Dance
Indigestible fare
Deirdre McMahon
During the recent season of the Sad- ler's Wells Royal Ballet, the director of the Sadler's Wells Theatre announced a E1 million project to widen the stage. This would enable its resident company, and other visiting troupes, to stage more large- scale productions. The reason for the current activity is the invitation to SWRB to become the resident company in Birm- ingham. The possibility of such a move and its implications raises again the rela- tionship of the Sadler's Wells company to its sister company at Covent Garden.
In many respects the relationship is a tenuous one, especially in the matter of repertory. In recent years Kenneth Mac- Millan has worked mainly at Covent Gar- den and there are few MacMillan ballets in the Sadler's Wells repertory. Ashton's works still form an important core of the repertory and the company, to its credit, was responsible for reviving Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, a sublime ballet not seen since the 1950s. Similar acts of piety have been conspicuously absent at Covent Gar- den.
In the early 1980s Peter Wright, director of SWRB, staged his own production of Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty. They look expensive but underpowered and reveal the company's lack of strength at ballerina level. With the new Covent Gar- den Swan Lake last year neither Royal Ballet company now has a production that includes Ashton's distinguished interpola- tions — the waltz, the pas de quatre and the Neapolitan Dance. The Ashton choreogra- phy is, however, being revived by Festival Ballet for its new Swan Lake this year.. What a humiliation for a man described fulsomely in the Sadler's Wells programme as 'one of the great choreographers of this century and one of the chief architects of the Royal Ballet'. If the Royal Ballet really believes this it should put its money where its mouth is and not leave the task of preserving the Ashton heritage to Festival Ballet.
Most of the recent creations for the two Royal Ballet companies have come from David Bintley. The Snow Queen is a long and tedious work whose three acts could more profitably have been condensed into two. Bramwell Tovey's 'after Mussorgsky' score is thin, dull and fails to sustain a dance momentum. Because Bintley's plod- ding musical intelligence anchors his choreography so firmly to the music, the dancing looks more and more enervated. The same might be said for the shorter Allegri Diversi (to music by Rossini). Bintley's allegro work gabbles and as a result the shape of the movement is con- tinually fussy and unclear. , Allegri Diversi was part of an indigesti- ble quadruple bill which lumped three new ballets together and as a result did none of them a service. Could someone not have warned poor Graham Lustig against doing a ballet like The Edge of Silence? The programme note was ominous enough, beginning with a poem by Kathleen Raine and going on to describe a 'theme based on a nether world between death and rebirth, in which lost souls drift together in a timeless journey'. All that was missing was Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone. To a Ponderous score by Alfred Shnitke, the dancers writhed about the stage making portentous gestures. The costumes were gimmicky. Why did the leading couple suddenly change into unitards at the end?
There was more writhing and posturing in Kreutzer Sonata by Pavel Smok of the Prague Chamber Ballet. The music, Janacek's First String Quartet, was influ- enced by Tolstoy's novel, about 'the emo- tional and moral questions of male despot- ism and the subordinate role of women in marriage and society'. This is another quote from the programme If Smok was attempting to convey these weighty con- cepts in his choreography he failed signal- ly. Three drably clad dancers from the Prague Ballet lumbered around the stage, alternately groping each other and indulg- ing in angst-ridden expressions. The two performances of Kreutzer Sonata were made possible by the Foreign and Com- monwealth Office and the British Council. Anglo-Czech relations deserve a worthier object of cultural philanthropy.
This interminable evening finished with Michael Corder's Gloriana. What could have been a mildly agreeable suite of neo-Elizabethan dances to Britten's score was instead swamped by an over-elaborate libretto (the programme note was worthy of a PhD thesis) and by Philip Prowse's hugely ornate designs, which must have cost the earth. It's the old story at the Royal Ballet — lavishness of means hiding paucity of purpose.
Previous page
