BALLET
Slipping Beauty
THERE is a terrible fascination about the latest Russian ballet film, The Sleeping Beauty, currently on view at the Odeon, Hay- market; it is fascinating because it stars the Kirov Ballet and they are the most perfectly trained dancers in the world, with a style so aristocratic that most other dancers seem' like peasants in comparison. Terrible, because the Petipa-Tchaikovsky masterpiece has been put through a transmogrifying machine and has come out looking like a 'thirties ,musical— Goldwyn Fairies of /935, possibly. Heaven and Konstantin Sergueyev (Kirov ballet-master and joint director with Appolonari Dudko) know what- the film was intended to be: what it is is a pastel-coloured monster of cuteness. From the opening sequence showing Carabosse—now a ballerina part, all pirouettes and high dudgeon —spinning amid a forest of lilac branches that are quickly pulled into the ground by black, disem- bodied hands, lovers of the original are in for some shocks.
Nastiest of these is the decor—expanses of Disney Baroque on which a severely cut version of the ballet is played before cameras that sweep down on dancers, peer at them from below, cut them in half in mid-solo or peek from be- hind billowing gauze.
And yet—despite the cuts, despite the decor and the deadpan faces of most of the cast-- despite the infant Aurora in her cradle played by an elderly and slightly glazed tot, The Sleeping Beauty is worth seeing. It enshrines— embalms is probably the word—such wonderful dancing by the Kirov that one accepts the inno- cent awfulness of much of the film because it has obviously, been made•by someone in love with both the ballet and the dancers' style. • The Soviet attitude to the classics has always seemed odd to me; they re-choreograph them, give them a message, re-slant them, and go on dancing them like angels, Well, they are entitled to at the Kirov; what we know as 'the classics' were created there and have been maintained in continuous performance, and if Konstantin Sergueyev wants to treat his inheritance in cavalier fashion, he is entitled to do so. That he has failed to make an effective translation of a great ballet into another medium is no surprise; the set patterns and formal structure of The Sleep' ing Beauty are unthinkable in any setting other than an opera house. But there is always the dancing, and it iS ravishing. Alla Sizova, heroine of the Kirov London season, is a darling Aurora, and YurY Solovyov no less, marvellous as her Prince; there are hordes of processing courtiers, Fairies , in the prologue that any other ballet company would give eye-teeth for, and as a bonus, two dancers new to us. Irina Bazhenova as the Lilac Fairy is superbly lyrical, and Natalia Dudinskaya is Carabosse. When Dudinskaya"— assoluta of the Kirov and a great dancer fur thirty years—dances the part I don't care that it has been perverted into a tirade of pirouettes, and now looks as if it were intended for Agnes Moorehead; she is marvellous, and makes 10 whole thing worth while.
The film is worth while for ballet lovers in
any case--the Kirov would be compelling view' ing if filmed by Melies: it may, sadly, also be worth while for balletophobes —to confirm their worst suspicions about that thoroughly frivolous
art!
CLEMENT cgor
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