Ballet
Marine
By CLIVE BARNES THE curious thing about Ashton's Ondine is how good it is--consider- ing. Revived last week at Covent Garden, all its virtues were again in evidence and once more they were surprising. Ashton has created a ballet about water, which is perhaps an unusual thing to attempt. Ondine is essentially a seascape with figures, and the more I see it the more convinced I am that this is the best way to approach it.
The ballet's pier of departure was Fouque's novel Undine, which in its time seems to have launched a thousand theatrical ships. This story of a water-nymph and her fatal love for a mortal is the very stuff of Romanticism, and Ashton has taken from it a narrative of true love undone that might have served for ballet any time during the past 130 years. For people who care about stories in ballet. I suppose this is as pretty, as fragile and as unconvincing as most. Its real im- portance, however, is Ondine herself and water, cascading gallons of it.
If Ashton were a painter he would never fill a canvas. He would paint one or two figures in detail, and complete the design with deft impres- sionistic brush strokes. Here Ondine is made won- . derfully true. Water-nymph or no water-nymph, her plight 'twixt land and water is realised in ob- viously human terms. Her problem is one of acclimatisation.
The choreography seems all in waves. fountains and waterfalls. Every arm movement has a ripple, the ensemble dances swirl like minia- ture whirlpools; the cast either swims or wades its way through the ballet rather than dances it. In the last act, when Ondine is tempting her Knight with visions, she is literally tossed like a darting fish on the dark sea. Here for a moment the whole ballet seems to be crystallised, it is like one of those lines in Shakespeare heavy with a dark. obscure significance that for a flash illuminates the whole play.
To accompany this ballet one needs the songs the sirens sang, the enigmatic roar of a conch- shell and the whistle of the wind. In short, one needs Benjamin Britten. Unfortunately, one has Hans Werner Henze, and his eclectic score clings on to the choreography as if it were a lifebuoy, but every time I hear the music I feel certain that it is just about to sink for the third and last time, pulling the whole ballet down with it. So far. though, it is still floating.
Ondine is perhaps the most coveted, and cer- tainly the most rewarding ballerina role in British ballet. It has been danced only by Margot Fon- teyn and Svetlana Beriosova, and this season both ballerinas have provided their particular variations on Ashton's theme. Fonteyn's original interpretation is a thing of mystery, an elemental creature with moral longings. When this Ondine comes on land, quick as a minnow, she walks Miranda-like into a new world, where she is both enchantress and enchanted, unaware of destiny. Beriosova is at heart the sea-goddess, grave and womanly, poignantly aware that blood is thicker than water. But nymph or deity, both Fonteyn and Beriosova ride the crest of the choreography with triumph and eloquence.
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