4 i , EVIEW

OF THE ARTS

Robin Young on culture taking the strine

One could not resist the thought, as Lucette Aldous ran down the stage to leap into Rudolf Nureyev's safe embrace: ''Jeez blue, I thought the cracking little sheila was about to shoot through that time." Australia is still Bazza MacKenzie country, where art is supposed to be ridiculed and scoffed by beer-drenched philistines.

The facts are rather different. Gough Whitlam might not be able to conduct Cockaigne, but he has been known to take his place in the standing room to see an opera. Don Dunstan, the Labour premier of South Australia, started as an actor. His interest in the arts is a carefully emphasised feature in the charismatic image that has been built for him. "Culture's where they get penicillin, ain't it?" is an outdated Australian joke these days, because the country is lapping up culture as fast as it can get it and investing on an unprecedented scale in cultural palaces in state capitals and the back of Burke alike.

Not a hint of cultural cringe in the performances of the Australian Ballet at the Coliseum. They have made Rudolf Nureyev's prod,uction of Don Quixote very much their own (the film of it is the only ballet Sydney Opera House has yet seen), a good, popular and traditional show with bright and busy sets, gay costumes, and a frothy dressing of bravura dancing. The company is built very much in the image and _ traditions of the Royal Ballet. Peggy van Praagh came from de Valois's Sadler's Wells. They share Nureyev and Sir Robert Helpmann *ith Covent Garden.

But the dancers, whatever their nations of origin, are all Australians, and they are mostly taught in the company's own school — which gives these visitors 100 per cent advantage over, for instance, our own classical touring company, the Festival. Dancing standards are high. In Lucette Aldous they have a ballerina with star quality, style, elegance, and a quantity of stage. presence which makes up for her marked lack of stature among the healthy, strapping females they seem to grow on Australia Farm. Again this diminutive centrepiece some of the girls seem wellenough built for the Bluebell troupe, but the dancing is lively, clean, open and assured.

Perhaps more than any other, the ballet company bears the brunt of the difficulties of the performing arts in Australia. They are the only major company to appear regularly in all the state capitals. To keep up standards and satisfy morale, they have also to tour abroad. Worse than anyone else, they lost out in the cultural carve-up of Sydney Opera House. They will not get into the place until December. The demotion to the secondary hall, dictated by the musically all-powerful Australian Broadcasting Commission, hits ballet even worse than opera. If Ted Downes was worried about sight-lines, how much more concern has Peggy van Praagh! The famous 42-foot revolve is little use, since it is not duplicated anywhere else in the Federation, and productions have to be able to fit into other state theatres. The stage is too small to stand any scenery without cramping movement. On the other hand you have to build in from the practically wingless proscenium so that dancers have some chance of making exits at speed without crashing, kamikaze-like, into the neighbouring wall. And you can't fly much scenery either, because these same walls cannot take the strain.

Professionalism has to be imported ih several departments — most notably administration. But at least Australians are breaking away from the old Elizabethan Trust pattern of dominating the arts with social-climbing members of the white glove set. The directors of the Australian Ballet, listed in the back of the programme, are still the sort of people Dr Herbert Cole Coombs (Australia's Poohbah or Arnold Goodman, and "Nugget" to his friends) delights to call "public spiritied citizens" — people with good social and business contacts, access to some money, and a dilettante interest in the arts.

The socially conscientious "public spirited citizens" (Bobby Helpmann is Sir Robert, Peggy van Praagh is Dame Peggy) have often been more of a hindrance than a help. Tey have kept the Australian press supplied with a continuous series of confrontations and rows between the conservative amateurs on the boards of directors, and the steaming radicals in the creative jobs.

The Australian Ballet Society helped take Glen Tetley to Australia to produce Gemini, which is at the Coliseum this week, and the ballet company has also had help

from the Bank of New South Wales. But big business generally has been apathetic. They take more interest in Melbourne's Moomba (a beery carnival described as an arts festival) than, in Adelaide's festival of Arts (the real thing). Qantas have been known to buy Nolan pictures — and sell them again at a good profit. But the airline which brought the Australian Ballet to Britain, noticeably, was the infinitely superior and unquestionably more civilised Singapore Airlines, whose six-channel in-flight stereo is every Australian's dream of a cultural adventure anyway.

It is a marvellous, if freakish, thing that Australia has given itself, in the Sydney Opera House, the most exciting modern building in the world. They got it, to their delight, for nothing too — all out of the proceeds of a tote, albeit those proceeds are now mortgaged for years ahead. It gives them a

aStatOr October 13, 1973

marvellous tourist attraction, and an exceptionally well-equipped

conference centre. Also somewhere to mount their equivalent of Sunday Night at the London Palladium and of Victor Hochhauser's interminable 1812s at the Albert Hall.

To the opera and ballet companies the Opera House, its uneconomic 1,500 seats in the drama theatre, and the narrow but deep stage, represents a difficult — but surely exciting — challenge. There is already the feeling that the Australians will now — having spent their $A110 million on achieving an impossible fantasy — have to spend a smaller sum on building a purely functional and possibly even ugly opera house in central Sydney, where opera and ballet can be presented as they should be seen. On current showing in London, the ballet company is clearly worth it anyway.