1 APRIL 1966, Page 16

BALLET

Marriage Lines

As an antidote to the boredom, vulgarity and

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platitudinising of our present troubles I can recommend a visit to Covent Garden, where the Royal Ballet is currently showing a programme that will remind you that truth, beauty and wit have not been entirely submerged by electioneer- ing. As a young dancer, Sir Frederick Ashton was engaged by the Ida Rubinstein company in Paris; he had already made his first choreographic essays back in London, but here he had the opportunity of studying a major choreographer, Bronislava Nijinska, for the first time. A year spent working in her ballets, watching her creative method, learning the fundamentals of his craft, showed Ashton that Nijinska possessed a wonder- ful talent, an opinion that he never had occasion to alter, but neither one to prove it to the post-war London audience, until his directorate of the Royal Ballet, nearly forty years later. It was then, with his invitation to Nijinska to stage a definitive revival of Les Riches last season, that we could appreciate the truth of his assessment.

Les Biches is a masterpiece; witty, stylish, a ravishing perspective of the social and sexual manners of the 'twenties, it could never have survived on these qualities in the 'sixties. What gives it life and importance is its choreographic excellence, and as if to prove that Nijinska's talent is still more impressive, Ashton has now brought us the clinching masterpiece, The Wedding. (The Royal Ballet call it Les Noces; but then Swan Lake used to masquerade as Le Lac des Cygnes. Still, as they probably say in Floral Street, 'nous avons change tout cela.') Its re-creation last week, and its juxtaposition in the programme with Les Biches (which is untrans- latable), effectively show Nijinska as one of the most significant and original creative artists in ballet this century. Her choreography is fresh, vital, and has a novelty of imagery that is as exciting as anything we have seen since the war.

Stravinsky wrote The Wedding between 1914 and 1917; his libretto is composed of scraps of conversation, clichés of ritual language and folk- lore, a mosaic of speech fragments that catch the religious and sexual attitudes of a peasant wedding at the beginning of the last century. He intended the work to be a masquerade, with musicians and performers mingled on stage, but when Nijinska undertook the production at Diaghilev's behest in 1923, she sought to realise the underlying situation propounded by the montage of words in the libretto. The score is used, and marvellously so, as a rhythmic basis, the outline of Stravinsky's action is adhered to, but the words serve only as an element in the musical accompaniment. Nijinska shows us instead the very heart of a peasant society, turn- ing experience into a sacrament of timeless dignity and force.

There is nothing of the brightness and extrovert jollity that might be expected, nothing gorgeous as such, although the whole work is gorgeous. Instead, with its stark back-cloths and its brown and white peasant uniforms, The Wedding is an abstract ballet, in that it looks below the surface activity of a people to their fundamental feelings and beliefs, and translates these into a rite. To do this Nijinska chose a dance style of apparent simplicity, but one, in fact, of the greatest subtlety and strength. The focal point of the dancing is the bride and groom, who become abstractions, figures from an icon, while the corps de ballet enact the ritual around them. Nijinska makes architecture with the dancers, shaping them into pyramids, forming them into chains and cascades; she contrasts a pounding heaviness for the men with curved, yielding poses for the women, whose point-work indicates the essential stylisation of the vocabulary. Everything looks simple, inevit- able; it is, in fact, immensely complicated and very beautiful. Most remarkable is the tremen- dous emotional momentum that takes us from the blessing of the bride to the final sequence' at the wedding feast. Here the patterns for the guests build up to the moment when bride and groom move into the bedroom and a black drape shuts off the whole family from us (slightly too soon, I suspect, and Nijinska's choice of a plain black curtain is rather hard to accept-but these are minuscule quibbles). As the chorus sings: 'Let us live in happiness so that all men may envy us', great bells ring out in the score and the corps de ballet are left in ecstatic, reverent groups under the falling curtain.

Small wonder that Diaghilev wept when he first heard the score; the work is deeply nostalgic, a backward glance at a world that died with the Revolution, and in a sense it represents the Diaghilev Ballet's last look at Holy Russia. The fruit of exile by war and social change, The Wedding is the most authentically nationalist of Diaghilev's creations in the post-Fokine era, and after its creation he was never to look east again, save for the late, unsuccessful flirtation with Soviet ideas in Le Pas d'Acier.

In last week's staging we saw all its virtues plain; musically distinguished, technically fault- less from the Royal Ballet's corps, who manage the complexity of Nijinska's rhythms and the real virtuosity of her writing in fine style-momen- tarily with almost too much style from the men, who must temper precision with passion. The companion piece, Les Biches, looked as wonderful as ever; its marvellous clarity of textures, the wit with which everything is implied and nothing stated, the freshness of its neo-classic inventions, mark it as a masterpiece no less valuable than The Wedding. It was given a nicely knowing performance by the whole cast, with particular honours to Deanne Bergsma's pearl-hung preda- tor of a hostess, and Georgina Parkinson unfor- gettably mysterious as the boy in blue (the programme note calls her 'the girl in blue,' which is carrying nice-mindedness too far).

And as if we didn't owe Ashton enough for having given us these two beauties, there is also a revival of his own superb Scenes de Ballet, a miraculously succinct statement about classical dancing. What more can one ask than this as a specific against the polls and the teleptindits?

CLEMENT CRISP