IA\ M
L
BALLET
Last Days of MacMillan
By CLEMENT CRISP
THt past fortnight has seen some serious changes for the worse in the ballet scene. with two announcements that came hot on each other's heels: one told of the cancellation of Ballet Rambert's London season together with the resignation of one of its directors; the other stated that Kenneth MacMillan was leaving the Royal Ballet to take up a post in Berlin.
British ballet, of course, is a patient whose feverish changes in condition have alarmed the amateur diagnosticians among us for years. It is not as if Festival Ballet have escaped infection they simply had their crisis last summer; it was a warning sign, and the reshaping of the company's image, foreshadowed by the acquistion of a new choreographer and artistic director, has hardly materialised in the present predominance of clas- sics in their repertoire. But the latest symptoms are ominous enough to need prompt and positive attention. If the setting-up of a committee under Lord Goodman and Lord Harewood to inquire into the organisation of both ballet and opera is the equivalent of calling in a specialist, it is not before time.
Rambert's temporary suspension of activity is just another fruit of the preposterous conditions that bedevil evtry touring company—a compound of inadequate theatres, a public too fond by half of 'the classics' (too many swans chasing too few audiences, in effect), and a lack of permanent 'home theatres' in which to work and experiment : here is the problem for the Goodman-Harewood committee. MacMillan's decision, though. is altogether harder to explain in these terms; his departure, for whatever period it may even- tually prove, is a major disaster and one of terrible implications.
Kenneth MacMillan is, and I use the word in all seriousness, a choreographic genius, one of the tiny handful in the world; we sensed this clearly with his first professional work, Danses Concer- tames, only eleven years ago. The brilliance of the dance shapes, the quickly flashing invention, the strong personal use of the academic dance were amazingly assured, and in the succeeding years his development—highlighted by the lyricism of Le Baiser de la Fee. the dramatic poetry of The Invitation, and the tremendous power of Rite of Spring—has been sure and clear in the sixteen ballets he has made. The culminating statement about his importance came with the magnificently sustained Romeo and Juliet, a triumphant asser- tion of his genius as a creator of dances.
Now in the full flood of creativity, he is the only possible successor to Ashton as the ultimate choreographic inspiration for the Royal Ballet, but since Romeo, over a year ago, his solitary new work has been for Cranko in Stuttgart— The Song of the Earth—hailed by several of our most perceptive critics as masterly, which judg- ment we shall be able to verify when it arrives on the Covent Garden stage next week.
The Royal Ballet's trouble is twofold, in that possessing a couple of superlative choreographers it seems unable to organise them into working. Ashton, one of the greatest creative artists of this century, is fully occupied directing the com- pany and has produced only the ravishing, but brief, trios of Monotones since The Dream over two years ago; the fact that he has done magnifi- cent things with the company cannot help one feeling that priorities have got muddled some- where. Now MacMillan is following Cranko in seeking the greater creative opportunities offered by Germany: the net result is that our national ballet finds itself without the choreographer upon whose talents the artistic future of the company would surely devolve during the next decades. A ballet company—to oversimplify wildly—is only as good as its school and its choreography, and each is essential. The Royal Ballet School pro- duces fine dancers, but who's to give them an artistic future in the 1970s and 1980s if Mac- Millan is not on hand to offer the best of his inspiration to London? Except for Ashton, there is not now a talent strong enough—nor yet any promise of one—to sustain a purposeful pro- gramme for our National Ballet, and you cannot go on reviving and refurbishing ballet's past successes ad infinitum. Well, we shall see what we shall see; but I for one am filled with foreboding.
The new Monotones pas de trois has at least been a ray of light in the gloom. A year ago Ashton irradiated the annual Benevolent Fund Gala with the white-lit glories of this trio, and in its successor he has extended the theme with a piece for Georgina Parkinson, Antoinette Sibley and Brian Shaw, using Satie's Trois Gnossiennes to make a fragment of green fresh- ness to touch heart and mind. Otherwise, the Opera House activity has brought a return of The Sleeping Beauty after a year's absence that has not diminished its importance as a master- piece, but shows it looking pretty stiff in the joints. The production is fascinating in that, with relatively few accretions (notably those cheerily anachronistic lvans instead of the proper coda to the pas de deux), it represents a Maryinski classic in a state of full and suitably ossified grandeur. There is no reason why we should copy the Soviets and start tinkering with a vital in- heritance that is also a superb statement of the classical ideal which underlies the best ballet of this century, but this Beauty is lumbered with the devastating quaintness of Messel's designing, at best ponderously pretty, more often sinking to outfits like the grotesque caparisonings of the Fairy Cavaliers who tread Agag-like in confec- tions that a Principal Boy would baulk at, .hatted for Ascot. The glorious choreography needs no embellishment save a serious re- thinking of the production, and a bravura in performance-style to replace the petrified for- malism of the corps de ballet, who prance and gesture sweet nothings with elegant disinterest. For anyone interested in hearing the full beauties of the score, I recommend a recording made by the Bolshoi orchestra under Khaikin, rather than the dutiful rendition given in the Covent Garden pit. Currently in the leading role, Nerina sparkles and flashes with diamond assurance, while Beriosova brings it a pearl-like radiance; both are splendid, but there are beauties elsewhere in the work that must be awakened before another hundred performances elapse, let alone a hundred years.
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