Dueling interpretations of Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute” bookend the 2009-10 season. At the far end, the comic fairy tale closes the Atlanta Opera’s 30th year, in an eclectically traditional show running April 24-May 2.
More unusually, it opens Atlanta Ballet’s 80th anniversary season Oct. 15 as “Mozart’s The Magic Flute,” a choreographed production by Mark Godden, with dancers onstage acting the roles supplied musically by unseen singers (and an orchestra) in the pit.
“ ‘The Magic Flute’ is iconic,” says Atlanta Ballet artistic director John McFall, who saw Godden’s concept onstage in Milwaukee, “and it takes guts to translate it into a dance theater piece. Mark’s version is really clever and gets an audience involved. That upper Midwest audience really responded to it.”
Godden created his “Flute” for Royal Winnipeg Ballet in 2003, where he’d been a dancer and later a choreographer. A native Texan, he has lived in Canada a quarter-century and is now based in Montreal, where he’s a freelance dance maker.
The ballet originally had penciled in this “Flute” production for spring 2010 — unaware that Atlanta Opera had its own production on the boards. The snag was caused, says McFall, by institutional confusion when Barry Hughson gave notice, with just a few months’ warning, that he’d resign as the ballet’s executive director in May. (That same month, Hughson became executive director of Boston Ballet.)
The shift from spring 2010 to fall 2009 on Atlanta Ballet’s calendar “brought us a few lumps,” adds McFall, although the ballet is back on track with its dancers prepared, backed by the orchestra, 13 singers and magic-realm costumes designed by Paul Daigle.
As an opera, the original “Magic Flute” was created for glorious singing and family entertainment, teaching lessons on morality and 1790s Enlightenment values — the same ideals held by the U.S. founding fathers. Godden’s ballet tells more or less the same story but concocts character details to appeal to today’s audiences: Here it’s an adult drama, about dysfunctional families, custody battles, prostitution and addiction (to TV and sex). Parents beware: This “Flute” is not part of Atlanta Ballet’s family series of performances.
“It’s still the same basic plot,” Godden says, noting that he was influenced by the Ingmar Bergman film of “The Magic Flute,” a gentle cult classic. “You still have a rootless young man in a quest and he still finds a philosophy on how to lead a better, more noble, life.”
Godden’s “Magic Flute” is also part of a growing trend: swiping a cash-cow hit from one genre and adapting it for another. Atlanta Opera, for example, performed Carl Orff’s bawdy and affecting “Carmina Burana” — originally a concert piece for three solo singers, chorus and orchestra that usually sells out Symphony Hall — and performed it as an opera with a stitched-on narrative. Other cities have experienced Handel’s oratorio “Messiah” as dance or “The Nutcracker” in an unlikely variety of guises.
Still, says McFall, who’s followed Godden’s career for some 20 years, the choreographer “doesn’t do anything derivative, and he’s a deep thinker. Because he’s not an artistic director, he doesn’t need to worry about scheduling and the hassles of coordinating a company — he does in an honest way what he finds compelling.”
Dance preview
Atlanta Ballet performs “Mozart’s The Magic Flute”
Oct. 15-24. $22 - $122.
Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, 2800 Cobb Galleria Parkway. 800-982-2787, www.atlantaballet.com.
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