Ballet
The Great Divider
By CLIVE BARNES
STYLE, put in the mouth of a critic, is so often a chinaman- a demon googly bowled at the batsman-artist who can com- mand no certain reply. Hurl down the charge of 'faulty technique' at an artist and he either cracks you to the boundary or it uproots his middle stump. A care- fully flighted suggestion that he lacks 'style' inevitably results in an appeal for l.b.w. leaving the bowler-critic smiling confidently at the umpire-reader. Yet, together with content, style in art is its most important element, and in music and ballet the two are sometimes virtually indis- tinguishable. Intangible, imponderable style is so often the careful divider of the sheep from the goats. Last week gave me an object lesson in this, with a comparison between a Dutch ballet company in the Hague and a troupe of Polish folk-dancers at the Albert Hall.
Seeing the Netherlands National Ballet amid the enterprising international offerings of the Holland Festival, 1 could not help feeling that' the youngest of national ballets was playing in a league a little beyond its class. It is a large company (seventy-nine dancers) with a large repertory (fifty-six ballets) and it has abundant promise. Yet—and no other phrase will do—it lacks style. The dancers have little finesse. Their arms flail out too indistinctly, they miss the sculptural roundness that nearly all Soviet and the best Anglo-American dancers possess, and despite their evident musicality they do not show the sweep and flow of the great. This absence of style undermines their authority as dancers.
The Dutch programme was not particularly well chosen. Balanchine's Le Palais de Cristal is one of those transcendental exercises of style few companies can manage. The Dutch ballet fared better in both Herbert Ross's ugly Caprichos (a carve-up of Bartok in the name of Goya) and Pearl Lang's interesting but insufficiently com- municative modern dance work, Shirah. Best of all was Skibine's Prisoner of the Caucasus, danced to Khatchaturian's Gayaneh, a vigorously unsubtle. yet, on its own terms, entertaining work, full of whirling men and yielding women unpretentiously pretending to suggest Pushkin. Here the Dutch showed a hopeful vitality. National ballets are not built in a day, and the Netherlands company has only a decade or so of experience behind it. Time will sort out a lot of its problems.
The Polish company `Mazowsze' now at the Albert Hall is probably the most distinguished folk-dance troupe outside Russia. It has all the colour, vivacity and that certain element of toy- town tedium common to the genre. All those pleasant peasants with their songs of village woo- ing can get flavourlessly monotonous, while I swear that the translations provided in the pro- gramme are unconsciously the funniest thing in London, not excluding Beyond the Fringe. Yet the `Mazowsze,' elegant and distinguished, has style to the nth degree. Marvellously imaginative costumes, tastefully poised between reality and fancy-dress, and rich choreography danced with an effortless air of rightness, bring an aristo- cratic, thoroughbred air to the programmes. If dancing had a Debrett, the `Mazowsze' would make it, the Netherlands National Ballet wouldn't. It's as unfair and simple as that.
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