Ballet
After the gala
Robin Young
Having bravely, untypically, and yet successfully given no fewer than five premieres in their 'Fanfare for Europe Gala, the Festival Ballet have temporarily relapsed into less novel exercises for their current season at the New Victoria. This cinema, a monumental grotto of Art Deco, is extravagant in everything except stage space, and better suited to popular period favourites than to anything else.
Sadly also the newest of the Festival's offerings during their stay, Dennis Nahat's Mendelssohn Symphony, is a pointless and unimpressive piece. The choreography, which is nothing of substance or consequence, could only be redeemed by much closer drilling than the company can muster. From the lofty heights of the dress circle (one does not see feet from the stalls), it seemed that almost every dancer had his or her own idea of how various bits of the dance might best be fitted to the music, the Italian, The truth is that no one could make it fit very well, though Michael Ho and Dagmer Kessler did notably better than most.
The centre-piece of the programme, Scheherazade, is an entertainment of almost injunction-worthy tastelessness. Surely if someone told Messrs McWhirter, Longford or Blackburn that in a converted cinema next to Victoria Station a company was performing oriental orgies every night, one or other of them might step in and do something about it.
The plot, as you doubtless know (the ballet is more than sixty years old), concerns the Shah whose back is no sooner turned than his concubines are bribing the palace eunuch to let them have it away as voluptuously as possible with the slaves from the cells. They all get massacred, of course, in pre-Peckinpah fashion with scimitars and other such stylish modes of execution. I should add (though not, I think, in mitigation) that everyone remains rather heavily and ornately clad throughout. Maina Gielgud works hard as the chief vamp, Zobeide, but conjures up no more inspiring image than that of a suburban housewife indulging her fantasies (" Oooh, my wild desires!"). Patrice Bart, imported from the Paris Opera, to be Gold Slave, did not even try very hard; he looked more dirty-brown than gold, anyway, and breathed harder when he was dead, if that were possible, than he did over Miss Gielgud's lavishly dedecked charms.
Actually, I wonder if a little more nudity might not help. At the moemnt Schehere zade is very, very boring which is what everybody in the public eye says about pornography once they have decided to admit reading or seeing it. So perhaps this really is pornography.
The true high spot of the evening is the brief make-weight pas de deux (almost inevitably Don Quixote, with Samsova and Prokovsky performing with bravura ease), and the company's individualistic tendencies are better suited by the irresistibly cheerful and charming Graduation Ball than by Nahat's comparatively characterless cavortings. Carol Yule and Carole Hill were both excellent, but I thought that Terry Hayworth and David Long rather overdid the Headmistress and the General.
The Gala's introductions will be seen again when the company re-opens at the Coliseum in April. I particularly look forward to Maina Gielgud's quirky, jerky Mart solo, Forme et Ligne (" variations on a door and a sigh "), and Barry Moreland's pious and deeply satisfactory In Nomine to Peter Maxwell Davies's ' Taverner ' theme. These will be additions of real value to the repertoire.
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