Dance
A masterpiece restored
Deirdre McMahon
Just over a month ago the National Film Theatre had a one-time-only viewing of the 1962 television recording of La Fille Mal Gardee. It had the incomparable original cast: David Blair and Nadia Nerina as the lovers, Stanley Holden as the Widow Simone, and Alexander Grant as Alain. They were every bit as wonderful as the books and reviews said but I think for many people at the NFT the real revelation was Grant. As the feeble-minded Alain he was by turns pathetic, funny and petulant. In his dancing one noticed the sinuous torso and brilliant footwork. His first solo drew loud applause from the NFT audi- ence. Grant was a unique talent, a gentle clown who was also a fine dancer. Ashton was the perfect choreographer for him, as the many creations for Grant testified. Grant's humanity reflected another side of Ashton's genius.
But if it was exhilarating to see this performance, it was also depressing (not least because hardly anyone from the Royal Ballet bothered to show up). I sat there ticking off all the changes, major and minor, which had taken place. The worst has been the coarsening of the mime, and here Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet has been the biggest culprit. For years the dancers
have hammed and mugged their way through Fille until it has become unwatch- able. It is a cardinal rule of Ashton's choreography that the meaning is in the movement: there is no need to superim- pose extraneous detail. According to the programme, the current SWRB revival of La Fille Mal Gardee has been personally supervised by Alexander Grant. It is not a revival so much as a miracle. Grant has taken this company by the scruff of its neck and shaken every affectation and manner- ism out of it. There is a new scrupulousness of timing and phrasing (particularly notice- able in Lise's farmyard solo in Act I and the tambourine solo in Act II); the port de bras and epaulement are much less sloppy. The grotesqueness which has come to mar the character roles — Alain, Simone, the Notary — has been banished. The grime and accretions have been removed from a masterpiece. It gives one hope for the rest of the Ashton repertory. Cinderella should be next on Grant's list.
Ashton's haunting Valses Nobles et Sen- timentales was on the opening night prog- ramme. It is one of those mysterious ballet parties (Apparitions, La Fete Etrange, La Valse, La Sonnambula, Les Biches, La Fin du Jour) in which a faintly sinister tone is evident and none of the guests are what they seem to be. William Tuckett's new work, Game, tries to be a similar ballet d'atmosphere but in paying homage to its inspiration it only succeeds in looking derivative. The music is Debussy's evoca- tive Jeux, composed for Nijinsky's epony- mous ballet of 1913. The young man in Tuckett's ballet, Kevin O'Hare, wears the white shirt and flannels that Nijinsky had in the original production. (I hope Tony Fabre's weird badger coiffure, with a white streak down the middle of his head, was not meant to be a nod at Diaghilev. He looked more like Cruella De Vil.) Bonnie Moore, as the slinky vamp, recalls Cyd Charisse in Singing in the Rain. Game ends with a direct quotation from MacMillan's La Fin du Jour, closing the door at the back of the set. This jumble of references reflects some of Tuckett's difficulties with the genre, but do pastel ballets d'atmos- phere work theatrically in the 1990s? I think they can but only if there is some- thing new, fresh and contemporary in them, not just stale quotations from pre- vious ballets. As his last work, Those Unheard, revealed, Tuckett eschews overt expressionism in his choreography and here at least he follows Ashton.
Fokine's Les Sylphides is the quintessen- tial ballet d'atmosphere but in the SWRB production the mood of romantic reverie is more suited to Golders Green cremator- ium on a November afternoon. There is no life or impulse to this production and the dancers look as if they're having teeth drawn. The beer garden orchestration of Chopin doesn't help. Les Sylphides is one of the set works for A Level Dance next year. It is set all right — in concrete.
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