Ballet
Vintage Tokay
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BARNES Dancing the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nut- cracker gives a dancer hardly any opportunity to do more than present her credentials. The role is nothing but a decorative pas de deux, a piece of sweet crystallised fruit tantalisingly suspended from the top branch of Tchaikovsky's Christmas tree. It would be splendid to see the mysterious Miss Kun in more of her repertory—I have been told that she had a notable success at the Bolshoi with her Giselle, and can believe it; but this taste of her quality was enough to place her in a quite different category from her predecessors.
She is of medium height and lithely built, with a delicately animal grace and a bearing and a way of moving that are both aristocratic and earthy. She uses her body in the total way of the Russians, her arms move freely from her shoulders, her legs are held straight from the hips in extensions, she leaps with the powerful Bolshoi spring and phrases the music with a sweet sensitivity. Her face has a small-boned beauty, and she smiles directly at the audience with none of your English grin or French simper. Her style of dancing—interestingly midway between Soviet bravura and Western correctness—has a simpli- city and amplitude that seems peculiarly her own.
She has a very grand kind of charm that is rare, and Festival Ballet should make every effort to bring her back for their summer season.
Quite apart from Miss Kun and her partner, the intelligent and brooding Vladimir Skouratoff, Festival Ballet's Nutcracker has, with one important reservation, a great deal to commend it. Alexandre Benois's sets and costumes, includ- ing the magical transformation scene when Clara's St. Petersburg dining-room flies away to reveal the green pines and snowy plains of Holy Russia, are childlike in their enchantingly realistic sense of fantasy. The whole production, from its scampering mice and bravely battling tin soldiers to its final confectioners' paradise in the King- dom of the Sweets, represents any well-brought- up child's dream of Christmas. The one flaw, the hole in the Christmas stocking through which too many of the bonbons trickle away, is David Lichinc's new choreography. First produced three years ago, it then seemed no improvement upon the battered but still largely surviving original version which Ivanov made for Tchaikovsky, and, for the most part, it still looks flat and dull.
Lichine does, however, make resourceful use of children in his production, and even if, like W. C. Fields and myself, you like your child performers best when fried, it would be a hard heart that is not well lost to the twelve-year-old moppet Mary Williams, who is playing Clara.
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