Favourite sons
BALLET CLEMENT CRISP
Two ballet schools have been showing off their pupils during the past few weeks: the Royal Ballet at their annual matinee at Covent Gar- den. then in the all too open air of Holland Park, and last week at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford; the Kirov Ballet with a film of their young hopefuls in Swan Lake. Every summer we go to the Royal Ballet School's matinee and start talking like wine-bores about 'good' and 'bad' years; last year was not very promising, but this season might well turn out to he a vintage one, particularly for the boys.
As in almost every ballet school, except in Russia and Denmark, the sheer recruitment of male dancers is a continual problem. Lincoln Kirstein wrote of 'the crucial moment in the ritual encounter: "Son, if you persist in this folly you will kill your Mother."' and this is only half the trouble; there remains the ques- tion of the proper training which makes such admirable male dancers in Denmark and Russia and in which we lag so far behind. But this year, at the Royal Ballet School perform- ance, it was the boys who caught our attention -- with one remarkable exception, of whom more later. In a pleasing new ballet by David Drew, himself a leading soloist with the com- pany, a quartet of young men showed the sort of panache and bright technique that we hope to see every year, and rarely do. Admittedly. our boys arc slow developers technically (though there is no good reason for this), but Drew's free-ranging inventions made these youngsters look virile and Large-moving: the crime of many schools is to turn out boys who cLince as mimsily as borogroves.
The Royal matin6e also included a totally unremarkable Napoli and a Giselle Act 2 where the girls shone with a complete pro- fessionalism as sister-Wills to a lissome young heroine called June Highwood, who, if she continues as she has begun, is going to delight us for years.
The Kirov are pinning some of their hopes on Elene Evteyeva, who stars in a highly sus- pect version of Swan Lake that can be seen as part of the Russian opera and ballet film season at the Queen Elizabeth U-boat pen the South Bank. The film, done by the same team who made the Sleeping Beauty film a couple of years ago, is cast from the graduates' class of the Kirov School plus the most recent intake into the company : Evteyeva is mag- nificent as Odile, slightly less so as Odette, and though her Siegfried shows about as much romantic passion as an oyster, he's wildly handsome and turns in a very nice variation.
But the ballet is cut to totally undramatic ribbons by the excision of about half its dances, and has been turned into a suite of dances, reminiscent in manner of Nureyev's staging of Raymotzda. Its decoration is all pale northern light and pastel gauze—entirely suitable for such an abstract ballet—massive in size, with versts of shining black floor (so that you expect Sonja Henjie to come spinning on as she used to in those dear movies of the early 'forties). Decoration on this scale never fails to capture the imagination, and the ballroom in Act III is gorgeous, with several miles of staircase, flaming torches, plenty of opulent costumes, and—I swear—a squad of Shirley Temples, corkscrew ringlets, pudding faces and all, who loom at the edge of the screen as attendants. The director has a lot of fun with dissolves, cuts, and dizzying angles, but even these do not destroy the magic of the dancing: here are all the Kirov's virtues of grace, ele- gance and nobility—even those abominable cygnets look good. It is, ultimately, a film to be enjoyed by people who have seen Swan Lake too often (as who has not?); and though I yield nothing in my admiration for the Royal Ballet School, it will be years before we dare film our graduates. But roll on that day.
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