STAGE AND SCREEN
BALLET
Anglo-Polish THE Ballet, which we habitually think of as Russian, owes a great deal to Polish dancers. ICrzesinska, Nijinsky and his sister, Idzikovsky and Woizikovsky are among the more famous names. It owes, too, a deal to a Polish composer, Chopin. We are apt to overlook the debt, because the pieces which Fokine chose for Les Sylphides contains nothing of the more obviously national music of the composer. In the mazurkas the local idiom has been transmuted by his art into a more universal language. But Les Sylphides is at once a poetic evocation of one side of Chopin's genius and the first link, forged long before the revived interest in Chalon's lithographs, between the contemporary Ballet and the romantic style of a century ago.
It was appropriate, therefore, to put this work at the head of a programme given by a company of Polish and English dancers, who have started on a provincial tour under the title of the Anglo-Polish Ballet, and who will visit those parts of the country where the Polish forces are stationed. They gave a preliminary and private performance in London a week ago at the Cambridge Theatre. The dancing was efficient and sensitive, though the corps de ballet had not yet achieved that certainty and fluency of movement which alone can give to this difficult Ballet its right dreamlike quality. They were seen to more advantage in the characteristic dances of Poland, of which the programme included a number of vigorous specimens.
Later in the week I re-visited the Arts Theatre, with a view to seeing a new Chopin Ballet designed by Keith Lester. The production had, however, been postponed, but I remained to see what was a novelty, at any rate for me—Prokoviev's Peter and the Wolf. This is a fable for children in the form of a melodrama—that is with a spoken text accompanied by music. It belongs to the great tradition of children's literature, in that it does not condescend to its audience and that it delights the grown-up mind that is not above enjoying nonsense in the Carrolline style. Its very sophistication goes so far round the circle that it reaches the point where lack of _sophistication begins.
Mr. Frank Staff has devised exactly the right kind of non- sensical choreography in which to tell the story of how Peter, with the aid of a bird and a cat, ensnared the big bad wolf that swallowed the duck—and that in the face of timorous admoni- tions from the elder generation. The fable is said to have no moral, but it seemed to me that one was implicit in the tale, and, in fact, holds together what would otherwise be a wholly inconsequent action.
English choreographers and dancers seem to have a special talent for the burlesque, and Mr. Staff shows himself a master of the vein, especially in the extremely funny dance of the hunters. The company, led by Miss Helen Ashley, Miss Sally Gilmour, Mr. Leo Kersley and Mr. David Martin, carried out his ideas perfectly. The Ballet is danced to an excellent American recording of Prokoviev's music, which, depending as it does on its instrumentation for the delineation of the characters, cannot be performed on the pianoforte. The music is also an excellent piece of fooling with a charming tune to represent the hero, who seems to be, on the musical side, a Russian cousin of Humperdinck's Hansel.
DYNELEY HUSSEY.
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