BALLET
Setbach
'THERE are two kinds of Bach ballets: Con- certo Barocco and the rest. Only Balanchine has the sensitivity and grace—in its theological sense—to use Bach for dancing and emerge vic- torious from the encounter; the other attempts I have seen have amounted to a series of mauvais quarts d'heure, ranging from Charrat's arid exercises in Diagramme to the triumphal archness of Alan Carter's Toccata, via the gamy charms of Le Jeune Homme et la Mort (which could in any case have been danced to Adam de la Halle or Chopin or Duke Ellington). There is a particular subtlety of musical understand- ing needed to realise Bach in movement that has escaped academic choreographers, although Paul Taylor, the finest Modern Dance inventor of our time, succeeded handsomely with the cello suites in Junction. Now the return of John Cranko to stage a couple of works for the Royal Ballet has brought -',the whole vexed problem to the fore again. In the five years he has been away Cranko has made his Stuttgart Company the finest in Germany, and he has mounted a series of large-scale ballets that have earned high praise. Alongside these he has also created plotless pieces like L'Estro Har- monica The Catalyst, Variations, which have shown him doing battle with the basic materials at his art, and winning through in the produc- tion of dance sequences of predominantly abstract interest. These neo-classical inventions bear the stamp of the brilliant and inquiring in- ' telligence we knew in the best of his works for the Royal Ballet. Movement is brightly and cleanly drawn, sharply developed, if somewhat short-pulsed : there are fewer of those long sequences of invention, paragraphs as opposed - to epigrammatic sentences, that Balanchine, Ashton and MacMillan produce. Cranko's merits lie in his fertility of imagery and in a wonder- ful sense of theatre; the trouble with his new neo-classic Brandenburg Nos. 2 and 4 at Covent Garden is that Bach's structural devices have sparked off such a profusion of dance reactions from him that an overall form has been lost: you can't see the shape of the wood for the movement of the trees.
Using eight men and eight women—among the technically brightest of the Royal Ballet's young lions—Cranko has given the piece an arbitrary shape by alternating movements of the concerti for men and women, with inter- spersed double work; but he rarely shows us fewer than eight people dancing full out all the time. As an exercise in virtuosic demands the piece has the fascination of the Olympic decathlon, and a comparable stillnes and repose. Choreography floods out like water gush- ing from a fountain, and with something of the same sense of waste; from this prodigality of steps certain incidents stand out as the dancers are briefly highlighted and then move back into the general background of ceaseless activity. On and on chatters the music, on and on rattle the dancers, brilliantly, quirkily, tirelessly; eyes and mind are dazzled, and ultimately long for beautifully reasoned structure of the music's form.
And yet there is something compelling about the work. For sheer profusion of choreography it is quite amazing; much of the movement is ingenious, sometimes—as in the first section of Brandenburg 4 for eight girls—beautiful, but it can also seem wilfully inventive for the sake of invention. It is very difficult to absorb; I recall, though, alas, I cannot locate, a state- ment by Balanchine that there is a law of optics for dancing to the effect that the eye can only follow a central pair of figures and that the peripheral activity of an accompanying corps must never distract frEm the central interest. With Brandenburgs one is faced with the task of keeping up with one section only to realise that something fascinating is happening else- where. The second movement of Brandenburg 2 comprises eight different pas de deux, and the eye is constantly teased by a series of duets in varying stages of completion : the scene is over- rich and disquieting.
My sympathies are all with Cranko, consider- ing the amount of talent he chose to use and the need to use it to the full; the girls are superbly gifted, the men only slightly less so, but having over-indulged in dancers, Cranko gives the im- pression at times that if he doesn't keep them all on the move they might slip away. The result in three sections devoted solely to men
or women is some curiously ambivalent pas- sages of double work, particularly for the men, whose choreography emphasises feminine quick- ness and speed, rather than force. At his best, in the first two movements of Brandenburg 4, he is very fine, with flashing enchainements set against ravishing groupings, and in the follow- ing andante a series of allusive and beautiful statements, which I took to be about the rela- tionship between men and women. But these do not adequately compensate for the surrounding rush-hour, which avoids `mickey-mousing' but parallels the music with an almost nervous insistence.
The work is admirably danced; despite hideous costumes that succeed in the difficult task of making practice dress look unattractive, the performers are enhanced by its formidable technical demands, but whether the repertory and Cranko's great creative abilities have equally benefited I beg leave to doubt.
Two other dance events deserve mention; the first is the advent of a new Rambert choreo- grapher in Jonathan Taylor, a leading dancer with the company. His first ballet, Diversities, is a very contemporary piece, with its musique concrete and perspex screen that reflects six dancers in Tizunderball costumes; compounded of jollity, faint menace and a dash of eroticism, it promises more serious creativity in the future. I must also record a miraculous return by Fonteyn to Swan Lake, giving, with Nureyev, a performance of glorious tragic intensity and even greater clarity and beauty of style than hereto- fore; the dancing seemed pared to the very heart of sorrow, riagnificent both in its means and its meanings.
CLEMENT CRISP
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