Celebrations
BALLET CLEMENT CRISP
Dame Marie Rambert, founding mother of British ballet, celebrates her eightieth birthday this week, and in common with audiences and those myriad dancers and choreographers whose talents she has goaded and guided into excel- lence, these columns offer admiring and grate- ful congratulations. An ex-Rambert dancer once said that if there were Old School Tights for ballet's elite, then Rambert colours would predominate; certainly there is no present we can offer this wonderful woman which will— even inadequately—repay the immense debt we owe her. Probably the best birthday present she has had this year is the one she gave herself: her reborn company's season in the West End. If Mercury has ever been her presiding deity it is also right that her company, springing from the ashes of ten years touring the classics, should have just appeared at the Phoenix Theatre. Phoenix-like, the company has taken on a new life and a modernity that leaves the rest of our ballet troupes standing.
The recent season was dominated by Glen Tetley's ballets, with Pierrot Lunaire, Ricercare, Freefall and Ziggurat all on view; enough has been said about the various excellence of the first three, but Ziggurat, still a puzzler, remains fascinating theatrical experience, and more par- ticularly, an intensely exciting dance-experience. As to the company itself, so much is so good that one tends to overlook the faults and mis- judgments that are inevitably part of growing pains. The dancers are fine, the men especially so, with Jonathan Taylor and the exotic Chris- topher Bruce (whom Racine might nearly have called un monstre sacre naissant); and the Tetley / Morrice repertory is splendid.
So, too, is the revelation of John Chesworth as a choreographic talent. Time Base was a most promising first ballet, 'H' has tremendous originality, and at the Phoenix his frivol, Tic-tack, came as much-needed comic relief in a repertory which has a Wildean tendency to insist on the importance of being earnest. The only other allegedly light piece is Intermede, which needs to be danced to a very scratched recording of Shirley Temple singing 'On the Good Ship Lollipop' for maximum gorge-rising effect. The return of Anna Soko- low's Deserts, which makes Strindberg seem like the maddest moments of the Katzenjammer Kids, simply makes me want to desert the theatre. These two carpings apart, the season was excellent. Many happy returns to Dame Marie—and her company. Meanwhile, a few hundred yards away as the swan flies, we saw
the equally happy return of Dame Margot Fonteyn to Covent Garden and the lake: the production—muddled, inconsequential, and as busy as they come—might with advantage learn from Dame Margot's interpretation, which is clean, uncluttered and magnificent.
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