Ballet at the Mercury Theatre
STAGE AND SCREEN
The Ballet
WE saw last week that English ballet in this generation gives promise for the future. It is always possible that the very tradition of the clasSical dance itself will one day pass into our keeping. That is one reason why the strictest criticism of English ballet shbuld be expected from us. Assuming for one moment this glamorous future, when the history of English ballet in our generation comes to be written, almost the first chapter will be concerned with the personality and aims of Marie Rambert, founder of the Ballet Club, nursery of English ballet. For it is within the limitations of this miniature theatre that with few exceptions our most hopeful talent has been, and today still is, nurtured. Inevitably some of Marie Rambert's dancers pass in time to the bigger companies, even though, wherever it is possible, they return to dance for her on a Sunday night. Recently she has lost first call upon the services of Frederick Ashton, who has been with her from the beginning. Nevertheless she continues to produce new talent : Sunday evening performances at the Ballet Club are as valuable as ever they were before the renascence at Sadler's Wells. The role of the Ballet Club. partly as an achievement in itself, partly as an experimental theatre, remains unimpaired.
The conditions of this theatre are favourable to the cultiva- tion of a strict style. On so small a stage, and in a theatre in which the audience sits so close to the dancers, the slightest fault of appearance or of manner would look exaggerated. The dancers must fight to utilise their armoury of classical beauty and to create the theatrical illusion, and this they have learned to do to some effect, thereby gaining a more conscious control of artistry, at any rate on the negative side in the avoidance of vulgarity, than they would have won in most eases under more normal conditions. And if the conditions of this stage have entailed often enough a choregraphy that is slight in form, yet such conceptions as have survived these limitations are all the better defined because of them. I refer principally to the work of Anthony Tudor. I do not suggest that his ballets are unfitted for a larger stage : on the contrary I consider that they can be fairly estimated only when seen in a full-size theatre. At the same time I feel that his great strength of conception has been developed in facing the definite problem set him by the Mercury theatre. Since no mere effect is very telling there, Tudor, whose style is naturally contemplative, has risked all on the integrity of his chore- graphic progressions. Among English choregraphers it is he who seems most familiar with musical thought. His aptitude for contemplation and his grasp of musical form have led him to choose for several of his ballets music with small theatrical appeal. I should like to see a new ballet by hint with music of a closer texture. It remains to be said that his work, especially in its details of movement, appears less directly derived, more directly experienced, less decorated with mannerisms and with padding than that of his English contemporaries.
Nevertheless the feminine talent of Andree Howard seems to me as definite and only a little less original. She too displays a paramount strength of conception. In my opinion her ballets are the most successful of the creations given at the Ballet Club ; her delicacy of movement, of wit, of staging, and above all of poetry, are perfectly adjusted to this milieu. Her new ballet La Muse S'Amuse is brilliant. The subject is the lionisation by a lady of some distinction and by her friends of a young and otherwise rather gauche virtuoso of the violin. The artificiality and feminine incorrigibility of these women is conveyed with wit, the little inconsequent ballet in fact of polite society in flirtation with personable art. The work is written around Maud Lloyd and Frank Staff, an extremely. promising-young dancer. Maud Lloyd would be an ornament to any theatre in the world. She seems of late to have gathered the assurance—assurance in her own sybilline purity of line so curiously conjoined with a softness, a ductability—that characterises the dancer of mature distinction.
ADEL1N STOKES.
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