Review: Northrop staging of 'Dido' shows timeless mastery of Mark Morris

It's not every day that you get to see an opera danced.

That's exactly what happened when the Mark Morris Dance Group and Music Ensemble brought the iconic 1989 work "Dido and Aeneas" to Northrop on Wednesday. The opera, written by Henry Purcell, was simultaneously sung from the orchestra pit and danced on stage, with intriguing if somewhat disconnected results.

Because it was difficult for the audience to see the singers (who were quite good), it was a bit like watching a dubbed movie, in which the dialogue doesn't exactly line up with the performer who is "speaking." Still, the live music and singing made up a rich, essential part of the epic work.

In five scenes, choreographer Mark Morris presented two contrasting worlds — that of the courtiers, and the malevolent world of the witches. The courtiers moved in symmetry, with neat, overlapping rows of dancers and flat, wide movements. They posed and gestured along a two-dimensional plane, as if they were figures painted on ancient Greek vases. Even when they spun in circles, they turned like paddles of a bread-kneading machine.

The witches, in contrast, wiggled and gyrated. They crawled and shook. Where the courtiers moved from one pose to another with stiff poise, the witches were driven with an electric impulse. The choreography could be downright silly, and the result was wonderful.

In her dichotomous roles as Dido and the Sorceress, Laurel Lynch straddled both of these worlds with majestic versatility. Her two portrayals were as different from each other as a stone statue and a snake slithering on the floor. Lynch's Dido was all purity, grace and precision. Her Sorceress was all pelvis, twitching and fire.

Originally, Mark Morris himself took on those dual roles, back in 1989 at the height of the AIDS crisis. Even if you have never seen the production, you can imagine Morris and fellow dancer Guillermo Resto — two burly, gorgeous men — playing out this love story of two people who are torn apart by a horrible evil. The context of that time, of the monstrous disease that killed so many, and the bigotry against gays, gets lost with a traditional male-female casting (not to mention this is a much different time).

That's not to say Lynch wasn't incredible, but a subversive edge that existed at the work's premiere has subsided. We can now see this as more of a timeless work, rather than a blistering political statement.

Sheila Regan is a Minneapolis dance critic and arts journalist.