BALLET
Tetley's tediums
ROBIN YOUNG
Glen Tetley's Field Figures was part of the Queen Mother's 71st birthday treat on its first performance at Covent Garden. It was impossible to gauge the royal pleasure in it from my discreet seat in the stalls, but the ballet is not the sort of treat that I personally could wish upon anyone, let alone a lady of the Queen Mother's homeliness and years.
The thing makes me physically uncomfortable. I disliked it intensely when it was included in the Royal Ballet's season of smaller works at the Sadler's Wells. Now that it has been brought to the Opera House it fits less easily into the programmes and looks, in those sumptuous surroundings, even more out of place.
Of course it is out of place. The Royal's dancers have only classical training, yet here they are performing (adequately enough) choreography by the most uncompromising of modernists. Field Figures is a gloomy psychological piece, supposedly, but for the most part obscurely, about human relationships — or at least the agonies, discontents and frustrations thereof. The discomforting scores to which it is set are by Stockhausen, and give me the feeling of being laid up alive in a coffin in the middle of an animal-infested and dripping wet jungle, and able to hear the worms eating through the wood.
There are a few attractive movements— the balanced poses when Deanne Bergsma and Desmond Kelly are coupled together are quite beautiful. But there is much more which is repetitive (Deanne Bergsma riding nightmares round the stage) or restricted (Vergie Derman, apparently with backache). The ballet runs fifty minutes, which is cruelly overlength. There was no mistaking the sound of scarcely stifled yawns from one's neighbours long before the curtain fell.
Easier to take are the present programmes of the London Contemporary Dance Theatre which is on tour, at present in Harrogate. Not all so very contemporary — one of their best short offerings is Paul Taylor's Three Epitaphs with atavistic jazz and ape-like dancers, first created in 1956. Noemi Lapzeson's Cantabile is an amusing riddle about living death in the family, tricked out with " folk " songs; The Road of Phoebe Snow is West Side Story to (badly
reproduced) music by Duke Ellington: and Robert Cohan's Consolation of the Rising Moon is a Bejart-ian exposition of vaguely Polynesian sexuality: willowy women, and men in long skirts with red tasselled G-strings beneath — reminiscent of John Taras's Piege de Lumiere.
Most directly comparable to Field Figuers is Cohan's Cell. It has the advantages of colour, discernible development, and an element of drama — the trapped characters die many deaths and there is a strobe-lit climax with a shower of bricks. The company also has the advantage of a dancer — William Louther — who interprets this sort of thing not merely surprisingly well, but as to the manner born.
Raymonda, Act 3, at the Opera House, came as a welcome relief after Field Figures. (" This is beautifully orthodox" enthused an American voice behind). But Lynn Seymour is being given too much to do, and it is no kindness to cast her in this, which is far from being what she does best. Lesley Collier, Monica Mason and Nureyev caught the mood of this grand parade of dancing. Seymour's air of affected disdain only detracted from the beauty of her dancing. And — someone had better say it — Nureyev seems to have a real problem holding her in the lifts.
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