The Ballet STAGE AND SCREEN
Russian Ballet at Covent Garden
THE opening performance of Colonel de Basil's Russian ballet season at Covent Garden gained from the audience an unbounded enthusiasm. The ballets. were Aurora's Wedding. Choreartium and Boutique Fantasque. The performance of Aufora's Wedding was easily the best we have seen, at any rate since Diaghilev's time : in fact this was a better perfor- mance than any that we saw last year of a classical ballet. Particularly memorable was the dance of the seven ladies of honour and their partners. While each of the maids, one after the other, was turned by her partner, the whole beauty of classical ballet was revealed to us, since at this moment the dancers' style was perfect. This perfection, in turn, made us aware that occasionally some of the dancers were forcing their effects. Perhaps this was the defect of a quality that dancers alone possess, the power to reveal their full might within a few moments of their entry in such a ballet as Aurora. Baronova's Princess Aurora was the outstanding performance : in her dancing the company's new certainty of knee and foot were summed. She has renewed the perfection of her technique with a more profound, more restrained poetry or artistry, and thus she appears to possess almost a leisure in which she moves. It is, of course, the prerogative of her extreme youth that the strictest, most arduous and most rapid movements of the joints should afford an effect of a leisure spent by her bemused in regal grandeur. There was a great deal more than precision in her performance : of mere precision she would seem to give no further thought, so perfect is her sense of rhythm, so easy her mastery of the flow of one movement into the next.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the first night was the appearance on that programme of f'horeartiunt, emphasising the popularity that this great ballet has finally won in the course of three seasons. The issue as to whether or not it is infamous to use Brahms' fourth symphony for a ballet has always seemed to me a false issue, revealing an inadequate conception of the art of ballet, one, moreover, that vitiates a great deal of our native choregraphy. The appropriateness of the fourth symphony in the theatre must be judged simply and solely in terms of the ballet of which it is a part. Braiuns' fourth symphony is one thing, C'horeartium is another.
We are all aware that our perception of the visual world is qualified by sound. This fact is experienced by us every day, especially in cities. What does Oxford Street look like without the noise of the street ? It is impossible to see it -sci except during the two minutes' silence when London streets are unrecognisable. Sound qualifies vision almost to the degree that sense of touch qualifies vision, although in a more purely imaginative unpractical way. Imaginative pbtver in this direction has been stimulated enormously by the conditions and inventions, such as radio and cinema, of the modem world ; and herein lies the richest fund for modern art. Even the short pieces of music between the different episodes of a news-reel qualify, and are intended to 'cpialify, those episodes plastically. Owing to the extreme contemporary relevance of these phenomena it is indeed astounding that in a recently published book on ballet by various authors, with promising chapter headings such as The Score," " Music and Action," " Ballet and the Film," there should not be one single reference to the purely plastic interaction of music and movement, and by plastic inter- action I refer to the visual stimulus that an arpeggio, for instance, ,possesses in relation to the ballerina as she extends her leg. It is as if she moved her leg through the rising and falling .notes of the arpeggio. I have stated before in this column, and will repeat, that ballet, as well as being dancing to music, is dancing with music. Such is the essence of ballet, the secret of its contemporary relevance ; and it is natural enough that this flourishing art that draws its strength from our perception of the world around us, from the infinite vistea/ interrelationship of sound and movement, should . realise its masterpieces by engaging for its use the masterpieces of musical thought. ADRIAN STOKES.
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