Dance
An individual voice
Deirdre McMahon
Ever since he joined the Royal Ballet in 1979, Jonathan Burrows has occupied a rather singular position within the compa- 11 Y. Besides being a gifted character dancer ln ballets like Cinderella and La Fille mal gardee, he has choreographed both for other companies and for his own semi- autonomous group of dancers within the Royal Ballet. The company has given him an admirable degree of flexibility and financial support and his work is respected by both Kenneth MacMillan and Anthony Dowell. The singularity of Burrows's posi- tion was brought home during the current quadruple bill at Covent Garden because the performance of the Mendelssohn quar- tet from his full-length work Stoics was the first time his choreography had ever fea- tured in the company's regular repertory. Burrows's contemporary style doesn't fit comfortably into the Royal Ballet style, or at least that was the theory behind the wary .scheduling of only a section of Stoics. At both the performances I saw, the audiences reacted with delight to Burrows's idiosyn- cratic movement, finding it both funny and Ingenious. As the title implies, there is a s.tiff_upper-lip quality about the movement, lerkY and spasmodic, which suddenly
like out into a kind of manic explosion, like i .ohn Cleese. Bodies are lifted and passed around from dancer to dancer; they are piled on top of one another like a pyra- mid, which then collapses and the dancers walk away casually. There is a pixieish humour in the way Burrows juxtaposes the lyrical Mendelssohn music with sinister undertones of violence in the dancers' ges- tures.
Burrows is the most individual talent of all the choreographers to have emerged from the Royal Ballet over the last decade, but though he does not fit easily into its classical repertory the creative latitude given to him has been of great benefit. I am still trying to hear William Tuckett's voice but all I hear are echoes. His best work so far was a ballet created last season for Rambert, Slippage. His latest work for the Royal Ballet is Present Histories, about six people 'held together by the threads of a common history who meet to share their memories, dreams and reflections reflections that lead them to doubt the strength of those threads'. The theme is as stale as last week's bread and so is the treatment — it's that dance cliché, a piano ballet (to a Schubert piano sonata). You know the kind of thing: dancers drifting interminably about the stage, meeting, embracing, parting. Tuckett has tried to make it more interesting by giving it a peri- od flavour (vaguely 1920s) with overtones of homosexuality, but it doesn't work.
Perhaps my tetchy reaction to Present Histories was affected by another look at MacMillan's Winter Dreams, new last sea- son. I like parts of it very much, particular- ly some of the choreography for Bussell, Mukhamedov and Durante, but 50 minutes of minor Tchaikovsky piano pieces goes a long, long way. Winter Dreams needs to be pruned by about ten minutes, but MacMil- lan has never been particularly amenable to cutting his work, apart from Manon.
The company's latest Balanchine import is the glorious Symphony in C (to Bizet), one of the most regal and dazzling show- cases for any ballet company. It was creat- ed for the Paris Opera in 1947 and I always think that its original French title conveys perfectly its translucent quality: Le Palais de cristal. Each of the four movements dis- plays its ballerina in wonderfully contrasted choreography which presents an enormous challenge to the dancers. Unfortunately the first cast had evidently been assigned by rote. Lesley Collier smiled very brightly in the first movement, as did Fiona Chadwick in the third, though Chadwick at least looked more comfortable with the demands of the choreography. Sylvie Guillem's contorted limbs caricatured the flowing, singing lines of the adagio second movement, a role which is one of the most privileged in the Balanchine repertory. The young dancers in the corps, on the other hand, looked exhilarated and that is the essence of Symphony in C.
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