Ballet
RUSSIAN DANCERS
le the verve, energy and technical precision of today's ballet, in any country, matched the dynamism and exuberance of the Moscow State Folk-Dance Company, now on view at the Empress Hall, then Diaghilev and Fokine wouldn't have worked in vain and the several European governments that sustain ballets at Lx million a year would be justified in the spending of every penny. The troupe, over forty strong with a male predominance, gives a series of ensembles built up out of the basic steps, gestures and space-patterns of the main styles of folk-dance indigenous to various provinces and republics of what today consti- tute Russia—including Moldavia. It is through- out an exuberant spectacle, with the girls teetering and tottering in delicate equilibrium while the boys leap like salmon, cavort like stallions, dive and tumble like porpoises.
The defects, which are not too transparently obvious, are that the musical rhythms have in most cases been squashed down into a uni- formity that gets rather wearisome as the even- ing advances, and that the costumes are in too many cases plain dowdy or vulgarly 'music- hall' in the worst tradition. Lacking experience of Russian dancing inside Russia, I would hate to pontificate, but I guess that these dazzling numbers have been very artfully cooked up by choreographer Igor Moiseyev to get the most startling athletic effects at any cost. Several of the men have, for instance, one brilliant trick —series of double air turns, or point dancing, or lightning-paced petits tours—which they do endlessly inside the context of nearly every number. There is a terribly melodramatic— dead right for home consumption but too naive for our decadent West—scena of partisans hunting, finding, ambushing, and escaping from, the enemy invader. The emotional con- tent, as in true ,folk-dance of any kind, is obvious and elemental (Boy Loves Girl: Girl Loves Boy—Period), and as with all folk-dance It's really meant to be done, not just watched . . . which is why it's wonderful in modest doses. This dose goes on for exactly long
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