BALLET
Bright young things
CLEMENT CRISP
For comment upon the most thrilling danc- ing recently I refer you to Hilary Spurling's article on the Noh Theatre in Brighton. My task is to bring you news of less happy events: Geoffrey Cauley's Le Symphonie Pastorale at Covent Garden and Anna Soko- low's Opus '65 for Ballet Rambert. Mr Cauley has been subjected to some brutal judgments for his new ballet, judgments which I find less than justifiable. To my mind his failing lay in choice of score rather than choice of subject; given fifteen minutes more music, this version of Gide's brief, profound nouvelle about the nature of blindness and the nature of faith, could have been made to work far more effectively than the Martinu score (The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca) allowed.
But Cauley was forced to compress further a story already reduced to its essence; to do so he was obliged to make a 'fantasy' upon the Gide original, and the result shows real theatrical originality. By using flash-back techniques, duplications of the two central figures of the Pastor and Gertrude (the blind girl whom he rescues and learns to love), and a spoken narrative. Cauley has produced a kind of mime drama with dancing rather than a pur-sang ballet. No bad thing, this, were he not also forced by shortage of music to accelerate the pace of the work to almost break-neck speed at the end. Even so, he catches a good deal of the original, notably the conflict between the Pastor and his home, with the omnipresent small children and a wife doomed by her very nature to be more mother than wife, though she understands the Pastor's feeling for Gertrude far better than he.
Where Cauley really has attempted the _ impossible is in the dogmatic struggle of the Pastor and his son, a battle between the Pastor's view of Christ's teaching and the son's Pauline interpretation, which remains impossible on stage. The piece, in sum, is a brave failure; where it succeeds is in explor- ing and extending the artistry of its in- terpreters—who are uniformly excellent— and in reaffirming Peter Unsworth (decora- tor of Cauley's other ballet In the Beginning) as a talent of the first importance: a painterly stage designer of tremendous gifts.
Ballet Rambert's spring season has opened at the Jeanetta Cochrane with the company looking in tremendous form : their assurance in their very individual style has now a fine gloss of physical pride that is continually exciting to watch. Their first new acquisition on show is Anna Sokolow's Opus '65,a five- year-old news-reel of urban American youth in full protest. Here are all the frantic activi- ties of a disorientated generation, fleeing from themselves through violence and drugs, twitching, jerking, mouthing incoherent in- sults at the world. They cling together, dress up, give every appearance of being far-gone on pot and cheap music (the Teo Macero score clatters devastatingly), and ultimately opt out by jumping into the orchestra pit. The Rambert artists are blazingly committed to their task : would they had something better to dance, for Miss Sokolow's choreo- graphy has a hectoring energy but little appearance of technical resource.
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