BALLET
Ballet Workshop. (Mercury.)—Bulbul and his Oriental Ballet. (Scala.)
IN Ballet Workshop's last programme of the season, two of the four ballets are by Peter Darrell. Les Chimeres, about which I have already written, confirms the good impression it made the first time I saw it. Darrell's new pas de quatre, Domino, is another neat little affair, introducing a dancer, Graham Smith, who has a delightful sense of comedy. Domino is a variation on an old theme, but it appears fresh and alive in its new guise, for Darrell knows how to express hts ideas in terms of the dance and project them to his audience. It will be interesting to see what he is able to do in a larger theatre and with more dancers.
At the Scala theatre is the Pakistani dancer Bulbul with his Oriental Ballet. His intention has obviously been to present a programme against a less esoteric background than the great exponents of Indian dancing have accustomed us to, and at the same time, to introduce some aspects of contemporary life. As a result we do not feel his art to be as remote from Western understanding as the purer, more traditional dances of the East; yet at the same time it gives that uncomfortable impression of being neither one thing nor the other.
LILLIAN BROWSE.
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