Ballet
Country dance
Robin Young
Why, I think one might be forgiven for asking, have a Welsh Dance Theatre and a Scottish Ballet if there is no Welsh dancing and precious little Scottish ballet? The answer, apparently, is that among the culturally articulate in the Dis-United Kingdom a resident dance company is reckoned to be as significant a symbol of independent nationhood as a national airline is among the countries of the developing world.
As a result London has just witnessed two consecutive and strangely contrasting seasons, one tragic and the other successful even beyond its deserts. For the Welsh Dance Theatre, full of the vigour as well as the pious solemnity of youth, what would have been a triumphant week at the Camden Festival was turned into a wake because they were obliged, by lack of further Welsh Arts Council support, to disband at the end of it. And at Sadler's Wells the Scottish Ballet, which started life as the Western Dance Theatre and survived both a geographical transplant and a metamorphosis from modern dance troupe to classical ballet company, came of age with a full-fledged London season replete with popular successes.
No doubt it is a very bad thing that there is now no resident dance company permanently based in Wales. Try as I might, however. I cannot suppose that Welsh audiences are likely to miss the Welsh Dance Theatre very much. One of the nine dancers was said to have had a Welsh mother, but there their Welshness came to an abrupt stop.
Their director, an incredibly good-looking and lithe American negro called William Louther, announced roundly that he took no notice of Wales. 'My commitment is to dance', he said, and went on to talk fashionably about preferring dance as communication to dance as acrobatics, ignoring the difficulty that, while he is supremely capable of both, some of his group were uncomfortably incapable of either. The Cardiff box office showed that Welsh Dance Theatre did not communicate in Wales, though their message was well received in London.
After the fine words. Louther's choreography for the company to bits of Bach (J. S. and C. P. E., not Dai Bach, you understand) was disappointingly dull. Lyric Fantasies was actually embarrassing, while a piece called Inventions failed to live up to its title.
The successes were Fallen Angels, an animalistic extravaganza by the American Gene Hill-Sagan; Louther's own performance in Barry Moreland's rather repetitive Triptych; two Doris Humphrey revivals not seen in Britain for thirty years or more; and an atmospheric and sensitive piece called Interior with Women choreographed by one of the company dancers, Karen Bowen. What struck me most forcibly was the energy and drive the company put into Doris Humphrey's New Dance (the modern idiom that pre-dates Martha Graham) and even more the same choreographer's Shakers. Rather than a museum piece, however interesting, about a remote and alien sect of religious zealots, couldn't something new have been attempted on the theme of Welsh dissent and the Nonconformist campaigns that excited Welshmen to fever pitch ? Would not modern Welsh composers have proved a bigger draw than Albinoni and the modern dance company's statutory bit of Berio?
All that said, the Scottish Ballet start with the bonus that there is just one kilted classic, La Sylphide. They have a pretty production of it, though not all the dancers are capable of the airy lightness that Bournonville's choreography demands. But where they came completely unstuck was in attempting a new full-length ballet with a carefully chosen Scottish subject.
Mary Queen of Scots is quite simply the worst-conceived full-length ballet I have sat through. Peter Darrell's ballet attempts to cram a score of historical characters and twenty-seven years of complicated intrigue. plot and counter-plot into the awkward confines of a classical ballet. It cannot be done, even if you give yourself, as Darrell does, seven scenes in two acts.
Yet hidden away behind the welter of inadequately explained historical incident, and in the dissonant murk of John McCabe's solemn and unbending score, was some good dancing—notably some bravura by Kit Lethby as Riccio, and the pas de deux by Elaine McDonald as Mary and Graham Bart as Bothwell. Nigel Spence also acquitted himself well as Babington.
That Darrell can accomplish full-length ballets of popular appeal when he does not let ambition run away with him was nicely illustrated in his pleasurable Tales of He: mann—the three essential ballet plots wound into one, with fine performances from Graham Bart and his three leading ladies, Andrea Durrant, Patricia Rianne and Elaine McDonald.
McDonald also made an admirable Giselle in a version which made some surprising bids for greater realism—and introduced some inconsequentialities all its own.
Other programmes encompassed a blithely danced La Ventana, a tatty and unconvincing version of La Fete etrange, macabre exercises in Jeux (winsomely so) and The Lesson (extravagantly), and a fine account of Jack Carter's Three Dances to Japanese Music, which benefited from the fact that the Scottish Ballet has talented Japanese dancers such as Noriko Ohara and Yuji Sata. 0 Caritas, a piece about violence set to some moderately hard-hitting rock songs, mostly by Cat Stevens, went down well with the audience but seemed cliché-ridden to me.
But the point surely is that there was something for everybody—including, and not forgetting, Scots who might never have been to ballet before. I hope a new attempt will be made in Wales.
Previous page
