Ballet
Where Do We Go From Here?
By A. V. COTON FIFTY years ago this spring the .Russian Ballet of Diaghilev appeared in Paris. It touched Jo off a renaissance that had never before in European theatre his- tory been either necessary or posssible. There came a re- appraisal of the beauty, the drama, and the magic too, that ballet can provide. Suddenly there were sprouting little local revivals of ballet in places where, a few years earlier, the art had seemed to die a natural death, smothered in sentimentality, bad music, worse dancing and appalling plots. In this country—and this cannot be too categorically emphasised—there would today be no ballet but for Marie Rambert and Ninette de Valois, both former Diaghilev dancers and acceptors of the latent challenge in the English theatre-scene. These• two resuscitated English ballet from the stagnation that had fallen on it in 1914. The jokers in the pack of mixed cards which each held were identical; a strong tradition of stage-dancing bred out of the romantic period through the Victorian pantomime and flourishing in the Edwardian musical.
From the little acorns of their two-boys-and-six- girls groups, grew vast oaks of companies which, later, were supported by orchestras, lively dance- schools, herds of would-be choreographers, de- signers, composers, maitres de ballet and bat- talions of little girls red in tooth and claw in the contest for ballerina-hood. Now, a third of a century since the first, genuine post-Great-War ballet was Created, the amount 'Of achievement is fantastic—not fewer than 650 works if we include all those given a professional airing since Ashtons Scarlet Scissors of 1926. Even though the airing may have instantly choked an inbred few. What have we created and held on to? What is it worth? Where do we go next?
Weighing all the really creative work, we have turned out a prodigious number of choreogra- phers—far more in proportion to personnel in- volved than any other ballet centre in the world. We have some very good, and a lot of goodish, dancers. We have no tradition of ballet designers. And we have precious little worthwhile ballet music. In practical terms, the extant ballets which live for two or three seasons or get revived every five or six years are a nucleus of high-grade 1930s ballets in the Rambert repertoire and a more diverse collection (with more contrasted choreo- graphic styles) in the Royal Ballet's repertoire. Of these latter, nearly one-half of modern works are by Ashton.
On paper this overflow of creative choreo- graphic talent looks good. But most of the works above the trash level created since 1940 are shelved —many perhaps for ever. For the number of annual performances they give, neither the Royal, Rambert nor Festival companies produce nearly enough new ballets. We keep going on a series of successes and part-successes 'plus a heavy stiffening of solid, and often too solemn, revivals of nineteenth-century classical ballets. Partly this is the fault of the public—but, deeper, it is surely the combined faults of managements and propa- gandists whose confused values have guided public taste, particularly outside London, to ask for 'classics' (however debased in quality) and ballets easy to 'understand,' i.e., with sentimental plots and cardboard characters.
There is no easy solution to this problem in re- converting public taste, yet sooner or later a public is going to demand ballets which, in some way, seem to bear some relationship to the world around us. The big-scale musical has shown uses of ballet method which appeal to both a sophisti- cated and an inexperienced public. The big lack (among several, most of which could be easily supplied) in English ballet is a properly run try- out theatre, existing as a laboratory for all those experiments that are involved if we are to keep the art, and the science, fully contemporary. We are at a point of no return, for ballet cannot go on indefinitely by selling the public Miss X in Swan Lake and Miss Z in Giselle. The sort of ballets exploiting other notions and different techniques from -those of the classical ballets are, generally, cautiously received by both critics and audiences in London, and in the provinces are, 95 per cent. of the time, a dead loss—in every sense.
We have a number of young choreographers capable of feeling (and—do not be surprised— thinking, too) who could create a lively future for English ballet. But they would need guidance, collaboration, with hand-picked composers, de- signers and scenarists, under suitable conditions for making trial works. It requires no fabulous genius to organise- such a workshop within the present framework of the three important com- panies provided the three directorates could accept the notion of mutual alliance for the benefit of all.
A new channel which choreographers could explore is that of the traditional apparatus of the English culture—folic dance and folk music, the masque, our one-time genius for mime, the vast range of plastic movement and gesture deriving from sports. Our literature offers an enormous field of plots; ideas, character-types, lyrical modes of expression, Which could with ingenuity provide raw material for every type of theatre-dance experiment.
The finances of the Diaghilev enterprise were no more secure, nor more erratic, than are the finances of English ballet today. His company provided (though it was not so labelled, or even thought of) exactly the sort of working-laboratory that led to the startling ballets of Massine and Nijinsky and Balanchine. Under whatever name, we need that sort of training apparatus for our choreographers, decorators, scenarists and com- posers if our ballet is to remain a vital theatre activity.
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