Ballet
Age of Anxiety
y A. V. COTON WHOEVER imagined that the war-time boom in ballet would extend into the austere late. Forties? And who, once that became an accepted fact, could have imagined that the kind of ballet that was good enough for the Roaring Forties would fit the moods of the Frenzied Fifties? Nobody but a fool with his eyes firmly fixed on the stars twinkling across the footlights, and his ears deafened by the crash of the cash-register. It is obvious by now that a change of direction is shaping up, and a good thing, too. Such shifts of balance come suddenly but they have been slowly building up all the time in any culture which is healthy and constantly undergoing change.
There is little danger that the `shop window' companies are going to fold. They are all solidly backed by State subsidies and their primary pur- pose is to serve as permanent exhibitions of the classical productions of their own country's dance system. But even these Number One Companies, outside Russia at any rate, have to put on new orks to attract the younger generation of dance- fans, to give young dancers something to cut their teeth on, and to enable the creative artists to eat fairly regularly and avoid too frequent visits to the psychiatrist's couch. The directors of these institutions, in this half of Europe, squirm on the horns of an inescapable dilemma. Shall they con- tinue to uphold the classics at all costs—there- fore concentrating on breeding a special type of classical dancer? Or can they permit the growth of a more fluid–Land fluent—style which fits the dancers for the kind of new drama-ballet that is creeping up over the horizon from America? For no part of our present system of running ballet- companies-plus-ballet-schools is geared to breed- ing a kind of dancer who can fit smoothly into the requirements of all the surviving good choreo- graphy created between 1841 and 1958.
Part of the new method of compromise is to encourage the creation of the three-acter, a revival of the last century's balletic convention which, so far, has produced nothing specifically hallmarked `twentieth-century product.' Another aspect of the directors' problem is to know how much liberty to give to really original young choreographers, a few of whom are strivingAo- wards a sort of expressive drama-ballet which specifically eschews romantic hero-figures, super- natural characters, and fairies. These few progres- sives, functioning at present like the grains of sand under the oyster's shell, are passionately deter- mined to make a ballet style of movement which can express the savagery, hopelessness, yearning and need to understand which a younger genera- tion feels, and which is not nourished sufficiently by the classics, romantic fantasies and escapist comedies forming the modern repertoire.
Meanwhile television poses its particular prob- lem; it is the lover-rival in the ballet situation now, a beneficent ally when it gives jobs to stars who merely display snippets of the standard repertoire at mouth-watering fees; a potential
enemy when it starts (as it very soon will) to develop its own style of dance-drama, thereby drawing away the more daring creative spirits and a lot of the best budding dance talents. Just now television's balletic function is an ambiguous one: it show-windows in the remotest hamlet and country town what, in actuality, can only be seen in metropolitan centres. How to guess what per- centage of viewers will react by making an effort to contact the real thing—and so begin to stiffen the numbers of the live audience? Equally, how to guess what proportion of casual viewers will remain perfectly satisfied with the image of Miss Snooks performing a tricky grand adagio, and couldn't care less if they never ' got within fifty miles of a live ballet performance?
The immediate beneficial contact between ballet and television is that,it has opened the way for those adventurous spirits (whether manage- ments or performers) who will risk skill and money in starting a fresh kind of touring venture —the dance recital by top-line names, giving one-night stands in any kind of hall anywhere in the provinces. This in response to the appetite whetted by television. The few adventures so far in this direction reaped rich harvests of cash and appreciation.
While the ballet managements try to grapple with a problem larger than any they have met in the past fifty years, the newest threat to any com- placency they may retain is the 'actuality musical' —the combination of song, music, acting and, above all, dancing, such as first hit the Western
theatre in the shape of Oklahoma! and was fol- lowed up by Brigadoon, Annie, get your gun and The King and I. Newest in the genre is New York's current rave show, West Side Story, which tells in terms of modern New York life the Romeo-Juliet tragedy, as enacted between rival gangs of lawless delinquents.
The team of choreographer-composer-designer which created such fine ballets as Fancy Free, Age of Anxiety and the earlier musical On the Town, is here responsible for this spectacle. Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein and Oliver Smith have simply shifted a ballet vehicle into a new gear. For a long time, audiences are going to want this kind of story-spectacle in which dancing is more important an emotional expression than the lyrics or the music per se.
Perhaps the English balletic genius is not yet quite ready to break out in its own new direction, towards a specifically English actuality-musical with plot and characters deriving from believable people in believable circumstances. But this genre is exactly what needs to be exploited by all those young, tortured and genuinely creative spirits in English ballet who at present eat frustra- tion three times daily. The final impulse which may tilt our ballet into the fresh direction it needs to travel could be the commissioning of the English equivalent of West Side Story.
The ambivalent TV-ballet relationship; the mostly decadent and perplexing repertoire; the disinterest which killed off the Edinburgh ballet venture; the ominous thinness of audiences dur- ing the September season when four companies appeared in London at once; these are the hard
facts of the ballet situation now and here. The shape of things to come will be a formula, not yet defined, but for which all the factors are present.
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