ARTS
Looking beyond the frills
Jann Parry
C ummon up the image of a ballet dancer L./ and what do you see? Very probably, what Degas saw: a girl in a long white skirt, adjusting a pink satin shoe. It is a curious mixture of conventions: the Romantic white tutu of the sylph and the sweat-and- blood-stained shoe of the working girl. Degas's eye was accurate. All ballet dancers, now as then, fall into the same positions at rest during rehearsals. Only the long white skirts make his dancers look pic- turesque. Take them away and you see the female nudes he drew and painted so obsessively: graceless creatures, preoc- cupied with their mundane physical tasks.
In 1886, he drew a series of pastels catalogued as 'nudes of women bathing, washing, drying, rubbing down, combing their hair or having it combed'. That description appears in a programme note for Ian Spink's recent work, De Gas (a pun on how Degas originally spelt his name), performed by Second Stride at Oxford. Se- cond Stride is a new modern dance group bringing together 12 dancers from different companies to perform works by three young choreographers; Ian Spink, Siobhan Davies and Richard Alston. All three have high reputations in the (admittedly small) world of British modern dance and Spink and Alston are beginning to get commis- sions from abroad as well. Later this year Second Stride will be the first British modern dance company to perform in the United States.
Spink's De Gas was made last October for his own group of dancers. It is a sur- realist joke and a fresh look at stereotypes. The familiar Degas poses are all there but instead of nude women you see formally dressed men performing their ablutions. Starting off in starched white shirts and long johns, three men, Matthew Hawkins, Jeremy Nelson and Spink himself, go about the ritual of finishing their dressing, then of washing their feet and hair. They are ac' companied by a tape of sound effects and woodwind music and by a musician, Christopher Redgate, who sits with his feet in a bowl of water while playing the oboe. The proceedings are temporarily inter' rupted by a plump ballerina (Betsy Gregory) dressed a la Degas, with a fan con" cealing the cup of tea she has brought for the musician.
Meanwhile, the dance goes gravely on, as elaborate as the preparations for a bullfight. Indeed, the towels that decorate the spartan set are manipulated sometimes as toreadors' capes, sometimes as the Ka hair of women and at other times simplY the linen to be ironed by Degas s Repasseuses. Why should the image of a man lovingly folding and refolding a piece of cloth be so less resonant than that of °' woman performing the same action? Sal- ly because it is less familiar, uncelebrated by the sensual palette of a Renoir or a Degas' Which is presumably Ian Spink's point, Back at the London Coliseum, Festival , Ballet has revived the hieratic ritual of Sylphides. Fokine's ballet is now seen as the, archetypal Romantic ballet blanc: people associate long white tutus with ,1: rather than the much earlier La Sylphide• i` is hard for us to appreciate how revol.n. tionary Fokine's choreography was for Li5 time. There is no story, no virtuoso role and Chopin's music inspires the movement rather than accompanies it. Diagbilev,, changed the ballet's name from Chopiniall,' to Les Sylphides when he brought it to Paris in 1909. The setting we now associate with It, — moonlit glade, long white dresses and black and white costume for the solitary . male — was provided by Alexandre Boots' Only Balanchine has ever had the courage (or effrontery) to go back to basics when restaged it in 1972 for New York City Bat with no set, no orchestration, and practil" tunics instead of costumes. He said it v.ia' an academic masterpiece that had bee/1 dulled by layers of sentiment. Festival Ballet, however, has its OP sense of tradition and its own high priestess; in the shape of one of its founders, Data s Alicia Markova. She danced Les Sy/piaci° first for Diaghilev and later, in America' for Fokine himself. She prepared this Pr°e duction for Festival Ballet, so it should be the real thing — the kind of performancee that Degas could have seen in Paris had 110 not been too old, blind and fed up to g° to the ballet any more. But there cannot be s true and perfect reproduction of Leo Sylphides. It has become so sacred that II, company can lay claim to a definitive S'
sion. Every balletomane has his or her con- ception of how it should be done.
For my taste, the music in the Festival Production is taken too slowly. The final Grande Valse Brillante becomes almost a lullaby. The laudable aim of subduing the bouncier members of Festival's corps into a semblance of sylphs means that they scarce- IY seem to leave the ground at all. The only one truly capable of flying is Evelyne Desut- ter, a French dancer who is developing into a true Romantic ballerina. Markova has clearly guided her in how to give the illusion of 'weightlessness: but Desutter has her own i gift of knowing how to place her head in relation to her arms and how to use her remarkably pretty feet to their best advan- tage.
This precise awareness of her own outline Is not yet shared by any other of Festival's Young soloists. They are put through their Paces in Harald Lander's Etudes, a one-act ballet originally designed to display the Classical technique of the Royal Danish Ballet. The demanding steps have to be done cleanly and repeatedly. Festival's dancers tend to be short on precision and stamina. They are happier in Andre Pro- kovsky's new ballet, Verdi Variations, Which shows them off without exposing their weaknesses. Prokovsky has a facility for creating sequences of steps that are ,cPrufertable and enjoyable to dance and tnerefore make the dancers themselves look good.
This concern with performance before content is alien to many new, modern ch°reographers. They want you to see not the dancers but what they are doing. Se- cond Stride as a company make few conces- sions to audience appeal. Apart from The De Gas, there are not many laughs. distinction choreography is cerebral, with little ulstinction between the sexes, either in three choreographers have distinctive styles of their own. Spink's is marked by unex- pected conjunctions; dancers move over and across each other, transferring
and energy from one weight
person or group to another. Siobhan Davies has her dancers move alongside each other as separate Units. In Rushes they seem a revolutionary group, dressed in red, black and grey; in Plain Song they are a congregation of in- dividuals, with Davies herself as their priest e'r leader. Both works have strong under- currents of emotion, restrained by their austere geometry. Only Alston's Field of duet communicates feeling directly in a ,uetfor two women. Danced to Vaughan Williams'sW Six Folk Songs, it has Davies .as vrl. Confident, assertive cello to Juliet Another plaintive, hesitant piano theme. added Alston piece, Doublework, is to be shown to the repertoire, which will .be next in full at London's Riverside Studios c'lexr Month. I am not yet sure whether Se- c°9 .Stride is an ensemble rather than a coincidence of dancers and choreographers. ,ut Balanchine said of Les Sylphides, Hgr!derneath is force, logic and ingenuity. igh praise, indeed.
Previous page
