Dance
Prague Festival Ballet (Palace of Culture, Prague)
Repetitive exposure
Sophie Constanti
T he beauty of Prague, a breathtaking panorama when viewed from the terraces of the Palace of Culture, sits in stark con- trast to the grim-faced, social manner engendered over 40 years of communism displayed by the members of staff at the Palace's theatre. They look as though they still belong to the era of Stalinisation. And the new Czech Republic is more of an eye- opener than David Slobaspyckyj's Prague Festival Ballet. I must admit, however, to being critically challenged when, over the usual promptly served but lukewarm cof- fee, Slobaspyckyj told me that he hoped `last night's performance was the worst [I'd] ever see'.
Slobaspyckyj, a 28-year-old dancer and choreographer, has assembled a small group of classically trained performers drawn from Czech ballet companies and from the Wiener Staatsoper Ballet (his base for the past two years). Founded in 1989 the company operates mainly as a vehicle for Slobaspyckyj's choreography. However, its latest triple bill includes an abstract ballet by Alice Minodora Nec- sea, a Romanian who danced in Bucharest and Sarajevo before settling in Vienna. Next to Slobaspyckyj's Love Lessons and his earlier Silent Whispers, Necsea's work, set to the Serenade opus 5 of Slovak com- poser Eugen Suchon, is conservative and bland.
More suited to this company is Slobaspy- ckyj's humorous, tango-influenced Love Lessons. Fashioned as a series of sketches depicting intimate relationships, it features conventional coupledom, partner-swopping and even threesomes. Like Silent Whispers — Slobaspyckyj's sensitive and touching interpretation of Moravian and Slovakian folk songs — Love Lessons treats the indi- viduality of each dancer as a gift, not a problem. But that is not sufficient compen- sation for Western audiences who, watch- ing this programme of 'modern ballets', will not find anything which could truly be described as modern. Slobaspyckyj's works are charming, unsophisticated and, at times, as lukewarm as Prague's coffee, but Prague Festival Ballet comes across as an
intelligently directed company of likeable dancers in need of proper funding and real choreography.
At Covent Garden, the Birmingham Royal Ballet has been giving London audi- ences the chance to see a couple of golden oldies: Ninette de Valois's Job, her 'masque for dancing' which unfolds alongside Vaughan Williams's score, plus Leonide Massine's Choreartium, his second work to symphonic music (in this case, Brahms's Fourth Symphony). These ballets, created in 1931 and 1933 respectively, belong to another age of choreographic art and stag- ing. Both are grand scale conceptions which rely on the visual effects afforded by large groups of dancers. And both depend on the sculptural range of the human body. But while de Valois, in her stunning tableaux, based on Blake's illustrations of the Book of Job, concentrates on the static force of physical shaping, Massine gives us sculpture which moves and changes so rapidly that the choreographer's tendency to repetition is soon exposed.
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