Centuries-old poems of love and fate are the inspiration for one of today’s most riveting musical works—Carl Orff’s powerhouse cantata Carmina Burana. Now those poems have inspired Columbus-based Oyo Dance Company’s new dance adaptation of Orff’s work.
“All the poems talk about the circle of life, about fate,” said Oyo Dance Company Principal Dancer Alexander Cornejo, who created the choreography for the production. “We are in the circle of life, but people have choices, and people can control that.”
Oyo Dance Company will dance Cornejo’s new choreography to live music performed by musicians affiliated with the Worthington Chamber Orchestra, vocal soloists soprano Skye Marie Johnson, tenor Matt Pitman and baritone Robert Kerr and a chorus of singers from around Columbus on Friday, May 23 and Saturday, May 24 at 7:30 p.m. in the Lincoln Theatre.
The upcoming performances featuring live music expand on Oyo Dance Company’s 2022 production of Carmina Burana, which was danced to a recorded soundtrack. Antoine Clark, artistic and music director of the Worthington Chamber Orchestra, will conduct Orff’s massive score in Wilhelm Killmayer’s more intimate transcription for two pianos and percussion, plus vocalists.
Killmayer’s transcription retains the rhythmic intensity of the cantata’s more feverish movements—including its popular heart-pounding signature number, “O Fortuna”—in a more transparent texture that allows other nuances and the feel of Orff’s score to shine through.
“There’s a clarity to the texture that, I think, serves the choir and the (vocal) soloists very well,” Clark said. “And with percussion instruments, the very percussive nature of the music, I think it’s a medium that really is still effective in conveying the quality of the full orchestral version.”
Alexander Cornejo’s updated choreography for Carmina Burana makes use of a larger performance space than was available to the dancers for their pandemic-era performance.
“We’d done Carmina Burana for the first time about three years ago, and we did it in a very small space because it was Covid, and we were just trying to be creative with our spaces,” said Rachel Nace, founder and artistic director of Oyo Dance Company. “And after it was finished, it was so beautiful that I told (Cornejo) I really wanted to give him live music and bring it to life in a bigger theater at some point.”
Cornejo had been inspired to create his own interpretation of Carmina Burana after dancing in an adaptation of the work in his native El Salvador. He says the poems in Carmina Burana—which are preserved in a manuscript written in 1230 in what is today southern Austria or northern Italy—inspired him to create his own choreographed version. Orff’s powerful music amplified his experience of the texts.
“When I heard the music, it made me think about which movements I want to put in the dances. I felt that from my heart to my head,” Cornejo said.
Written as long as a thousand years ago, those poems are bold attestations of the transience of life, the imperishability of love and the inscrutable power of fate as ever-present forces in all eras of human experience. Nace says her company’s adaptation of Carmina Burana seeks to portray the full depth of the vicissitudes of life and love.
“We are trying to depict in our dancing the different situations—fate, the fact that (the character) Fortuna holds the fate of the characters in the story, and we have Roman gods and goddesses that play in the roles of the different characters,” Nace said. “We’re talking about fate, we’re talking about love and the human condition.”
