THE BALLET
Instruction or Entertainment? -
'THE programme of the Russian. Ballet at Covent Garden is remarkably reticent about the name of the company which is performing there. We had been promised some months ago a company of all the talents under the grandiose title of ` United Arts (Inc.)." But somehow the arts failed to achieve unity, and the obscure dissensions of the financial backers have been revealed, though not made plain, in the law courts within a week of an official announcement that there were no such things as disagreements or writs in the ballet world. The only thing that came out clearly in court was that the company at Covent Garden has the title of " Educational Ballets (Ltd.)." No wonder the programme keeps quiet about so forbidding and, I was going to say, inappropriate a name ! But is it so inappropriate ? Is not half the trouble with ballet due to the fact that its more ardent aestheticians have forgotten that it is primarily an entertainment and are trying to elevate it, as they think, to the level of a subject for a night-school course, like geography or economics ?
The majority of the audience goes to Covent Garden surely not for uplift, but to find enjoyment in good dancing, in the beauty of well-trained men and women performing difficult actions upon the stage, and in the adjuncts of musical and pictorial invention provided by the composers and the scenic artists. They want to be entertained. Fortunately there is plenty of entertainment to be found in the repertory at Covent Garden despite the dour implications of " educational." There is Fokine's Le Coq d'Or, which combines all the delights of a Christmas pantomime with an intelligence that ensures discretion in the buffoonery and good taste in the magnificence of the spectacle, and throws in a spice of tart satire for seasoning. As a work of art it may be defective, because the movements of ballet cannot always effectively convey what was indicated by the libretto of the opera, and from the musical point of view the cutting of the score is often heartlessly brutal. But it makes a first-rate entertainment and, I confess with some surprise, does not lose its effect after the first blinding brilliance of the spectacle has passed, but rather gains on repetition. It is also excellently danced, especially by Baronova as the Queen.
Massinels Symphonic Fantastique, on the other hand, becomes more boring 'every time one sees it, and it was always, as a Frenchman remarked of one of our English ballets, vraiment fatiguant a voir. This is not to deny to the choreographer a quite astonishing ingenuity in fitting movement to the music, though sometimes his invention completely mistakes the zeal mood of the music. The few itassages of good dancing in it may be seen better and in a more concentrated form else- where. For one thing the costumes, especially in the last -two-movements, fail to perform their proper function in ballet, which is to reveal the beauty of line in the movements of the dancers, though it may be said that any costumier would be hard put to it to reveal any beauty in the hideous caperings of the " Witches' Sabbath." If it is objected that such an orgy is not a thing of. beauty and that the music itself is as ugly as .sin (which I will not deny), the answer is that it was a fundamental mistake of Massine's to make use of this Symphony for a ballet just as it was a mistake on the part of Berlioz to imagine that a satisfactory symphonic finale could be made out of such material. But this, I suppose, is all very educational—which may account for the boredom aroused by the solemn and humourless pretentiousness of the slow movement.
What a relief it is to turn to Massine's earlier divertisse- ments, in which he was not concerned with anything more than entertaining his audience with gay dances aptly set to bright music ! The Midnight Sun is no more than a bright piece of folk-lore and Cimarosiana but a series of charac- teristic dances, but at least they have real character. Except the Tarantella, they were not well done. The company lacks a first-rate male dancer in the classical style. For apart from his remarkable powers of elevation; Lichine has none of the finish or poise, not to mention the whimsicality, required for the parts created by or associated with Idzikovsky. His " Blue Bird " dance in Aurora's Wedding was a ragged per- formance, though the audience who failed to recognise the poiSe and style of Ncmtchinova's Sylphide and• Swan Queen "which offset a certain coldness and heaviness in het dancing, did- not' Seem to think so. DYNELEY HUSSEY.
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