BALLET
Young visitors
CLEMENT CRISP
Matinees of Coppelia are all very well, but Swanilda celebrates her centenary this year and today's child deserves something slightly more up to date: during the past fortnight Bertram Bate11's Sideshow (Ballet Rambert at the Jeanetta Cochrane) has been playing matinees and the occasional evening to the only knee-high audience in London. The programme is a corporate and engag- ing effort devised by Norman Morrice and Jonathan Taylor; the result is six short ballets created by the dancers, with intro- duction and linking scenes by Mr Taylor, who is resourceful, witty and may well turn out to be the Pied Piper of Holborn—on the afternoon I went the audience loved it and so did I, a Gulliver among vociferous hordes of Lilliputians. ('Why is he doing that?' 'Why is he doing it like that?' The spider is going to eat that lady'.) The sideshow is excellently geared to the young without talking, or rather dancing, down to them. ftertram himself, splendidly designed like everything else by Peter Caza- let, is a cardboard robot who introduces the show with many a hop, skip and jump; the fun in the link passages is clever and balletic; and, of the six short ballets, the opening Walks by Pietje Law is a winner. As beauti- fully simple as its title—the dancers trot, creep, crawl, gallop, roller-skate—it offers exactly the sort of direct and ingenious comedy that will catch a child's imagination, and I'm prepared to bet that a good many will go home and try to copy it.
Three other of the dance scenes need greater focus and clarity, but they give ap- prentice choreographers a chance to learn their craft; and Jonathan Taylor's acrobatic trio, The Brothers Zucchini, indulge in exactly the right sort of boisterous foolery. Amanda Knott's Primitives is tough enough for even the youngest taste, with its hunters in fierce pursuit of game; it is also properly worked out choreographically and reveals an intense and serious style.
An incidental pleasure of the performance for an adult is the chance to see the Rambert dancers smiling, a habit their regular reper- tory does not for the most part encourage. But I have bad news for Bertram: one link shows a girl in a raspberry-fce tutu on full point, and the rapturous indrawings of breath from the dwarfs surrounding me suggest that modern dance still has an uphill battle to convert the young from what must be an instinctive taste for tip-toeing.
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