Cover photo: MMDG/SRE Layla & Majnun: dancers (l-r) Rita Donahue, Michelle Yard, Domingo Estrada, Jr.; musicians (seen behind) Fargana Qasimova, Rauf Islamov, Shawn Conley (Photo: Susana Millman)
Stories of star-crossed lovers go back through the ages, told through music, dance and theatre; we in the West are familiar with doomed duos in 1950s New York (West Side Story) and 16th-century Italy (Romeo and Juliet). How many of us know the far older tale of “Layla and Majnun” from the Middle and Near East, a millennium old when Shakespeare wrote?
We can now hear and see it in a superb marriage of music and dance, east and west, as Mark Morris Dance Group and the Silk Road Ensemble’s Layla and Majnun is being presented with extensive and useful program notes in four performances this weekend by Meany Center for the Performing Arts (formerly the UW World Series). The last performances are today, Saturday, at 2 and 8 p.m.
The production has come together from many Azerbaijani sources, beginning with the 16th-century narrative poem by Muhammad Fuzuli, composed into a perennially popular Azerbaijani opera in 1908 by Uzeyir Hajibeyli.
MMDG/SRE Layla & Majnun: dancers Lesley Garrison, Durell R. Comedy (Photo: Susana Millman)
A National Treasure in Azerbaijan, mugham singer Alim Qasimov (mugham is a branch of maqam, a form of traditional improvised modal music widespread across the Middle East and Central Asia) approached Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble with the idea of creating a shorter instrumental version of the opera, expanding the traditional instrumental accompaniment of tar (lute) and kamancheh (spike fiddle) to the Silk Road’s broad range of national instruments from China to the West. They embraced it, and Qasimov, Silk Road violinists Johnny Gandelsman, and Colin Jacobsen made the arrangements, with first performances of the music being at the start of this century.
But it wasn’t until this past year that the idea of creating choreography for the story came to fruition, a task given to Mark Morris. Meany Center is one of the many commissioners who put this all together, and Mark Morris Dance Group, The Silk Road Ensemble, and mugham singers Alim Qasimov as Majnum and his daughter Fargana Qasimova as Layla are giving the premiere performances this month.
The story has been shortened considerably, only the salient points being included in five short acts which follow each other seamlessly: the love between Majnun and Layla, the disapproval of her parents, their sorrow at being parted, her reluctant wedding to another man, and the lovers’ demise. There is a strong Sufi subtext, with human love reflecting love of God, and one can see a Sufi element in the choreography, particularly in the shape of the women’s long skirts as they spin.
MMDG/SRE Layla & Majnun: (front two dancers l-r) Billy Smith, Nicole Sabella; (middle dancers) Aaron Loux, Rita Donahue; (back dancers) Lesley Garrison, Durell R. Comedy; (musicians) Zaki Valiyev (partially hidden), Alim Qasimov, Fargana Qasimova, Rauf Islamov (Photo: Susana Millman)
The Silk Road players are spread inside different levels on stage with the two singers seated cross-legged on a low platform in front with a tar and a kamancheh player either side, and the whole is lit by lanterns distributed near the floor. A backdrop of an abstract painting is sometimes lit, sometimes not.
A long Silk Road introduction mourning the Night of Separation with mugham singers MIralam Miralamov and Kamila Nabiyeva, tar (Zaki Valiyev) and kamancheh (Rauf Islamov), sets the mood as we hear the hypnotic sounds, the long bubbling melismatic phrases of the songs (supertitles translate), and the switch from mournful to lively.
The music remains front and center throughout, as important as the choreography which brings the story to visual life, and as the dancers come on so do the two Qasimovs, replacing the earlier singers. Morris uses six women, four of whom become Layla in turn. All are dressed in shades of salmon pink, only Layla has a long deep salmon scarf, which gets handed on to each Layla in turn, and Qasimova is in the same color though she wears a hijab as well. The six men, including four Majnuns, have close fitting white pants and long sky blue shirts, a white scarf delineating Majnun. Qasimov wears the same.
The choreography is the music brought to visual life, as melismatic, swaying and swirling, most movements very fluid, but while the sexes pass each other they touch only with a fleeting hand or chin caress, yet the anguish of the separation, the grief and sorrow are strongly apparent, as is Layla’s distress at her forced marriage, Majnun’s anger at her seeming giving in to her parents, and the parents’ sorrow at the deaths of their children.
The whole is mesmerizing, the mugham singers so compelling that it’s as though the dancers are under the music’s spell, as is much of the audience.
