BALLET
Old ropes
CLEMENT CRISP
It was unkind but salutary programme building to give the premiere of Ruth van Dantzig's The Ropes of Time side by side with The Song of the Earth; set against the clarity and expressive force of MacMillan's beautiful commentary on life and its re- newal, van Dantzig's hectic display-piece for Nureyev looked hollow and dated, like some weird revenant from a provincial Opera House in Europe. The themes of the two works bear some similarities, though van Dantzig's starting point is, reputedly, the idea of artistic longevity and the struggles and triumphs of the mature performer faced with the challenge of both time and younger rivals. In effect it is a composite of All About Eve and Tudor's La Gloire, with the merits of neither. Lumbered with 'uni- versal' implications, and with occasional irruptions of those venerable bores 'Life' and `Death'—danced by Diana Vere and Monica Mason, whose choreography seems so similar that one might reverse the attri- butions with little difficulty—we see Mr Nureyev as 'The Traveller' giving more than generously of his technical all (an irresistible alternative title is Al! About Rudi).
The ballet starts on a note of frantic energy and continues in this vein to the accompaniment of an electronic score of ear-splitting unpleasantness by Jan Boer- man (who was responsible for the sound track to that other van Dantzig monstrosity. Monument for a Dead Boy, in which we have recently seen Mr Nureyev disporting himself): to a fine agglomeration of screeches and crashing, with various quaint constructions by Toer van Schayk- moving on and over the stage, we follow the Travel- ler's journey from somewhere to somewhere else. He is first seen, heroic, on a dome— his little world?—which rises to reveal dancers underneath; Death and Life hour- ree on, and from this moment the action is fast and monotonously furious. I can re- call few ballets more filled with dancers rampaging to so little purpose. The choreo- graphic style is basically academic, on which van Dafitzig imposes modern dance con- tractions and a lot of flailing arm move- ment: it lacks all the subtlety and delicacy that we observed in this same choreo- grapher's Moments: it also misses the rever- berant allusiveness, the intellectual challenge of his mysterious and beautiful Epitaphs.
It may be that, faced with the need to give Mr Nureyev a thumping big role and brought into contact with a strong classical company, van Dantzig felt constrained to make a work both busy and staidly classical so as not to waste the material on hand. The result, though, suggests nothing so much as a man trying to persuade us that what he is saying is 'significant' by never pausing for a moment and by maintaining an un- remittingly 'significant' manner. It is all very sad. As a vehicle for Mr Nureyev it fails signally to do anything but allow him to do a great deal of what he should be allowed to do only occasionally; his role is plainly very demanding (he dances with prodigious stamina) but it demands the wrong things; it adds nothing to our knowledge of Mr Nureyev as a dancer or as an interpretive artist (which are not always the same thing).
At the extreme pole from all this activity, a mention must be made of the slight but elegant staging of Les Chansons de Bilitis at the Elizabeth Hail, in which Geoffrey Cauley offered an understated visualisation of Pierre Louys' sapphic pastiches, using the Debussy incidental music. Beriosova was lovely as Bilitis, with excellent support from Patricia Ruanne and Graham Bart; she moved with a marvellous understanding of the economy of stillness, and I shall long remember a simple gesture in which she brought one arm slowly across to the other and then let it fall back to her side.
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