Dance
Bintley's
banalities
Deirdre McMahon fears the Royal Ballet's choreographer is leading it into the wilderness
Isuppose the career of David Bintley, now resident choreographer of the Royal Ballet, is a judgment on all those critics (including myself) who used to complain that none of the choreographers working with the company eight or nine years ago was interested in steps. It was a time when non-ballets like Dances of Albion cluttered up the repertory. Well, Bintley gives you steps all right, with a vengeance. The only problem is they don't amount to anything. He is the ultimate dyslexic choreographer.
There are a number of gaping holes in Bintley's choreography. The first is his musical sensitivity, or rather lack of it. He listens to the notes, not to the musical phrase, and the result is a relentless step- note relationship, brutally revealed in bal- lets like Galanteries and Allegri Diversi because of the music he uses — Mozart and Rossini respectively. Bintley is not the first choreographer to be so seduced by all those pretty notes that he tries to stuff every bar of music with steps (Stravinsky presents another such trap for the unwary) but he is one of the most monotonous in his response to the music.
The effects of this are particularly no- ticeable in his allegro work: for example, the men's allegro variations in Allegri Diversi, the Dance of the White Dwarf in The Snow Queen, Lesley Collier's varia- tion in Galanteries. The shape of the steps, a pirouette a la seconde or an attitude turn, is continually fuzzy and unclear. This shape is one of the elemental aspects of dance. In Bintley's work all one sees are awkward angles and warped lines while the dancers are in motion. Elsewhere, Bintley's limited vocabulary shows in his constant use of blocks of steps: three arabesques here, three jet& there. It is like looking at a Sanderson catalogue.
There was a programme on BBC last December about Bintley during which he said, apropos of Galanteries, that he pre- ferred the interaction between this person and that person as opposed to this dancer and that dancer. How nice; but I would have thought that a choreographer's first task should be to respond to his dancers as dancers, however sweet and charming they may be off-stage. There is an obvious danger in encouraging dancers like Lesley Collier to exacerbate an already over- winsome cuteness when they perform.
Bintley's ballets are full of smirking references to the work of other choreog- raphers — Cranko, Balanchine, Ashton and MacMillan. In The Snow Queen I counted Petrushka and The Rite of Spring; in The Sons of Horus, Apollo, Manon and The Four Temperaments; in his latest oeuvre, 'Still Life' at the Penguin Cafe, the list is slightly longer — Façade, The Dream, La Fille Ma! Gardee, The Concert and The Rite of Spring (again). In both The Sons of Horus and 'Still Life' at the Penguin Cafe, Stephen Jefferies has solos that are simply a corny old rehash of a role he used to dance for Sadlers Wells Royal Ballet, the Joker in Card Game. How clever, we are supposed to marvel at all this: Bintley has been a good little boy and gone to choreography school.
Another gimmick is his fondness for using lumbering, supposedly humorous titles for various sections of his ballets. In The Sons of Horus we have `Qebhsnuf: falcon-headed protector of the intestines' or 'Hapi: ape-headed protector of the lungs'. In 'Still Life' at the Penguin Cafe, dancers in animal heads (Tales of Beatrix Potter by Ashton) perform anodyne disco dances to Simon Jeffes' sub-Glassian score. There is a deeper message, or so we are given to understand from Bintley's prog- ramme note, a treatise on the disappear- ance of the Great Auk! The message is ecology, though how the cause of ecology. is served by Bintley's trivialities is a mys- tery. Perhaps a contribution to Green- peace would be more in order.
Bintley's choreography doesn't chal- lenge the dancers but it makes them feel good. They come off-stage in a pleasant lather of perspiration and think they have done their bit. His ballets are the equiva- lent of a good work-out, and just as mindless. Lesley Collier was heard to say on the BBC programme that Bintley is in a class with Ashton and MacMillan. In two recent triple bills Bintley ballets were put side by side with Balanchine and Ashton, a clear indication of where the Royal Ballet would like to place his talents. The com- pany is not altogether to be blamed for inflating Bintley's reputation so absurdly. Choreographically speaking, it is a lean time for dance companies everywhere. They are desperate for new choreog- raphers and new work. The Royal Ballet, with all its other problems, passionately needs to believe that Bintley is the saviour to lead them into the promised land. But he is leading them inexorably into the wilderness.
Bintley is not complaining. 'Still Life' was sponsored by the European Cultural Foundation: European companies are in- viting him to work for them. He is the most inflated name in British dance — the Perfect choreographer for a classical com- pany in irreversible decline.
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