Scandinavian Models
WHAT in ballet companies divides the sheep from the goats? Why is it that when watching some companies, whether they are giving a good, bad
or indifferent performance, you are aware of an indisputably great ballet company? Partly, I
suspect, it is a question of possessing an accepted national style, partly again it is a matter of continuity, that sense of a company having a past, present and future. The Royal Danish Ballet, for all its possessing as many ups and downs as a fair-size roller-coaster, has about it an undeniable air of authority.
At the fourteenth Copenhagen Ballet Festival found its new productions, a Danish ballet Doren., and two fresh Balanchine reproductions, Four Temperaments and Bourree Fantasque, were all to some extent sub-standard, or at least sub- standard in the context of What one expects from the Danish Ballet. Denmark's agonising search for a contemporary choreographer continues with dogged persistence, but it still seems as hopeless as looking for a haystack in a needle. Doren (The Door) by Kirsten Ralov, is a strange, dated work with a heavy symbolist theme (the meaning of which eluded me) and dull, dispirited choreo- graphy and music, by Niels Viggo Bentzon, of only flickering interest. The Balanchines, poten- tially of far greater value, were danced with more enthusiasm than style, and this unfortunately holds true of most of the Danish borrowings from the international repertory.
In other respects the Danish dance picture is brighter; brighter, for example, than last year.
Partly this is because the Danes have included more Bournonville in their repertory, adding for the first time in some years the full-length Napoli.
Another welcome revival was Ashton's version of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, and the younger generation of Danish dancers, now implacably taking over from their elders, are more and more making their presence felt.
The men are still better dancers than the women, but this has for long been the unique tradition of Danish ballet, and it is the company's particular distinction to have the strongest team of male dancers in the Western world. Now, however, there is a group of Danish girls also worth writing. home about, if not at such length, and among them is the first possibility of a Danish prima ballerina in years, Anna Laerkesen.
This Festival Laerkesen was seen in Ashton's Romeo and Juliet, and seemed like Shakespeare come to life. The ballet itself, which incidentally is to be mounted at Covent Garden this autumn, makes a curious and not altogether flattering comparison with Lavrovsky's original version for the Bolshoi. Its weakness is in its conventional ensemble work; its strength is in the choreo- graphy for its principals, another variation on Ashton's theme of love, and among his most tellingly poetic. The revival of the ballet (which was first seen in 1955) is a fine one, • and Laerkeson, luminous with love and tragedy, makes the Juliet of our time, just as, and I am using words carefully, Ulanova did before her.
Another play into dance, this time not Shakes- peare but Ibsen. Last week in Brussels, London's Festival Ballet kept up the Scandinavian interest by giving a gala preview of their new Peer Gynt, intended as the main attraction for their Festival Hall summer season. As staged by the Soviet- trained choreographer Vaslav Orlikowsky, this silent Peer Gynt to a varied assortment of Grieg is altogether stronger on production than choreo- graphy. The word-spinning fantasy of Ibsen is, of course, lost, and the play is reduced to a pro- cession of skin-deep narrative. Yet with agreeably pine-topped settings by Edward Delany (surely calculated to warm the hearts of the Norwegian Travel Bureau) this ambitious undertaking is strong on simple spectacle, which should justifi- ably endear it to a mass audience. It is also whole- heartedly danced. The cast, entrusted with the task of making bricks without straw but with plenty of corn, go to it with a will, and where Orlikow- sky's choreography helps in its mass chorus effects the work comes off extremely well. What operetta is to opera I feel Peer Gym is to ballet, and perhaps none the worse for that. In short, a popular success in which John Gilpin looks poetically haggard as Peer, and everyone dances
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