Ballet
No, No, Napoleon
By CLIVE BARNES
FEST IvAL Ballet's marathon summer season at the Festival Hall opened at a surly dog-trot the other week with the first London performance of Serge Lifar's Bonaparte a Nice (1796). Lifar, who apparently believes all life can be expressed in the simple classical terms of pirouettes and entre- chats, is the most wrong-headed minor choreo- grapher ever to achieve a major reputation. I would hesitate to call Bonaparte a Nice (1796) his silliest ballet, as I have only seen about thirty of his others, but having made some allowance for the mind's habit of forgetting pain, this I would say is well up among the silliest Lifar ballets that I personally have seen. There seems little object in describing either the puerile choreography or Maurice Thiriet's pathetic music in detail, although Andre Levasseur's costumes had a certain chic gusto about them. Yet one must at least protest about a ballet that literally puts Napoleon on a hobby horse, shows him disciplining a rabble of troops b) offering them the example of an uninteresting classical variation, entangles him with a group of girls preposterously pretending to be orange trees and finally sends him scudding off to conquer Europe as if late for dancing class. Such a work fails to live up to the very modest ex- pectations raised last year by the same com- pany's depressing production of Noel Coward's London Morning—a deplorable waste of dancers such as John Gilpin.
Nor can I give a particularly enthusiastic wel- come to the Mexican Dance Company currently at. the Piccadilly Theatre, or to the Haitian Voodoo Dancers who opened a season at the Westminster Theatre last week. The Mexicans divide their programme into two halves, the first and duller being intended as a reconstruc- tion of dances from Mexico's pre-Hispanic past. With movements said to be copied from sculp- tures and paintings (shades of Isadora's Hellenic rapes), the company's director and choreo- grapher, Javier de Leon, has produced some supposedly authentic Mayan and Aztec rituals of plodding pomposity.
The Voodoo Dancers, led by their High Priestess, Mathilda Beauvoir, are odd almost to the point, I should have thought, where the Lord Chamberlain intervenes. The show appeals partly to the beast and voyeur in us, and no fans of Aleister Crowley or James Bond should miss it. This sort of dark-grey Mass must surely be the nearest anyone in London can get to diabolism for the price of a theatre seat. The 'entertainment' opens with a procession to a bamboo altar. Then after a certain amount of chanting in Creole, the peculiar congregation, most of them pretty girls, led by the Voodoo Priestess, start summoning up their favourite spirits or loas,' who—dead on cue—take possession of the celebrants one after another. There is certainly an ethnological (or tourist) interest aroused here, and the show contains a few things that collectors of the bizarre must adore—a half-naked coloured girl wearing a drooping white towel and riding round the stage on a live sheep, to instance but one obvious example—but the general impression of writhing bodies, bongo drums and shrill cries very soon falls into a monotonous pattern. Towards the end the succession of highly anatomical belly- grinds and bloodless blood sacrifices is broken when the dancers evoke the dreaded Baron Samedi, top-hatted king of the zombies. Here, however, the chance to chill our marrows is missed, partly because Mathilda Beauvoir chooses to play Samedi herself, and the sight of an attractive girl in top hat and tails and with bare legs is a shade too reminiscent of a Ginger Rogers's musical to inspire much terror. (Note for voyeurs: friends assure me that the show has been bowdlerised since the first night. The girl with the drooping towel now wears a bikini, while the live cockerel that was ceremon- iously wiped over the bodies of the celebrants has been replaced by a bunch of flowers.)
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