Misnomer
A TROUPE of about two dozen French African Negroes appear, under the title Les Ballets Africains, at the Palace Theatre in a bill of
song, dance and music by several odd instru- ments and drums. The selling of this attraction under the U-label,`ballet' is an appeal to our art-snobbism; nothing could be less like ballet than the sight of these vigorous people displaying a jungle-type culture through un- inhibited dancing, drumming, yelling, yodel- ling and leaping around. Rousseau, meeting this kind of Noble Savage, would have been aghast at the idea of calling his dancing 'ballet'; to him it would have seemed a deni- gration of primitive art to compare it with the precise and carefully arranged text-hook danc- ing that comprised the French—and, therefore. world's best—ballet system of his day.
Theatrically, it is about the best programme of genuine folk-art shown in a London theatre for many a day; the material has been worked into a series of persuasive vignettes of modern African life in and around Dahomey, Senegal, Gabun and Guinea. Lovers' meetings, harvest dances, punishment of sorcerers, the moral code of village life—these arc a few of the ideas projected in a fine simplicity of gesture, dance and music. An unnamed production supervisor has set the items in splendidly simple backgrounds, a few fishing nets, the skeleton of a village hut, bamboo screens, sheaves of grasses, combining to form a purely theatrical suggestion of what the Equatorial African village looks like in day- light or darkness.
It makes a highly selective but essentially accurate picture of how the black Frenchman of this sultry region spends his leisure, what use he makes of music and dance, which aspects of his race's story he needs to cele-
brate. It lasts only until April 14, and should not be missed by an aficionado of folk dance, hot rhythm, or the Negro way of life.
A. V. COTON
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