Ballet

Dancers of New York

By CLIVE BARNES

Young brilliant dancers were everywhere in Zurich. There were long-legged girls with self- effacing smiles and techniques as sharp as razors, spinning with the precision of Swiss watches. jumping with the bound of antelopes. They are

lyrical girls, classically poised for flight, yet not too lyrical. Balanchine, it is said, once told a ballerina: 'Don't forget Carpentier was the most lyrical boxer who ever lived, but Dempsey knocked him flat.' Always Balanchine insists on bravura.

The girls of New York City Ballet are very strong indeed, yet would surprise no one who knew the company in 1952. The men are a different matter. When the company last visited London its male dancers were completely over- shadowed, most of them crawling around like fugitives in an Amazon world. The men now are tough. with a general level of technique unsurpassed outside Russia. Nowadays they are perfectly well able to steal the thunder from the girls. The dancers are less important in New York City Ballet than the works they dance, which is the way it should be. The blind spot of the company's artistic direction remains as it ever did. No one seems to care overmuch how the ballets are decorated. The emphasis is entirely choreographic. If Balanchine were a jeweller he would be the type liable to wrap up diamonds in scraps of newspaper. This worries me less than it might worry some people. Naturally I prefer the wrappings of a ballet to be ex- quisitely chosen, but for me diamonds will always be a choreographer's best friend. Choreography is king of the City Ballet's castle, but only Balanchine's choreography. From the solitary non-Balanchine work in the Zurich repertory—a terrifyingly jejune ballet by Todd Bolender to Milhaud's Creation of the World— I guess that Balanchine has still not solved his old problem of giving variety to his programmes by the introduction of other worthwhile choreographers. Jerome Robbins, still listed as the company's artistic director, has not given them a ballet for many years. Just as Stratford gets along nicely with Shakespeare, however, New York City Ballet is well enough placed with Balanchine alone,

Some of the older works seen in Zurich looked better because they were better danced.

Symphony in C, for example, or Night Shadow (the latter weighed down with hideous designs) come up as fresh as daisies, and that Balanchine has lost none of his adroitness in the neo- classical style was shown in two ballets new to me, Valse et Variations to Glazunov and

Allegro Briltante to Tchaikovsky. In such ballets as these Balanchine's command of the dance vocabulary, his musicality and sense of style are as effortless as the song of a lark. Yet throughout his career (he was Diaghilev's choreographer as long ago as 1925) much of

Balanchine's best work has been done when he

was breaking new ground. This in its day was true of Apollo, the ballet which marked the

start of the neo-classical revival in the days of

Diaghilev and still maintains its place among Balanchine's masterworks. In Zurich the com-

pany showed Agon, which I wrote about a few

months ago when a group of City Ballet dancers gave it in Hamburg, and its successor Episodes. This 'homage to Webem' was originally con- ceived in two parts, the first being choreographed by Martha Graham and danced by her company.

The second part, by Balanchine, now stands on its own. It is a difficult ballet, not so readily

enjoyable as Agon and not so perfect. Webers, after all, hardly composed the score, taken from various works and ending with the orchestration of Bach's Musical Offering, with Balanchine in mind.

Even so, Episodes is, together with Agon, the first serious attempt for ballet to tackle modern music, and Balanchine is here blazing a trail which others must follow. I hope to write about Episodes in detail later. Its originality cannot be dashed off in a sentence or even a paragraph. Obviously Balanchine is, at least in some works, moving towards a new objective style, in which the dancers are manipulated with a kind of im- personal purity. It is an exciting journey into new territory, and I only wonder what Soviet ballet will make of it. But most of all I wonder when New York City Ballet will return to London.