The Romantic Ballet in Lithographs of the Time. By Cyril
W.
THE WORLD OF BALLET
Beaumont and Sacheverell Sitwell. (Faber and Faber. 5os.) Ballet : Traditional to Modern. By Serge Lifar. Translated by Cyril W. Beaumont. (Putnam. 15s.) Ballet Go Round. By Anton Dolin. (Michael Joseph. Iss.)
SINCE Diaghilev's death, too much ballet activity has arisen from the wrong side of the footlights. Before, the stage
was a workshop with everyone busily getting on with his own professional job, without interruption from the outside world. Mr. Cyril Beaumont, the unofficial recorder of ballets new and old, published each year a few technical books—that was all. In Diaghilev's day, few were allowed behind the scenes. Today, no sooner has the last bouquet been thrown and the final delirious squawk heard from the gallery, than the sluices are opened and enthusiastic " balletomanes " rush backstage, in an avalanche of hysteria, into a false world of vulgar. " glamour " that they alone create. The molested artists are baffled by the varying opinions bandied, whether or not the pas de deux was taken too quickly, or if Mr. Stokes would approve. Indiscriminate popularising of the Ballet has brought its worship to the level of film fanaticism.
Here are three more ballet books. That Mr. Beaumont's tame is associated with two of them, and not even one boasts a foreword by Mr. Haskell, augurs well. With the help
of Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell, Mr. Beaumont produces a luxurious, lilac-coloured, lilac-perfumed volume of prints and music titles of the Romantic ballet period of the years 1832 to 1849. Collected by Madame Rarnbert and Mr. Ashley Dukes, these lithographs have long since entranced the devotees of their Mercury Theatre. Some of the engravings have appeared scattered singly among the pages of recent publications, but now, for the first time, almost the complete collection is captured. While only occasionally covering the same ground as Mr. Beaumont, Mr. Sitwell has turned his prolific prose machine (this is his fifth production this year) on to the dancers Taglioni, Elssler, Grisi and the other now legendary creatures that Theophile Gautier eulogised. Mr. Sitwell also informs us about the ballets in which they appeared, about Bouvier, Brandard, Chalon and the other artists who made the drawings, about the engravers, the choreographers, the composers, dress designers, scene painters, impresarios, and the shops where the prints were sold.
Mr. Beaumont's compilation of a complete annotated cata- logue stimulates the imagination of those who enjoy itemised lists. His descriptions are almost as pretty as the pictures. But it is the pictures themselves that make even such an expensive book irresistible. As tender as Valentines, as sentimental as a forget-me-not, they show ladies more ephemeral than those in the Victorian books of beauty. Caught in mid-air, flying in the clouds, their draperies making another cloud, rising like Venus from the waters in a shell, or poised sur la poinre on a window-sill or a pruned rose-stalk, they are sketched in their Lami tutus, with coronets of convolvulus, coral, or stars. In the strong light of the moon, they dance against a pearly stageland representation of Edinburgh Castle, Notre Dame, Nijinovgerod, the Danube, a ruined Greek temple, _ rocky gorges, woodland grottes, or a peri-banked lake. Little wonder that with their perfected technique and airy delicacy, these virtuosos were cast for the roles of pens, wraiths, sylphs, and other supernatural apparitions. So successfully did they defy the laws of gravity that only when their tulle skirts caught alight did their wearers prove to be mortal. Maybe, we are so accustomed to this now con- ventional costume, or maybe it is that today's fashions corre- spond so nearly to these displayed here, but the pictures have such a timeless quality. When must relics even ten years old have become ridiculous, it is surprising that these exquisite drawings, made over a hundred years ago, possess so little that is outmoded or comic. Apart from their charm and aesthetic virtues, these treasures are important technical documents. Never before or since the days of photography, have the actual steps of the dance been so accurately portrayed as here.
