I Ballet
Taylor-made for Nureyev
Robin Young
It was an exceptional week. Strange to think that the Paul Taylor dance company could not get a London theatre until they enlisted Rudolf Nureyev as guest star. Nureyev, of course, was a welcome addition, but even without him Paul Taylor's is the brightest and most exciting of the small, multi-talented, contemporary American dance troupes which have brought their varied and various programmes to Sadler's Wells. In the event, after an anonymous donor had given them Nureyev's services for another two nights, the management could have done with a theatre 400 or so seats bigger. The Taylor group should prove an assured draw whenever they want to return.
Taylor does not like to be called a choreographer. He says he simply makes things for dancers to do, and that the dancers are the most important thing. His works are varied and imaginative, unfailingly inventive, powerful and impressive in their imagery, and popular in their themes and inspirations.
Aureole is a lyrical exercise in perfect grace, an ideal compliment to music by Handel — the sort of thing that proves many a choreographer's downfall. Book of Beasts is a series of jokes which sends up well-known pieces of music and even more famous ballet cliches. Big Bertha is a folksy horror tale in which the fairground robot takes over — chillingly gruesome. Scudorama is disturbing and drama-laden — the torments of severed souls in a haze of amorality. Noah's Minstels has a Mississippi paddle-boat for an ark, and American folk hymns in its music. In this, and in all the works offered, the diminutive but delightfully energetic . Carolyn Adams, who is black and beautiful, was outstanding, a dancer who is pure joy to watch. It was not difficult to understand why Nureyev was willing to juggle engagements for the opportunity to show in London what he can do in roles so refreshing and different. His comic talents are too rarely deployed here — though he provides as witty a foil for Lynn Seymour in Sideshow as he did recently a sensitive one for Natalia Makarova's heavily. dramatised Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. It was remarkable how well Nureyev, who is small and tautly made, fitted roles which Taylor had originally made for his own exceptionally tall and relaxed frame.
The second attraction, which made the week quite utterly exceptional, was the Shanghai acrobatic troupe, who took the Coliseum by storm and exceeded even my confident expectations. I thought the second team, which I saw at home in Shanghai recently, was astonishing — but this touring company topped them time and time again. The impossible does not even take them a long time. There is no agonising and overplayed build-up. They are announced, they come on, smile modestly, and get straight on with the tricks. On our night they packed in fourteen fast-moving acts —and the applause was almost continuous.
Picking favourites is an invidious task, but I have a very soft spot for the man who balances huge porcelain jars on his head, making them spin, or stand on their rims. It looks almost as pain ful as it surely must be for the girl who carries on one shoulder a bamboo pole on top of which her partner is performing on a trapeze.
Plate-spinning is familiar — but here the girls who spin five or six ordinary dinner plates on wands held behind their backs or while they are turning somersaults pre sent a graceful tableau of very simple and affecting beauty. Then, one of them climbs up on a bench balanced on three soup-bowls and a ball, with one leg unsupported, and leans over backwards to pluck a rose from a vase of flowers — spinning five plates in each hand all the while.
A girl does handstands on ephemeral structures while balancing a stack of rice bowls on her head.
Her partner climbs and descends a ladder with her, and her rice bowls, all balanced on his head. A man doing a single handstand on a pile of bricks removes them one by one. There are also two chaps who imitate ducks, geese, songbirds and railway engines very convincingly (the one I saw in China also did an imitation of a mass rally shouting " Long life to Chairman Mao!") and there are a pair of engaging clowns who hurry on with some throwaway tricks between acts.
Not all the acts will be unfamiliar to people who have been to Western circuses, but the Chinese generally go one better. And I had not seen before the one in which two acrobats twirled and tossed a spinning rope with glass bowls filled with water tied to each end.
And the juggling act, ' The Jolly Cooks,' which the North Koreans did almost motion for motion at Sadler's Wells recently, was here embellished by a performer balancing three real eggs on top of each other, on top of a chopstick, on top of his nose. And all done as if for the pleasure of the thing, and not for money or fame at all. _
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