Pot of message
BALLET CLEMENT CRISP
As a means of putting across a message or as a weapon in any ideological conflict, dancing is about as effective as gros-point embroidery.
It is one of the many faults of dear old Modern Dance that, like the White King's messengers, it is for ever striking attitudes, ablaze with all the right feelings about those moral issues that seem to weigh so heavily on its practitioners' minds. Dear Heaven, how modern dancers care, how anxious they are about the human condition, H-bombs, loneli- ness, sexual guilt and all those other items of chat from the analyst's couch!
My complaint is that, instead of seeking some readily understandable means of com- municating their intellectual ferment, they must needs set it dancing until what started out as a message gets hopelessly mangled.
These thoughts are prompted by two new ballets from Norman Morrice which inaugur- ated Ballet Rambert's brief season at the Jeannetta Cochrane Theatre last week. Morrice is a most gifted choreographer, and his ballets —thoughtful, eminently danceable—are always a pleasure to watch. In what I find are his most compelling works—the dazzling early Hazaiia, Conflicts, The Tribute and Hazard— he provided consistently exciting dances to ex- press his themes. Never less than stimulating theatre, his ballets communicate their ideas, explore the possibilities of dancing, with re- markable dramatic and dynamic skill. But the ever-present danger in his creation of 'ballets of ideas' is that the ideas shall swamp the ballets—possibly as a reaction against so much of the classical activity in our ballet, where ideas are as rare on stage as unicorns, and as unwelcome.
The danger is exemplified in Them and Us, the weightier but in the end the less effective of these two new pieces. 1-2-3, by contrast, is danced all the way and superbly efficient in unfolding a straightforward idea through beautifully complex dances—which is the right proportion. Its theme is one that Morrice has favoured in the past: the destruction of a happy relationship by the arrival of an element that ruins its natural balance. This was the germinal idea of Hazard and it was also hinted at in Morrice's first work, Two Brothers.
The piece starts obstetrically and, unneces- sary as this may sound, Morrice conveys his situation with dazzling skill: heart-beats, laboured breathing, a foetus swimming under and over a vast waving polythene sheet—all shown through telling imagery. The young male is born, discovers his world, and is joined by a second new arrival, also male, whom he guides and helps. They play happily until their Eden is destroyed by the entry of a girl who, for Morrice, is more serpent than Eve. Sexual jealousy sets the two males against each other, and the final pose finds all three separated, their problems just beginning. The idea is childishly simple, the dances luscious, expansive and wonderfully resourceful in their use of the only props in the ballet: the polythene sheets and a long chiffon train that the girl wears. Always visually exciting, 1-2-3 has dancing that is richly revelatory, while the failing of Them and Us is precisely that its dancing is never rich enough.
Morris is here concerned with the problems of our old friend the social misfit, the non- conformist, presenting us with a series of in- cidents which suggest once again that man's tribal, herd instincts reject anyone who fails to conform. With the, help of a gallery of wittily designed masks by Nadine Baylis, the ballet extends into a study of man's use of social masks and the pressure brought upon indi- viduals to wear them. The action is dense, mockingly allusive, often very stimulating, but with so much well-trodden ground to cover the dances come a poor second to the exposi- tion of the theme. When choreographers are so rare, and sociologists so common, it seems something of a waste of a ballet.
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