Ballet
The Rambert
Michael Church
One of the most hallowed conventionsofarts criticism holds that the writer should present his response as a fundamentally integrated one. He may admit that he is puzzled by the Work in question, that future viewings or hearings may yield meanings which initially elude him, but a specific avowal that he has Produced two unrelated and even contradictory responses is usually taken as evidence that he has not, really, responded at all. At the very least he should know what he likes. Yet how often do any of us go to the theatr., for example, in such a harmoniously hedonistic state that we can perform this litmus-paper function untrammelled by feelings of charity or its reverse, or by the tendency to convince ourselves that we actually do see and feel what we subconsciously know we ought ?
It seems to me that a certain degree of critical schizophrenia is inevitable with any art which is in rapid transition. Why should not most of those pundits whose views seem SO utterly to negate each other be at least Partially right ? Anyway, I make no apology for taking the first two works of Ballet Rambert's recent programme and reviewing not two works but four.
Reflections, by Robert North, is an ephemeral piece of emotional self-indulgence. The Programme tells us 'The small times count/ the inches not the miles/Touches not tradition/ will fill your memory' and it lists Young Man, His Wife, His Brother, His Brother's Wife, Teacher, Three Young Girls as taking part. Maybe there is a story, Maybe it concerns the Byronic hero's tantasies, amours, indecisions and pricks of conscience, maybe he really has got problems. Whatever happens, and one really can't tell What does, he'll be all right because they all think the world of him. Technically it's a rather facile piece of work specialising, for the men, in those graceful earthbound nonleaps for which North himself is so famous. The whole thing is pure boudoir, archly mirroring Howard Blake's agreeable neoBrahms score, and quite unworthy of Nadine Baylis's exquisite extract of art deco set.
Robert North's Reflections marks a technical and emotional, step forward for both Choreographer and company. Like most of North's pieces it has a distinctly autobiograPhical feel. The fuzziness of the plot matters less than ths-! fact that it exists at all: it gives an edge to the dancers' characterisalion, bringing them more fully to life. Pernaps inevitably, some typical Martha Graham rhetoric occasionally surfaces_ notably in the hero's final solo—but the Choreography as a whole is fluently conceived and fastidiously rendered, with each episode vividly delineated. Julia Blaikie
brings discreet bourgeois charms to her role as the wife. There is a muted but intense loveduet for Sara Newton and Leigh Warren, and a noble caballero duet for Warren and Joseph Scoglio which has echoes both of Ashton's Enigma Variations and of that delightfully competitive male duet in Robbins's Dances at a Gathering. The strength of the piece lies in its understatement, a quality subtly reinforced by Baylis's set.
Christopher Bruce's Ancient Voices of Children, to George Crumb's music of the same name, is one of those 'experimental', expressionist works which depend on their audience's willingness to forego emotional and imaginative clarity and to enter instead the realms of an undifferentiated angst. The poise and lucidity of the Lorca poems on which the score is based is mocked by the choreography which, like the squares of faded silk with which the dancers improvise babies, bustles, kimonos, ghosts and pantomime horses, is basically a matter of cobbled -together shreds and patches.
The composer of Ancient Voices of Children is concerned with sentiment rather than structure; the choreographer concentrates on movement that looks organic and spontaneous rather than being deliberately formalised. The beginning sets the keynote, to which the piece returns at the end: to the sound of a hard cascade of high solo soprano notes the seven dancers lie under separate white sheets like small-town saints in a Stanley Spencer painting, each in turn sitting bolt upright and fixing the audience with a visionary stare. The music covers the world from Spain to Japan; the dance, a matter of vivid hints and nudges, has similar sweep. To (I think) the couplet 'Each afternoon in Granada,/a child dies in the afternoon' Joseph Scoglio makes two expressive little leaps round a recumbent form, covers it with a shroud, and crouches over it like a peasant in mourning; a group of muffled figures comes on, cavorts like a grotesque beast from a mediaeval munuscript, bears off the dead and then, mockingly, all uncover themselves. Make-believe, terror, transience. description and leave more detailed comment until I have returned for a second look.
The temptation for critics with a film like The Missouri Breaks is to note that the narrative could have been dealt with at greater speed and to dismiss it as slack and overextended—reviewers seem remarkably prone to developing itchy feet after ninety minutes, which has come to be accepted as the proper length for a feature film. Here, however, the length is not extreme and the tone is contemplative rather than flatulent. What Penn is contemplating, as he has done before, is American history. His medium here is the contest between a 'regulator', who hires himself out to communities with bad guys needing removal, and the leader of a gang of thieves. The regulator is a portly Marlon Brando with an Irish accent that is initially quite surprising; the thief is Jack Nicholson, doing another variation on his usual (and,.I hasten to add, very expert) performance. In a striking reversal of the bounty killer and badman format, almost everything positive in the film is associated with Nicholson, while Brando appears as a malign and destructive force. But more of that in our next.
The other recent arrivals are minor league stuff. It is the time of year when film distributors seem to clear their shelves by pushing out their less promising products in the hope that one of them will be looked upon with favour. And as it happens, one of them has been.
In the small and none too comfortable confines of the Warner West End One we have Sunday Too Far Away (AA certificate), which concerns Australian sheep-shearers, a rugged collection who lead sweaty and monotonous lives. In documenting their existence, the director, Ken Hannam, has managed to do enough with his rather uncommunicative characters to make a satisfactory, though not particularly absorbing, picture. The few major mistakes in it come from attempts to liven the proceedings up with a spot of comedy or drama. Apart from the routine of the working day, though, there is little narrative drive. The possibility of a strike, which materialises at the end of the film, is of little importance for most of the time. We are left with the ques
tion of whether the hero, who has returned from working in the Brisbane fish market, will retain his position as the fastest shearer in the business. As an Australian equivalent of being the fastest gun in town, this lacks promise: the proof of prowess here is a repetitive matter of shears on sheep and chalk on scoreboards. It is clear that, this year. Australia's will be the emergent cinema that critics are talking about. In these circumstances, the films are likely to be overrated until reaction sets in. Sunday Too Far Away may be a giant leap forward for the Australian cinema, but by global standards it is no more than a decent but largely unmemorable effort.
Lifeguard (Ritz, AA certificate) is almost determinedly unmemorable, the sort of movie that seems designed to fill the screens of drive-ins without distracting the audience too much from their other activities. Assembled with no particular elegance and frequently leaving out or cutting short scenes which could have given us more insight into the characters than the director, Daniel Petrie, seems inclined to offer. it nevertheless ambles along in quite a likeable way. The ageing lifeguard—he's actually over thirty—goes to a class reunion where he sees how his contemporaries have succeeded in their careers and meets a girlfriend from the past who is now a well-heeled divorcée. Still, he decides not to become a Porsche salesman but to stick with the beach for as long as he can find employment there—a pleasing insistence on the virtue of doing your own thing which indicates just how much the target audience of Hollywood movies has shifted away from families and towards the kids. Leading an attractive and unfamiliar cast, Sam Elliott stands out as the sort of personality, much in the mould of Dennis Weaver, around whom television series are destined to be built.
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