Dance

Clouded vision

Julie Kavanagh Valley of Shadows

Requiem (Royal Opera House)

Vittorio de Sica's film The Garden of Host the Finzi-Continis with its hazy, play 8assani's eleggy forythe last summers of two jvvev'fiall families in Italy before the second ballet , war. Kenneth MacMillan's new „ 'et Valley of Shadows, inspired by both novel and film, shows — in the opening sec- algic

Poi nan enhanced Giorgio Pictures of beauty and youth at

tions anyway — the power of dance to define characters and relationships more subtly and more rapidly than either written or spoken words. From the moment Alessandra Ferri as Micol Finzi-Contini comes on stage, she has to establish not on- ly her own personality but the emotions and motives of characters around her. She must differentiate between the brotherly love she feels for Giorgio (Guy Niblett, who returns a sentimental, Petrachan ardour), the com- plex, perhaps incestuous love for her brother, Alberto (Derek Deane, whose per- formance deliberately recalls Helmut Berger's) and the physical attraction she has for Malnate, Alberto's friend (athletically danced by Ashley Page). Ferri's recent per- formance of Mary Vetsera in Mayerling was outstanding because by grading the emo- tion in each of her duets with Rudolf, we could actually watch her transform from the shy, daisy-like girl-child of the beginn- ing of the ballet, to the sensual glutton at the end. Here, she again proves herself to be a remarkable dancer-actress — probably the finest the Royal Ballet now have although more performances and more confidence would sharpen the difficult aspects of her interpretation.

Micol's centrality and her carefree, teas- ing vivacity, a privilege of beauty, is marvellously expressed in the choreo- graphy. Held horizontally by the three boys, she spirals slowly like a glider on a windless day, and is tossed in thrilling flip-turns from one to another like a tennis ball on the Finzi-Contini's court. What the dance cannot communicate is the background to Bassani's story (the characters are Jewish, and because racial laws imposed by Mussolini have banned them from Ferrara's tennis club, they play instead in the Finzi-Continis' edenic garden). Nor can — or at least nor does — MacMillan's ballet express the social distinctions that the book and film make clear. When David Wall, playing Giorgio's father, refuses to shake hands with Ferri, who has approached him like a friendly gazelle, there is obviously something wrong, but without knowing the story the audience could never attribute it to the father's unease about Giorgio's involve- ment with Micol: `the Finzi-Continis aren't suitable ... they aren't for us you know ... they don't even seem like judim.'

After this brief encounter, we next see Wall shorn, pyjama'd and in wild-eyed despair. The music has changed from Tchaikovsky to Martinu, the scene from Yolanda Sonnabend's impressionistic garden to the sepulchral gloom of a concen- tration camp. Now, instead of a quartet, MacMillan focuses on a trio of dancers: Wall, Sandra Conley (Micol's mother) and Julie Wood (her grandmother). His point is obviously that a concentration camp equalises people and their social dif- ferences, though he is allowing himself con- siderable licence — the sexes were segregated in the holocaust camps. These scenes, which are now interspersed with flashbacks to the garden, are badly flawed. We are not shocked by the monstrous con- trast MacMillan makes because the three central characters have not been dramatised until now, so we do not begin to identify with them Also, singling them out from the huddle of inmates and attempting to per- sonalise them seems objectionably ex- ploitative — most of all when we watch round-shouldered Conley shuffle towards a leather-clad Nazi with a notebook in his hand.

Although de Sica's film enacts the begin- ning of the tragedy, which is only alluded to by Bassani — we see the Finzi-Continis and Giorgio's father herded into a school where Jews are awaiting confinement — this sense of the edge of the threshold is artistically more powerful than the fact of the horror that MacMillan provides. De Sica conveys the humiliation in small, understated ways: when Micol arrives with her grandmother, there is nowhere for the old lady to sit down. MacMillan, on the other hand, has a Jacobean relish for making a spectacle of death. Again, with questionable licence, MacMillan brings Derek Dean to the con- centration camp to die (in the book and film Alberto dies in the Finzi-Continis' house). His grandmother expires on top of him.

There is little dance content in Valley of Shadows: in both the garden and the camp

MacMillan tends to use the corps like a tableau, their frozen poses decoratively off- setting the main action. This has the advan- tage of making what movements there are particularly resonant: like the female in- mates' swift, wide-flung arabesques that are crumpled by the men as if curbing their at- tempt at flight; or the step repeated by one, then another and another, enforcing the uniformity of their plight. But the few po- tent images cannot redeem the imperfec- tions of the work or get away from the unsettling fact that however effectively the dancers twitch, rock, drag their feet or silently howl, they will always make the agony aesthetic.

The heart sinks when in Requiem, the ballet that follows, on shuffles what could

be another huddle of holocaust victims (or

Lost Souls from Orpheus, that opened this MacMillian bill) their mouths contorted in

mute, Munchian screams. But no, vener- ating Faure's exquisite score, MacMillan provides a peaceful, beatific resolution to

all that has gone before. Requiem, made

for the Stuttgart Ballet in memory of their director, John Cranko, was performed for the first time by the Royal Ballet with guest stars Marcia Hydee and Reid Anderson dancing the roles they created. The last minutes of the ballet when the whole com- pany stand and watch a symbolic spotlight rising into the flies could easily be comical or sanctimonious. That it is neither, is a measure of the theatrical restraint Mac- Millan can show at his best. John B. Reed's expert lighting and the inspired per- formances of the dancers — particu- larly Haydee's — made the whole stage glow.