Ballet
Pork and Butter
By CLIVE BARNES The rest of the repertory has been carefully pruned for respectability, for Festival Ballet, at last going cap in hand to the Arts Council for the State subsidy it at last deserves, has quite long rejected the gimcrack days of its youth, when it could be guaranteed to cram in more bad ballets over square foot of stage area than any com- parable organisation, living or dead. Now the monsters of the past have been put down, and the sparse band of survivors is let out gingerly to public gaze. This season has already seen four Fokine revivals; and three works stemming, via Harald Lander, from the Danish school; Etudes, excerpts from Napoli and Lander's version of Coppelia.
What is one to say of Schelu'razade or Le Spectre de la Rose? They hardly seem like great works now, but what has happened? These harem scandals and a Victorian keepsake were once regarded as ballet masterpieces. Have they deteriorated, as only such fugitive things can, beyond recognition, let alone repair? Or has changing taste caught them in its pincers and squeezed the life out of them? After all Stephen Phillips, almost a contemporary of Fokine, was once thought of as a' great playwright, of whom William Archer could write : 'the elder Dumas speaking with the voice of Milton.' But nothing now seems left of Paolo and Francesca.
Les Sylphides, Fokine's choreographic sigh to Chopin, remains, usually bloody but unbowed, and, more surprisingly, Prince Igor, whose Polovtsian hordes can still sometimes stir. They do this season, exuberantly led by Vassilie Trunoff, and incidentally serve as an indicator mark how well the whole company is dancing.
The same high quality emerges •from the repertory's Danish pastries. This Copenhagen Coppelia, with its accent on folksiness, has its pros and cons, but with Marilyn Burr and David Adams, it is ingratiatingly danced. Better still arc Etudes and Napoli. The former is Lander's straggling but assertively exciting idealisation to Czerny music of a ballet class, and with its revels led by Burr, John Gilpin and the rising Barry McGrath, it remains a sight for sore eyes, par- ticularly as it is generally more stylishly danced than in previous seasons. This is real ballet and real dancing, and one wonders why Festival Ballet's audiences are so clearly prepared to take any substitute, as if they couldn't even tell the difference between pork and butter, Yet un- doubtedly, credit where credit due, the company are in high fettle, and even at their slightest they usually entertain.
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