Tour de force
BALLET CLEMENT CRISP -
I don't think that it is just because they know they are going to stay in the same theatre for the next three months that the Royal Ballet's Touring Section looks so happy and engaging a company—though, like poor Jo in Bleak House, they must be used to moving on by now. Whatever the reason, they arrived at Covent Garden last week for their summer season, bright-eyed and buoyant in a couple of Ashton programmes that showed them dancing splen- didly. The Two Pigeons is as irresistible as ever with its enchanting Messager score (which will sound even more enchanting when it is more sensitively played), its gorgeous sets and cos- tumes by Jacques Dupont, and with Doreen Wells and Elizabeth Anderton to impersonate the varied claims of pure love and gipsy in- fatuation on David Wall's young painter. Miss Wells is all heart, blonde beauty and limpid technique; Miss Anderton is temperament, flaunted bosoms and huge jumps, and Mr Wall a young Apollo touched by the fires of passion, learning from bitter experience that love is all. This is an allegory about the search for happi- ness, done with such delicacy and sympathy for youth that we all feel twenty again and sigh for the ardours so beautifully expressed.
The novelties of the first week are a re- dressed and slightly re-worked Dream, and the first London showing of Sinfonietta. The Dream has gained handsomely from Peter Farmer's romantic greenery for the forest glade—in which the horns of Mendelssohn's elfiand are
coarsely blowing, thanks to desultory orchestral playing—and from fine performances frOM the company. Johaar Mosaval spins and gambols Magnificently as Puck, the lovers are ardent (Richard Farley's Lysander beautifully judged), the fairies barely touch the ground, and Ronald Emblen is marvellously funny as Bottom, whip- ping about on points like a berserk Ballets Russes ballerina.
Sinfonietta is Ashton's newest ballet and sees that master still exploring the classical dance and discovering fresh beauties. It is a plotless Work, and though I find the Williamson score unappealing, Ashton has compounded splendid sequences of movement to its varying moods : the opening double pas de deux is patterned from sharp, nimble shapes that seem partly in- spired by the music, partly by the mercurial brilliance of Brenda Last. Then follows a cen- tral Elegy for Doreen Wells and five cavaliers, set in Ashton's latest 'Acrobats of God' style, with the girl soaring on her human trapeze or becoming the focal point of a series of quincunx patterns of pirouettes. Finally, a mod Taran- tella, all bounce and sparkle with sudden bounding interruptions by David Wall to show just how fast and high he can move : very jolly, this. Equally jolly are the projections of lights, devised by the Hornsey College of Art's light/ sound workshop, which bloom and dissolve very prettily, unlike the costumes designed by Peter Rice which succeed only in making the dancers look like animated liquorice allsorts. But the choreography's the thing, with its unflagging inventiveness, and its skill in showing the excel- lent qualities of this half of our National ballet; on the bright omens of these first performances we should have an interesting season ahead.
At the Victoria and Albert Museum there is a new exhibition recommended to anyone in- terested in ballet and theatre design; entitled 'Ballet Designs and Illustrations 1581-1940,' and accompanied by a handsome and admirably annotated catalogue,* it offers a fascinating selection of plums—plus a few prunes—from the museum's collections, and at the same time provides a curiously revealing history of ballet itself.
The most important section, because the best represented, takes us from the origins—that rarest of ballet books Le Balet Comique de la Reyne is on view—up to the gauzy delights of the Romantic age. There is a series of superb engravings from the Florentine Intermezzi at the end of the sixteenth century which show a nice taste for hell, with dragons, demons and ruins going up very decoratively in flames, and a magnificent sequence of designs for court ballets at Versailles by Henry Gissey. What fun ballet must have been then, with equestrian spectacles that boasted a royal cast—we can see Chauveau's engraving of Philippe d'Orl6ans as the King of Persia in the Carrousel of 1662, wearing a mass of feathers and almost as be- ribboned and marcelled as his horse—and the elaborate staging of La Princesse de Navarre in the grande ecurie at Versailles in 1745 to mark the nuptials of the Dauphin to the Infanta Maria Teresa.
The theatrical taste of the Vestris age is sharply evoked in a print of Gaetan Vestris posturing in the grand manner in Jason et Medee, and a satiric study of his son Auguste extravagantly balanced on one leg; while the change brought about by the use of points and the emergence of the goddesses of the Romantic • Ballet Designs and Illustrations 1581-1940 Brian Reade (HM Stationery Office £5) age is excellently shown in Chalon's lithographs of Taglioni in La Sylphide and the Pas de Quatre (and what an admirable artist Chalon proves when contrasted with the wooden efforts of Bouvier, also on view).
Ballet's subsequent decline in the nineteenth century is all too clearly mirrored in the break in the exhibition until the Diaghilev era, with little to show but Wilhelm's deadly costume sketches; thereafter the selection (and presum- ably the Museum's collection) is interesting but far less comprehensive. There are gems from the Diaghilev period : three lovely Baksts, Roerich's gorgeous 1909 setting for the Polovt- sian Dances, fine Braques for Les Facheux, and designs by Benois that are especially fas- cinating for their historical feeling—which one can easily judge from the previous rooms at the exhibition; but there is also a preponderance of Goncharova and Larionov which does some- thing to destroy the perspective of the show. One item I would urge no one to miss: a book illustration showing the 1826 production at La Scala of Elerz and Zulmida. Set in an enormous neo-classical greenhouse banked with palms, pot plants and a tree like a woolly octopus, we are shown three Turks, two ladies (one of whom is apparently restraining the other), and a Hussar duelling with a gentleman in mustard unmentionables. Who was Elerz? And who Zulmida? Why the greenhouse, and what are those mountains gleaming white outside? We shall never know, but it must have been a mar- vellous evening's entertainment.
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