Contemporary Arts
Not the Mixture as Before
THE position of English ballet— to eyes capable of seeing farther
than tonight's performance—is as precarious now as it was in Janu- ary, 1957, and in all the other Januarys since we cast off the tempting, to forecast the future of an art as to make inspired guesses about the future of politics or of the designing of women's clothes. Here goes.
In recent months, various published statements from the director of the former Sadler's Wells Ballet enterprises (now in process of becoming The Royal Ballet, but still existing in dual form as Royal Ballet Nos. 1 and 2) have set out some ideas about ballet policy for the next few years.
The first point of policy is to be a consolidat- ing of ground already won, in London, the provinces and abroad; the basic company to be resident at Covent Garden is to be large enough to stand splitting into segments so that a season of sufficient amplitudeeat Covent Garden can coincide with the provincial appearance of a split-off group which would be graced with the presence of some of the top-line stars. Margot Fonteyn and Svetlana Beriosova need not neces- sarily—it is inferred—be on view at the Royal Opera House all the time; occasionally each can be seen as Giselle or Odette in Birmingham, Plymouth and Aberdeen.
This policy naturally only concerns the Royal Ballet; whatever the other English companies want to do is pretty much their own affair,. As the two leading ones (Ballet Rambert and Festival 'Ballet) have to keep alive mainly by touring the provinces, they can for a while Probably share a market hitherto divisible be- tween themselves and the (present). Royal Ballet No 2—formerly the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet. Festival Ballet, stressing entertainment rather than art (yet under the iron necessity of blending both to make its offerings at all attractive), is run on private backing, and it is one of the miracles of present-day English theatre finance that it has kept going for so long and, apparently, so success- fully. The Ballet Rambert receives a modest hand- out from Arts Council funds—probably enough to relieve its management of, say, 10 per cent. of its more serious financial worries. The lion's share of Arts Council subsidy goes to Covent Garden, to be divided in proportions known to few living persons between the opera and ballet groups. Thus the situation, here in 1958, for all the companies is no easier, no less fraught with Problems, than it was one year ago.
If we like to believe that the Arts Council sub- sidy will go on, and will go on being split in the same way, the operations of all the companies could follow the same pattern as recently—this at the cost of near nervous breakdowns once a month for administrators and directors and with the same tide of frustration ebbing and flowing over the creative and interpretative artists because of the restricted opportunities for them to con- test for so few—and sometimes pinchbeck— prizes.
No promulgated policy anywhere implies any attempt to keep the art of ballet alive and there- tore of cultural value to our way of life and our peculiar times. New works are as much a neces- sity in ballet as in other art-forms; yet very few of the new ballets of the postwar age have shown any ideological advance on the English ballet- making pattern of the 1930s. What sounds like a note of hope is struck by Dame Ninette de Valois's insistence that what English ballet needs is a return to the full-length ballet; and certainly much of the glory of her company rests upon its successful remountings of the best survivors of the nineteenth-century conventional three-act ballets. But, surely, this is retrogressive? The Russians have kept the three-act ballet as the normal conventional form for over two cen- turies; we in the West swung to the one-acter promulgated by Fokine and Diaghilev, and the whole twentieth-century renaissance is based on it—all over Europe and in the Americas.
The long ballet offers scope for lengthy and very elaborate building-up of detail for chore- ographer and composer : it sets fresh tasks for the dancers in forcing them to acquire and de- velop a technique of acting and miming which can enable them to create new full-length charac- ters (hitherto they have inherited interpretations of full-length characters from all the leading dancers since about 1800). The task of bringing any such new long ballets to convincing life on the stage would be formidable—and, candidly, one asks which living choreographers seem to have fecundity of imagination and invention enough to devise ballets that would not be re- workings of the plots and ideas of the nineteenth- century master-works.
The few recent attempts to alter the scope and aim of the short ballet have mostly proved to be simply a re-proportioning of the formulas in- vented or adapted or crystallised by our best prewar choreographers—Ashton, Tudor, Howard and Staff. The joint output, within the past ten years, of John Cranko and Kenneth Macmillan (the two most significant younger figures on the native scene just now) more often presents the confusions rather than the joys and challenges of present-day life; or they attempt to reveal pro- fundities of human action and reaction which are strictly untouchable by the contemporary usages of the classical ballet vocabulary.
For long enough, anyone who Cares about the whole art of the theatre has been aware of fast- approaching sterility; the majority of new plays are as saddening a spectacle as the continuous revivals of old operas. Pure music, poetry, paint- ing have each in some measure shown that many of their creator% are responsive to ideas and sentiments appropriate to this Age of Uncer- tainty—much more so than the playwrights and choreographers. Anything which could re- liven the theatre and start some sort of move- ment away from the doldrums ought to be acceptable, even if only as a challenge to creative artists to experiment freshly with old materials.
Because it deals most effectively in the at- mospheric, the symbolic, the imprecisely poetic, ballet is the kind of theatre-art most easily adaptable to what could well be the easiest way out of the present general ideological lethargy. A clever re-working of technical means from other branches of the theatre into the basic structure of the ballet spectacle could open a way to an at least interesting future through what is, in fact,
the earliest doorway—that of Whole Theatre. The formula requires scripts from playwright- poets devised to convey 'meaning' by implication, by suggestion rather than statement, by shocking with visual and aural assault of a fresh kind : which is obviously a more daring move than attempts to re-create and teach the old conven- tions of the nineteenth-century long ballet—don- ventions which one would have thought the Russian system _of ballet has exploited to the limit already. The use of individual and massed bodies exploiting a stylised and disciplined system of movement and gesture could be accom- panied by all the devices of theatrecraft—variable stage-levels, transformations, a flexible decor composed mainly of lighting; together with narra- tion, music, recorded sound, singing and even acrobatics, spectacular mechanisms of fountains, fireworks, back-projection—all this is an existing palette ready to the hand of the adventurous poet-playwright-choreographer. Well, it would make a nice change from yet another production of Coppelia and it would not cost any more— it might even persuade some of the younger choreographers to get beyond thinking of them- selves and their devoted dancers as something other than a bunch of crazy mixed-up kids.
A. V. CO FON
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