Why Was Sylvia?
WHILE the larger section of the Royal Ballet appears unexpectedly to be having a some- what choppy passage with the New York critics at the Metropolitan Opera House, the company's touring group have momentarily paused in their wanderings and turned up for an eight-week season at Covent Garden. The decision to open with a revival of Ashton's Sylvia was at first glance surprising, and at second glance un- fortunate. Why, indeed, Sylvia?
This, the second and weakest of Ashton's full-evening works, has become something of a bore. The Delibes music, with its infuriating little pizzicato solo for Sylvia herself and its grandiose marches, has gusto and a certain pachydermatous charm. But the ballet's story, draped loosely on Tasso's Aminta, gives little opportunity for creative choreography. It is, at one level, a sort of exercise piece for a ballerina, and when first created, eleven years ago, it marked an important stage in Ashton's explora- tion of Fonteyn's talent. Now the thinly sketched Greek myth and the plump romantic music seem at fatal variance with one another. Quite a lot of the choreography has a distinctive originality, while here and there the spectacle suddenly flares up into a telling picture of the legendary Greece seen, as it were, through a Claude-glass. But this is rare and the ballet as a whole is nowhere so convincing as Ashton's earlier evocation of Greece, Daphnis and Chloe.
What Sylvia needs, and offhand seems to need more than almost any ballet I can think of, is complete conviction in performance. It needs dancers that can go to within a hair's-breadth of actual parody in their efforts to leave no punch unthrown. Fonteyn has contrived to
make her performance set a human portrait against the frozen spectacle, and yet also to dance dazzlingly enough to make that spectacle seem sumptuous rather than tawdry. The touring section's ballerina, Doreen Wells, has no such brilliance nor, more unfortunately, the specific authority that can command belief. Despite a tendency to over-force and over-stress her dancing, her actual performance technically had a clarity that was good to watch. Yet for the present this was no nymph of Diana, no ballerina of the highest lineage and no Sylvia to be com- mended by all our swains.
The company, not seen at Covent Garden for two years, appeared slightly overawed and under-rehearsed. All of them, however, even including the large student body that seems to have been attached to them for the duration, will obviously settle down. The principal male dancer, Christopher Gable, has clearly settled down already. He nonchalantly dominated the proceedings like a prince among his subjects. Very possibly the best-ever British premier danseur, and certainly the most promising, he needs only a stronger, more resilient jump to find a place even among the international brigade.
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