It’s startling to see a work of genius composed largely from movements as basic as walking, running, hopping, skipping, lying down and the like. I do so again with pleasure now. Even after 22 years I find no end to the intricacies of Mr. Morris’s construction, and the meanings that continually pour from them. It fills the soul with wonder; it fascinates the mind with suggestion. Although Mr. Morris has made other works as eloquent and profound — notably “Dido and Aeneas” (1989), “Grand Duo” (1993) and “All Fours” (2003) — the direct simplicity of his dance vocabulary in “L’Allegro,” in which he constantly seems to show the root essence of dance, makes this a classic. Thursday’s performance at the Mostly Mozart Festival. Koch Theater’s new acoustics — made me wish I could go straight back to see it again，because I’m still finding new aspects to it. Perhaps better, it still makes me catch my breath at almost all the moments where I caught it in the 1980s and ’90s. Something in Mr. Morris’s mind is fascinated by dualism. The protagonist of his “Dido and Aeneas” is both Dido and anti-Dido (the Sorceress), for example, while the characters of the black-and-white 1960s America of “The Hard Nut” (1991) come back transfigured in its colorful Oz. But nowhere else is this dualism so transporting as in the first half of “L’Allegro.” The work starts with two streams of dancers (more ravishingly lighted than ever by James F. Ingalls) hurtling past one another on bisecting diagonals, like random atoms, until at last two collide and pause: a molecule. We see two L’Allegro women in the aria “Come, and trip it”; two Penseroso women in the aria “Oft on a plat of rising ground” visit a house with twin fires flickering in twin nooks, and many more pairs: there’s always the possibility that each Allegro person’s other half might take a Penseroso route, or vice versa. More than possibility: the bird that symbolizes Allegro thought, the lark, finds its counterpart in the Penseroso nightingale. And meanwhile the twinning device makes it marvelously clear that we’re seeing choreography, that this vision is planned. In one section a lark (male) and nightingale (female) meet, and, rooted to the spot, contemplate each other with staccato turns of the head and body. But several of the most heart-stopping images in Part 1 occur when gauze divides the stage into twinned worlds: parallel universes that sometimes suggest a Platonic ideal and sometimes suggest different views of the real world. Mr. Morris even alternates these effects. In a ravishing Penseroso ode to a nightingale , the woman who is “our” nightingale (the exemplary Julie Worden on Thursday) often contemplates another, distant nightingale (a marvelous paradox, to suggest that a bird might have a role model). But then she turns her view to a new pair of women, who, lifted and turning, become “the wand’ring moon” as it slowly crosses the sky — one of the most spellbinding images Mr. Morris has created. The two nightingales, though removed from each other, dance a question-and-answer duet that corresponds to the dialogue Handel composes here for soprano and flute. But when Handel interrupts this with full orchestra, Mr. Morris offers philosophy of another kind: dancers crossing the stage while trying the famous overhead lift from “Dirty Dancing,” another kind of classic image of dancers attempting perfection. Mr. Morris then deconstructs it, so that there’s a male-male version, and men lifting empty air, as well as the male-female original, and so that all the work that goes into the lift is apparent. When the two nightingales return to the stage, we view them differently: the one needs the perfection of the other. But this dualism fades in Part 2. Here it’s one world, not two, and it’s often less clear whether the mood is Allegro or Penseroso, as Handel’s music pushes the two at times toward convergence. Handel’s cantata ends with a Moderato conclusion (libretto by Charles Jennens); Mr. Morris takes two of these Moderato items and interleaves them in Part 2, showing harmonious ensembles of coexistence. Above all, the Moderato soprano-tenor duet “As steals the morn” (Jennens was adapting words spoken by Prospero in “The Tempest”) is a group utopia, a chain dance in which everyone shares the same iambic gait along changing paths to suggest perfect geometry. A pity that on Thursday Part 2 was marred by the ill-tuned and shrill high notes of Christine Brandes’s soprano (especially in the Penseroso aria “Sometimes let gorgeous Tragedy”); Lisa Saffer, the more mellifluous soprano, also lost pitch later during the final Penseroso aria (“May at last my weary age”). The tenor John McVeigh brought a keen sense of utterance throughout, while the bass-baritone Andrew Foster-Williams was commanding in diction and phrasing alike. I’ve concentrated on just a few aspects of Mr. Morris’s choreography here. Others are no less compelling. There are episodes in which the quick succession of images seems the quintessence of poetry, as in the Penseroso aria “Hide me from day’s garish eye,” when the flight of the bee, past open flowers, moves into dreams and so becomes an elusive muse. The audience laughs most at the “L’Allegro” men’s dance. Here men, in daft non sequiturs, kiss and spank one another; but this too leads back to dualism. And this is the largest implication of Mr. Morris’s work: We contain our own opposites.
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