Mr. Serge Lifar's book, translated by Mr. Beaumont, shows a scholarly attitude towards his work, the ballet in general and its history. Not so many years ago, Mr. Grigorieff, the stage manager, was shouting from the wings, " One, two, three ! " above the music, as a completely uncultivated youth danced his first steps for Diaghilex, Ish)W, this same stripling
writes authoritatively on music, the dance and the Arts, showing surprisingly intellectual capabilities. Serge Lifar, excellent dancer though he be, wishes to be known as a " choreauthor " and a personage of the generally brilliant and sensitive calibre of, for instance, Georges Balanchine. His desire to give an impression of erudition, however, is palpable, his footnotes too painstaking, and he splits hairs on the indefinite meanings of the terms " classic," " academic," " romantic " and char- acter " with unctuous pretentiousness. Nor is his style easy: Mr. Lifar, like others of his small circle in Paris, has acquired the habit of calling upon the names of the great in connexion with even everyday trivialities. When a newspaper article is likened to Dante, a hat to Leonardo, or a cocktail to Michael Angelo, the impression is less effective when he gives the great events in his life as the discovery of Pushkin, the Italians of the Renaissance and the Acropolis.
This book lacks the human element. Rather than admit to being thrilled when elevated from the corps de ballet, he writes that his first roles delighted him " because of their genuine topical interest." His love affairs were " spiritual encounters." " My first encounter had been platonic, tinged with pale blue dreaminess—the dream was destined to colour all the first period of my dancer's life—the second was purple-coloured ; it dealt my entire being a terrible shock, it made me live a drama and seek its solution in creation." The Acropolis had an even worse effect on him. Yet only occasionally is Mr. Lifar quite so silly as when he muses that if he were to put the philosopher Kant into a ballet " he would give him dance movements which he could not do and never could have done." But it is when Mr. Lifar's dance theories are applied to his own work that one disagrees, and it seems he contradicts himself. He is entitled to say " An art's power of its expression and the extent of its means of expression are in inverse ratio to each other," but is surely mistaken, then, when he wishes to become" Unfettered in the composition and expression of my psycho-physical emotions." By abandoning music (which he did, incidentally, as a result of Markeivitch's score for " Icare " being too compli- cated to dance to) in favour of percussion instruments, he merely diminishes his effect, and becomes like all the middle European dancers, who, allowing themselves only an occasional beat of a gong and a loin cloth, fetter themselves with so much freedom that development becomes impossible.
At the other end of the barre is the Irishman Patrick Kay, or Anton Dolin. Mr. Lifar and Mr. Dolin, both premiers danseurs, have in common an egomaniacal conceit, lack of humour and a regret that the ballet is not what it was. There the similarity ends. Mr. Dolin does not bother his head about dancing philo- sophies, or if his roles are of topical interest, so long as the audience applauds, the fans wait at the stage door and the salary cheque is a fat one. This is a book of ballet gossip, behind-the-scene glimpses of how she said to him who do you take me for, and he said, well, who do you think you're talking to, anyway. Mr. Dolin has an unfailing memory, enabling him to report verbatim the most trivial conversations and telephone calls. The book babbles with anecdotes of the theatre in London and the provinces. Some pages make hilarious read- ing. Although Mr: Dolin considers himself the first and possibly the last great British dancer, he explains that he is " the opposite of being conceited, with a nice retiring nature, in spite of the fact that he has not been out of the limelight or suffered from lack of publicity over the last fifteen years." Yet through these pages flows a perhaps unsuspected undercurrent of calamity. We read that Mr. Dolin missed catching the coconut in " Petrouchka " ; that he forgot to mention Constant Lambert in a speech ; how unfortunately he and Diaghilev were not on speaking terms for so long ; and of how Lifar, rushing around to his dressing-room said, " Bravo, Anton—it is not you they boo, but the orchestra."
If there is any hint of bitterness against-highbrows, or exas- peration with his-fellow artists in the Russian Ballet and a hint of future revenge, it is not because we feel Mr. Dolin is out of his element, -thoughto most Britishers collaboration with the Russian Ballet is like fighting feathers. Rather the impression is that Mr. Dolin enjoys enormously the cups of tea and temperamental explosions backstage. Throughout -all his " ups and downs," world of Ballet. - the four comers, illustrate how large and varied is the restricted
Sitwell, Beaumont; Lifar and Pat Kay ! These books, from
CECIL. BEATON. he emerges as a very nice person. Sentimental, •hardworking, good to his mother, he is the Ivor Novello of the Ballet.
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