BALLET
Angels descendant
ROBIN YOUNG
The Little Angels from South Korea are the first dance company to appear here (they are briefly at Sadlers Wells Theatre) at the express wish of Edward Heath — which is to say he saw them in America, where they danced for the President and Ed Sullivan, the meeting them afterwards (twenty-nine girls, aged between eight and twelve, and three boys) mouthed something polite about seeing them in Britain. So the children came in confident expectation of renewing acquaintance with Teddy and thinking in terms of another command performance, some of them having forgivably confused the Skipper with the Queen. They even brought him presents, which all the popular dailies said last week were dolls, and which the Times described cagily this week as 'a secret.' All of which goes to show the Oriental mites have winning ways, even if their name does suggest that they have been over-sweetened for public consumption. In fact they are sub-titled 'The National Folk Ballet of Korea,' but no doubt there have been some changes made to "present all the beauties of Korean motion in a manner comprehensible to the Western World."
Neither title gives any hint of one of the highlights — a pyrotechnic display by a crack squad of girl drummers which would have been a credit to the Edinburgh Tattoo. The children, carefully chosen through national competitions and trained for three years before starting their brief careers as the infant prodigies of the dance world, are a superbly drilled troupe. Their costumes are lavish. Their programme is well devised and planned. Childish enactments of springtime and an arranged wedding are balanced by dances — about a lost angel or the moon festival — in which it is easy to forget that the performers are only children.
They have a fine finale with a virtuoso display of spinning streamers attached to hats — and then, astonishingly, line up to sing songs including the Londonderry Air. (This on the night their hero was meeting Jack Lynch at Chequers.) A more serious and classical, though less entertaining, dance company from India is in London — at The Place until Saturday, and the Piccadilly Theatre for two shows on Sunday. The Darpana company ranges comprehensively through the dance forms of southern India, and the director, Mrinalini Sarabhai, is a great dancer whose command and elegance leave you in no doubt that, even if you do not know what she is supposed to be doing, she is doing it very well indeed.
Overseas visitors in more familiar dance style are Liliana Cosi and Peter Breuer, appearing with the Festival Ballet at Festival Hall. Cosi is prima ballerina of La Scala, Milan, so not surprisingly her histrionics as Giselle were enthusiastic. She kissed her way up Bathilde's hand and arm in gratitude for a gift rather like a starving man going at a barbecued sparerib. But she is also Russian-trained — a strong, and sometimes brilliant, dancer. Breuer is slender, long-legged and nobly graceful, but also seemed to crave more flamboyance. The sideways-twisting leaps he introduced toward the end were more suggestive of an aspiring ballet star dancing with a lot in reserve than of an Albrecht nearly dead of exhaustion.
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