BALLET
THE polite applause which greeted Frederick Ashton's Daphnis and Chloe at its premi&re last week suggested that the audience felt much the same as I did about this new work. Ravel's beautiful score, with voices used as an additional orchestral instrument, alone made the evening a joy ; but, although Ashton never creates a ballet that does not contain something really worth while, his new produc- tion cannot be called a success. Diaghilev staged Daphnis and Chloe in 1912 and commissioned Ravel to write the music to Fokine's scenario. I never saw the ballet, but I think it, too, was generally acknowledged to have been a failure.
The initial trouble with Daphnis and Chloe lies in the fact that tho " book " is altogether too slender for the scale and richness of the music, which has now become the determining feature of the ballet. I would even suggest that it was the score rather than the theme which attracted Ashton in the first place, for much of his choreo- graphy is calculated and self-conscious, and does not spring from an inner belief in, and sympathy with, the trite little love story. Starting thus on the wrong foot, the choreographer soon got into difficulties of conception. Having decided to stage his work in con- temporary terms, he was unable to reconcile an over-realistic choreo-
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graphy with the mythological background of the story and with the formalised sets of the designer. Then there were the horrible lapses of the three Nymphs and of Pan and the unforgivable solo of Daphnis in Scene I. Only the pirate scene had real vnity, for here the choreographer had a clear idea of his intentions and therefore the company and the artist—John Craxton—were able to collaborate satisfactorily.
As far as individual performances are concerned Violetta Elvin gave a spirited rendering of the tiny part of Lykanion ; and Margot Fonteyn as Chloe, in a lovely pas-de-deux when reunited with ,Daphnis, showed her usual exquisite subtlety of feeling. But, on the whole, it was apparent that the dancers believed in the ballet as little as did the audience, and therefore nobody appeared to the
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