Dance
Royal Ballet (Covent Garden) English National Ballet (Royal Festival Hall)
Russian refinement
Deirdre McMahon
Colas in La Fille mal gardee is the first Ashton role which Irek Mukhamedev has danced since he joined the Royal Ballet last year. Fille is often described as the most English of ballets, but some of my happiest memories are of the Russian dancers who have performed in Ashton's classic. As Lise, Galina Samsova gave the most touching account of the mime scene in Act II, which a lot of ballerinas tend to ham. Rudolf Nureyev danced Colas in 1974, comparatively late in his career, and three years later Mikhail Baryshnikov gave a few performances which still rank in my mind as the most brilliant and definitive.
The happy-go-lucky Colas is a deceptive- ly straightforward role because it requires a seamless blend of acting and dancing. He and Lise are lively, resourceful lovers in Act I but by the end of Act II, as Ashton's beautiful choreography shows us, the rela- tionship between them is deeper and more passionate. Mukhamedev was by turns ten- der, funny and teasing and nowhere was he more wonderful than in the mime scene in Act II, which starts with gentle wistfulness
and ends with slapstick humour. When he surprises Lise, who is acting out her dream of marriage and children, she is horror- struck, but he is amused and teases her about the number of children they will have. He offers the tearful Lise a hanky to blow her nose, then they kiss and are bliss- fully in each other's arms. Lise's formidable mother, the widow Simone, appears and Colas has to be hidden, but where? Lise tries to stuff him into a cupboard, under the table or even up the chimney (which scorches his bottom). It is a key scene which encompasses a range of emotions and it requires a fine sense of balance. I watched Mukhamedev bring out each nuance with increasing admiration. He is a physically big dancer with a magnetic stage presence who could, if he wanted to, blast his way through a ballet much as he did in those schlocky Grigorovich ballets at the Bolshoi. But Mukhamedev's power is refined. The variation in the Act I pas- de deux was superbly done, particularly those difficult travelling sauts de Basques. Like most Bolshoi men he is an exemplary part- ner, and his Lise, Lesley Collier, who has danced with some real sticks in this ballet, positively bloomed.
The Paul Taylor season •at Sadlers Wells was a feast of wonderful dancing and choreography which was greeted enthusias- tically by the audiences. Since Taylor's last visit to London in 1989 coincided with the Bolshoi season and a torrid summer and played mostly to half-empty houses, the audience reaction this time was gratifying. There were old Taylor favourites like Airs and Esplanade but also a solid new hit, Company B, a set of ten dances choreo- graphed to songs by the Andrews Sisters. It's an utterly irresistible work which few choreographers would have the nerve to attempt: cheerful, unpretentious but hardly serious. Ironically, this has also been said about Ashton's File, but Edwin Denby's comment about Ashton also applies to Tay- lor: 'The more trivial the subject, the deep- er and more poetic is Ashton's view of it'. There is a dark side to Taylor's work (Fact and Fancy, Sunset), but Company B is about love, youth and dancing. There are two wonderfully contrasted duets, 'Pennsyl- vania Polka' and 'There Will Never Be Awke went Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney, Peter Davy, Dan'l Widden and 'A bankrupt.'
Another You', and the solos 'I Can Dream Can't I?' and the exhilarating `Tico-Tico', danced by Andrew Asnes, as virtuoso a piece of dancing as we will see this season.
For the festive season English National Ballet has unveiled a new production of The Nutcracker, its third since 1976. It is not really a new production, since Ben Stevenson first staged it for the Houston Ballet in 1987. Like its predecessors, this new ENB version is lavish but essentially hollow because Stevenson seems to be interested only in spectacle and the chore- ography is bland to the point of invisibility. Audiences deserve better.
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