Ballet
Noel and Christopher Robin
By CLIVE BARNES
WHAT, as the psychiatrist might put it, do you think of when I say the word 'ballet'? Pretty girls in billowing white tarlatan, tip-toeing eternally in some moonlit glade, chased con- scientiously by a puffing young man with an ambiguous manner? Well, yes, ballet can be like that—but, fortunately, that isn't the whole story. The most revered brand in this country is still called 'classical ballet'—and in its chocolate,box you will still find a few sexless sylphs and glades. But another type is discouragingly called 'ethnic dance', and here we place those mad, crazy Spaniards. Yet another bears the strange generic name of 'modern dance'. What there is 'modern' about it is nowadays none too clear—for it can trace its family roots back for the best part of half a century, and most of its current British exponents appear to be happily entrenched in the life and times of the 1930s.
'Modern dance' is, as of course it would be, an American coinage. The European article, where it exists, might perhaps be called 'expressionist dance'. It was all started by Isadora Duncan kicking off her shoes, and almost everything else for that matter, and leaping over the traces in an apparently inimitable way. This led in- directly to two dynasties of free-dancing; one in Europe, the other in America, which shared a contempt for the supposed artificialities of classical ballet technique and resolved to burst out of its conventions. The aim was to make dancing a pure personal expression of thought and feeling. In America it prospered and has achieved a significance equal to that of the classic ballet, which it has by now greatly influenced. In Europe, however, after a brief flare of glory—with the Ballets Jooss, Mary Wigman, Birgit Akcsson and a few others— expressionist dance has languished.
The how and why of this difference between American and European modern dance (for the Europeans in their dog-days have adopted the American name) was driven home to me recently when I saw a dance programme, called Six Choreo- graphers., at the pleasant, new Emma Cons Hall in Morley College, and later went to see an American film with Martha Graham at the Academy Cinema.
The British programme was full of the sweat of honest ambition. The ballets and dances had been arranged by probably the best modern-dance choreographers in the country. Yet there was hardly any origi- nality among a whole clique of clichés. John Broome, for instance, is a young man trained by the Royal Ballet and the Sigurd Leeder School, and now he is teaching movement at RADA. He produced an angry young something called The Blind People which combined acting, singing, mime and dancing. Here should have been the kind of experiment our theatre needs. An insulting manifesto thrown at the audience, telling us that we are blind, empty, and materialistic, that we are ships without rudders. It sounds splendid. But Broome seems to be a rudder without a ship: he knows where to go, but at the moment has nothing to take him there. Not that there was anything wrong with his message—there never has been—except that he was quite unable to deliver it. This half-baked mixture of West Side Story and Paul Slickey wouldn't have infuriated an ill-bred fly, except by its inept and pretentious amateurishness. Certain of the less ambitious items proved more pro- fessional, and two ex-Jooss stalwarts, Sigurd Leeder and Ludmila Mlada, turned out some very sound, yet perfectly un- sensational works, with little even here to stimulate the mind or illuminate the senses.
Compare this with the Martha Graham film at the Academy, called A Dancer's World. Graham is the greatest non-classic dancer anywhere, she is also among the handful of top choreographers and teachers in the world. The film opens with Graham making up in her dressing room, and we are ushered into the presence to hear her give forth on Dancing and Life. Her face, stressed with intensity, is an emaciated mask, shrewd, wise and, above all, superior. Her voice is care-fully ar-ticulated New England, and the commentary smacks a bit of self-consciousness and high art. The woman is, and the layman will soon catch on, a priestess. But she is also a genius, and somehow I think a layman will catch on to that too.
She describes, in the pious voice of a Daughter of the Revolution, a modern dancer's training. She describes the good life dedicated to movement, the hours of classwork, the years of discipline, the un- willing muscles and the unyielding spirit. Then we see her dancers performing with all the ease and simplicity of the Bolshoi Ballet, bouncing on the resilient floor like little human gods and goddesses. The gap, the chasm between British and American modern dance comes not from any difference in the aim (to make the body totally expressive) or the approach (highly serious dedication) but in the method.
The Americans have worked to find a technique as coherent as the classic ballet. They acquire that technique through disciplines even harsher than those imposed by the older tradition, and they are led by people equal in talent and imagination to the leaders of the old ballet. The results will speak to anyone who sees this wonder- ful film.
Noel Coward's new ballet London Morning, now at the Festival Hall, takes place in front of Buckingham Palace and has everything except Christopher Robin, who must have been saying his prayers when it was cast. This work, ushering in the tenth season of London's Festival Ballet, is as predictable an entertainment as all-in wrestling. While Mr. Coward plonks down his cards in a straight-flush of clichés, the audience capitulates with frightening gurgles of delighted recognition.
Intrepid Mr. Coward, with one hand on the pulse of the TAM-rated telly public and the other. tied behind his back in a gesture of defiance, leaves nothing to chance. Setting his ballet at the hub of the Empire—not that there's anything funny in that—he has gathered around him a typical cross-section of everyday folk. The Bateman Guardsman who drops his rifle, the London policeman with a gruff heart of gold, the ooh-la-la French maid, the giggle of St. Trinian's nymphets, those dear old juvenile delinquents, the sailor that all the nice girls love, the Mr. Pastry in the bath-chair who is nimbler than he seems, the cute American girl who provokes the Guardsmen, the Chelsea set who provoke no one, the amusing 'Ladies of the Town' chased by the Gentlemen who are something in the City, the earthy proletarian family from Streatham happily breeding with quiet bad taste, the awful little boy with the red balloon who gets clipped round the ear by Dad—Mr. Coward knows his England.
The music by Mr. Coward himself may not sound much as pure music, but for London Morning its wishy-washy tunes, gently reminiscent of the radio in the next room, are downright ideal. And when at the end, as the crowd are watching our Queen enter the Palace, the confidently expected strains of that dear song 'London Pride' break through almost like a national anthem, and one feels that even the con- ductor must get a lump of something sticking in his throat.
The scenery by William Constable shows a concaved perspective of Buckingham Palace's elevation, and is fair enough in an Osbert Lancaster-manque fashion. The costumes by Norman MacDowell look as though they might have been got together for an exhibition called 'A Century of British Dress' and dart around the decades with bewildering freedom. Freedom, on the other hand, is just what the choreo- grapher—yes, Mr. Coward used a choreo- grapher—badly needed. Here and there Jack Carter showed his ability, only having immediately to return to the strait- jacket jointly provided by the theme and music. He did his best, as did the dancers concerned.
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