera arias or about an evening of sculpted, modern dance. It was about combining a bucolic setting, a beautiful evening and some delightfully creative interpretations of music, on which fronts it was a complete success.