DANCE WORK TAKES A NEW STEP TO SHOW ORCHESTRA

In a perfect marriage of music and dance, you can see the music and hear the dancing. Choreographer Mieczyslaw (Misha) Morawski is ready to take that traditional concept a step further.

During this Sunday’s collaborative concert with the Jewish Community Center Symphony Orchestra, scheduled for 3 p.m. at the Coronado High School Auditorium, Morawski will premiere his kinetic equivalent of Benjamin Britten’s “Young Persons’ Guide to the Orchestra.” The dance work, performed by a cast of 20 from the American Ballet Ensemble, will not only visualize the music, it will attempt to reflect the individual voices in the orchestra as well.

“This piece was never too lucky before,” for other choreographers, Morawski said, “but I wanted to simply show how an orchestra is built.

“There are 65 musicians in the orchestra, and I don’t have 65 dancers, so in this respect the ballet is a compromise. But the orchestra is constructed of five groups, and I’m using five corresponding groups of dancers to illustrate the woodwinds, the brass, the percussions and two sections of strings.”

The orchestra’s conductor, David Amos, who commissioned the dance work for this concert, has never teamed up with a ballet company before, and the American Ballet Ensemble has never danced to a live orchestra. But both the dancers and the musicians are eager for the chance to cross-pollinate.

“We’re always looking for new ways of doing things,” Amos said. “We present concerts for the Optimist Club every year, and we always try to do blockbusters. This time, we thought we’d do ‘Young Persons’ Guide to the Orchestra’--first with the orchestra and a narrator (as it is usually performed) and then again using the dancers to provide a more abstract version. The second time, when the music becomes familiar, the orchestra will take a back seat to the dancers, and there won’t be any need for a narration.”

The piece was constructed in three parts, reflecting the three sections of the music: theme, variations and fugue.

“In the variations, we had to use the same dancers for different instruments,” Morawski said, “because we only have 20, but it works very well.”

“People who know music should see it without hearing the music,” Amos said. “You can feel the flavor of the instruments and the texture of the music.”

This collaboration is a labor of love, Amos pointed out.

“This is not a commercial project,” he said. “To each of us, the artistic end is more important than any financial situation.”

Also slated for this program is Concerto in C Major for Two Trumpets, Strings and Basso Continuo with trumpet solos by Tim Brandt and Ronald Miller, a Mozart concerto featuring Brandt and the “Polovetsian Dances from Prince Igor.”

The concert will be repeated at 8:30 p.m. Feb. 21 at the Tijuana Cultural Center.