Ballet

Contrasts

By CLIVE BARNES IT would be difficult to think of two ballet companies more dissimilar in aims than Western Theatre Ballet and London's Festival Ballet. The first is perhaps the last of the chamber ballet companies.

Only fourteen dancers, with a virtue made of poverty, during the past five years it has been turning a lonely furrow. Its function is to experiment, to create new ballets and to create new audiences. Festival Ballet, although fundamentally a British company, is also the last of a line; the ultimate successor to the international touring companies that before the war revitalised ballet and so started the re- birth of individual national ballets across Europe and America.

Last week Western Theatre Ballet started a season in Camberley, at the Elmhurst Studio Theatre amid the pine-trees and golf-courses of Surrey. At the Festival Hall amid the South Bank monuments, defying augury, Festival Ballet held a gala performance to celebrate the thirteenth anniversary of their founding. The two programmes were as contrasted as blacker- than-black and whiter-than-white.

Western Theatre Ballet gave the first perfor- mance of The Web, a first ballet by Laverne Meyer, one of the members of the company. Typically it dealt with a serious subject (it was a moral tale on the effect of gratitude) and it made a far-out choice of music, being the first ballet produced in Britain ever to be set to Webern.

As a choreographic debut it proved unusually successful Meyer, a Canadian, has apparently based his ballet on an episode in his own life. Years ago, he stopped a girl from throwing herself over

a bridge. This incident is the jumping-off point for The Web; the boy gives the girl protection

and they fall in love, but her gratitude is so stifling that it poisons the relationship and in a bout of anger he kills her. It is just the kind of melodramatic theme with an undertow of symbolism that ballet can do well. And Meyer's choice of music, Webern's Quartet, Op. 5, gives the ballet a distinctive flavour of fevered energy and is so cleverly used that I can forgive— indeed to be honest I only just noticed—that Meyer topples the careful proportions of the music by repeating the last movement.

A choreographer's first ballets are always in the nature of explorations for a personal style, and some of Meyer's choreography is too con- ventional for the subject-matter. But the absorb- ing story is clearly told in clean choreography that does not strive for phoney effects and here

and there finds a choreographic mot juste in its dance vocabulary. The ballet was unpretentiously

designed by Diana Dewes, and very intelligently

danced by Gail Donaldson and Simon Mottram. Festival Ballet also emerged well from its gala. This company in some respects resembles ITV—

at times one would hardly flicker a surprised

eyelid if commercials interrupted the even flow of the ballets. Last week's gala provided good

entertainment value for money. A couple of the items were more than averagely appalling, but to offset this was the first performance in

Britain of a brightly inventive Balanchine pas de deux, sweetly and stylishly danced by Toni Lander and Royes Fernandez, and Anton Dolin's exciting, knock-'em-in-the-aisles Varia- tions for Four, zestfully given by four fine male dancers, John Gilpin, Louis Godfrey, David

Adams and Barry McGrath. There was also, for

good measure, a neat reconstruction by Alicia Markova of Nijinsky's L'Apres-midi d'un Faune

for those who wanted it. I personally didn't--in my view it% a wrohg-headed ballet--but it was well enough danced by Markova herself part- nered by Milorad Miskovitch.

While the Festival Ballet season now just ended has been notable for a rise in its standard of dancing, but no improvement whatever in its level of creative activity, I am beginning to

'I think think this is where he handed over to a younger

man.'

wonder seriously if such activity is in fact within its scope. And if it isn't, whether it much matters. After all, if we judged opera companies on the new operas they produced each season, which would 'scape whipping? On the other band' Festival Ballet's repertory is not ideal, indeed not even adequate, for showing off its dancer!. This is a perennial problem; like the rain, 1" always with us.