Dance
Brumming it
Deirdre McMahon
The announcement last month that Sadlers Wells Royal Ballet is to become the resident company at the Birmingham Hippodrome in 1990 prompts a number of questions about the company's present and future identity.
Although there have been mutterings of protest from some of the dancers and the musicians, the relocation to Birmingham, under discussion now for nearly two years, is not unexpected. The Hippodrome is offering SWRB handsome new facilities and, with the Arts Council, is providing £2 million additional funding for three years. Peter Wright, the director of SWRB, told the press conference that this higher level of funding would enable the company to fortify its repertory with important works by the world's greatest choreographers. Wright also stressed that the relationship of SWRB with its sister company at Covent Garden and with the Royal Ballet School would be strengthened by this move.
These are brave words. Wright must be aware that there are serious problems which must be tackled if the company's move to Birmingham is to be a success. The first problem is dancers and the second is repertory, and both of these stem from the company's increasingly tenuous rela- tionship with the rest of the Royal Ballet organisation. Although most of the SWRB's dancers come from the Royal Ballet School, once they graduate into the company there is little interchange be- tween Covent Garden and Sadlers Wells. The Sadlers Wells company has infrequent seasons at the Royal Opera House (one this month) and few Covent Garden dan-
cers make guest appearances with Sadlers Wells. Covent Garden has long regarded the touring company as a useful testing ground for new talent like Darcy Bussell, who spent a year with SWRB and has now gone on to bigger and better things at Covent Garden. At principal level SWRB needs drastic weeding out and an urgent infusion of new talent, otherwise Birming- ham has been sold a turkey. Although the company has its own glossy, expensive productions of Swan Lake and The Sleep- ing Beauty, the general performance stan- dard has been one of middling compe- tence.
There is a comforting theory put forward in some quarters that, of course, SWRB is more a demi-caractere company which has never aspired to the chilly grandeur and technical perfection of its sister company and this has become an excuse for lax teaching and direction. The Royal Ballet is however no longer noted either for its grandeur or its perfection, while SWRB's demi-caractere quality in ballets like La Flute Ma! Gardee is nothing more than desperate mugging at the expense of the choreography. The ballerina crisis at SWRB is now acute, with Sherilyn Ken- nedy on maternity leave and Margaret Barbieri no longer dancing full-length roles. The company has become reliant on outside recruitment and guests to fill the gaps in its own ranks.
In terms of repertory, Peter Wright's directorship has been a series of fits and starts. There have been the Tetley phase, the van Manen phase and the Balanchine phase — works taken into the repertory and then dropped after a season or two. The 'classics' phase — Paquita, Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty — has been more consistent, but because the productions have been so underpowered they look like nothing more than expensive status sym- bols on the company's annual reports. The atrophy afflicting the Covent Garden re- pertory is just as pronounced with SWRB. The Christmas season just past did not contain a single Ashton work and neither does the forthcoming season at the Opera House. MacMillan has not created a work for SWRB since 1982 and this has meant that the responsibility for new work has been delivered into the all-too-prolific hands of David Bintley.
There is an element of civic hubris in the statements being issued from Birmingham. I was not surprised to see a reference to Simon Rattle and the CBSO in the very first paragraph of the City Council's press release, but in their case the hubris is justified. Rattle and the CBSO are an object lesson in how a firm, consistent artistic vision can win audiences on its own terms and not by prostrating itself before the lowest box-office denominator. SWRB's move to Birmingham offers the chance of a complete overhaul, an oppor- tunity the company cannot afford to neg- lect.
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