DANCING
East and West Rant GOPAL'S second London programme, at the Saville Theatre, is almost entirely new, and even better than the first. There is now a small orchestra directed by Rajani Lakhna, who is a remarkable performer on the drums as well as, in a purely Indian manner, on the violin. There are two sitar players, a very good flautist and the exciting young Cingalese drummer Anura, who now adds an equally captivating dance to his drumming. But the real musical sensation is the famous classical singer of Bengal, Dipali Nag, who is a very great artist. Her effortless, birdlike song, as she sits on the ground beside the microphone, very lovely to look at as well as to hear, has wonderful variety of tone, melody and rhythm. Ram Gopal has a splendid new Garuda dance, with flexible golden wings, which he wields marvellously. Why anyone who can dance with such eloquence and beauty should elect to address the audience in words is beyond my understanding. No dancer should miss this opportunity to study Shevanti's subtle and eloquent arm-movements, and indeed her whole dance. There is also a newcomer, Bhanumati, a young dancer from a Malabar village, discovered, I believe, in the secre- tariat of India House. She has no solo part at present, but we shall certainly hear more of her.
It is a far cry from the highly stylised expression of the great dance traditions of India to a solo recital of the Central European expressionistic school. Yoma Sasburgh is a young Dutch dancer who employs her somewhat limited technique in a variety of choreo- graphic designs, which are always musically conceived, precisely executed and sometimes striking. They are generally too ambitious, but never banal, and she has chosen some interesting music. Besides that of her husband, Clifton Parker, she dances to the music of Milhaud, Satie, Bela Bartok and Rachmaninoff. Her costumes, by Reece Pemberton, are strikingly beautiful. Lucifer's silver-rayed spiky headdress was of magnificent design and majestically worn, though the dance itself did not quite come up to its textual descrip- tion, and the fall of Lucifer seemed to be beyond her powers of interpretation. Her most successful dance was the masked Peasant Woodcut, to Bela Bartok's music, for the reason, I think, that the mask almost played the part of a dance tradition in stylising, not only the facial expression, but the whole movement of the dance. The semi-obscurity to which we were doomed throughout the performance had a rather irritating effect, as did the continuous sound of two pianos, though, with the exception of the Mozart piano-duet, they were very well played. BERYL DE ZOETE.
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