More than Meets the Eye BALLET
By CLEMENT CRISP
4rTHE art of dancing is for generous hearts I that love it, and for the gentle spirits that have a heaven-sent inclination for it,' wrote Gulielmo Ebreo, Renaissance dancing-master, and no inclination for dancing could be more heaven-sent than the Kirov's. Yet the reception• offered the company from certain sections of the London audience has been something less than grateful. Criticism seems to centre upon two aspects of the productions: the decors afid the alleged 'coldness' of the interpretations. They don't act as well as the Bolshoi,' I have been told, and what about those sets . . . ?' Some people, it seems, still expect ballet to be a compound of three-ring circus and a game of dumb crambo, with dancers alternately spinning themselves into the ground and mugging like first-year students at a drama school. Well, to hell with that kind of acting and circus tricks, say I, and so—with far more moderation—do the Kirov.
Now that the greater part of their repertory has been seen at Covent Garden, it is per- missible to attempt some assessment of the company. Here is, first and foremost, a troupe of peerless classical dancers. The corps de ballet is superb, corporately and individually; as swans, Wilis, stars, or what you will, the girls possess a uniformity of excellence, with legs that achieve the same height in attitude, with timing and phrasing perfectly in accord, with the smallest steps looking clean, high, sharp, and enchaine- ments executed with a Bluebell precision that is never regimentation. This corps seems a single unit having a single interpretative existence— it is as if the company possessed an extra, protean ballerina. Though the men have less to do in the classical repertory, they look decorous, courtly, elegant, but once set them loose—in Taras Bulba or Leningrad Symphony—and they can all surge and leap with heroic vigour.
Against this backing, place principals of the noblest calibre: Irina Kolpakova seemed a goddess in Cinderella, but how to describe her as Aurora, her speed, her faultless, soaring leaps, the beauty of her feet as they take up a position, her charm of manner, and the intelligence that colours choreography with the most delicate and telling effects? And what of her Chopiniana—what of the whole company in Chopiniana?—which showed us Les Sylphides properly for the first time, danced in the style for which Fokine composed it, softer, but stronger in outline than the usual dainty pos- turings, and without a single false emotional accent. And then there is Makarova, glorious as Odette and Giselle, dancing so lightly, with so delicate a touch on the ground, establishing a dramatic study at the heart of the choreography and music. And Komleva, lovely Aurora and Cinderella, thrilling in Chopiniana because she knows not only how to dance but how to smile. And as for Yury Soloviev, what to say except that he is unchallenged as the classicist of our time, carving out great shapes in the air with the dedication of a man fulfilling some inner vision.
My point, though, in listing even this few from so many is not simply self-indulgence, but to suggest that here is the ultimate basis for the Kirov's productions. Their school trains the best classical dancers, and to make proper use of them ballets must be tailored to this requirement. When the Maryinski became the Kirov, and the old classical ballets were ad- justed to the demands of a directed socialist aesthetic, the old traditions of training, and the proper expression of that training, were not rejected. The classics remained, altered perhaps (though in Leningrad the traditions were far better respected than elsewhere), but still serving as an opportunity for glorious dancing. More important still, they were used as foundations for creativity in the new society. Despite the pre-eminence of Moscow—and hence the Bolshoi —it was the Kirov that continued as the centre of balletic development, launching choreo- graphers like Lavrovsky, Vainonen, Zakharov, mounting such significant works as The Red Poppy, Romeo and Juliet and Laurencia, and providing the great ballerinas. Thus the view we are getting in London of the Kirov is in part a false one: only one modern work, Cinderella, to show how the Petipa tradition has developed (very interestingly, as it turns out), and the short Leningrad Symphony to illustrate the most recent activity among young choreographers. This last is a fascinating piece, guaranteed to drive any- one asking for subtlety of manner screaming into the night; I found it searing, and fiercely theatrical. Igor Belsky has translated the• agony of the Leningrad siege into impure but gripping dance: strutting Germans, soaring young Rus- sians whose heroics are real and impassioned, and their womenfolk who mourn in groups from a Rodin frieze, all are set rampaging over the stage with no restraint whatsoever, but with a sharply communicated sense of anguish. Most significant of all is the fact that it shows dancing as the prime expressive means.
But if there is more to the Kirov repertory than meets the eye, what does meet the eye is the dancing, and that in an uninterrupted view. Of course, some of the designing seems old- fashioned—the Giselle first-act set could have been used for a panto in 1906—but their Sleeping Beauty palace is to be preferred to the Royal Ballet's fancy-schmancy decors, and the quasi-abstract Swan Lake designs are far better suited as background for a lyric tragedy than others nearer home. Even the disastrous Cinder- ella staging is no more alarming to my eye than some of the decorator's misdemeanours we have seen on the Opera House stage. This apart, the Kirov productions aim at an unobtrusive efficiency far more relaxed than our attempts at what we think is Maryinski opulence, and they are to be admired as well-conceived loca- tions for impeccable dancing.
Nothing interrupts or impedes this dancing, which, in any case, needs far more space than the classicism we are used to. All the Kirov dancers devour space greedily; everything is much more `travelled'—with big preparations, broader jumps, larger extensions of limbs, and steps more fully explored in the air. Yet, with these characteristics, the Kirov style is not over-
blown or exaggerated, nor in the slightest degree coarse. The dancers possess the secret of large- scale delicacy, in part through the strength of feet and limbs, partly because Russian backs and arms are more fully and lyrically used than ours. The result is a greater harmony in placing the body, with movement carried right through to the very limits of the extended arms and legs, and the image is immediately richer and more lasting—not slower, but more leisurely. The pulse of the dancing is strong, the outlines clear, and this unhurried assurance is helped further by a fine musicality in placing the dancing on the rhythms of the score.
The Kirov are essentially at home in the classics because they created them and know them by divine right, as we know Shakespeare. Not surprisingly, they treat them with a far greater sense of reality than do the Royal Ballet, whose court functions bear an uneasy air of fantasy and 'playing at Kings and Queens.' The Kirov Sleeping Beauty starts in a real palace, pillared and tremendous, with courtiers personally concerned in the action, and the arrival of the fairies is so smoothly and featly done that it seems the most natural thing in the world. Courtiers dare to stroll through the settings, which immediately come alive as localities; Aurora's suitors are made human by a sudden spat of jealousy between two of them. And with all this, the ballets are produced in lyrical terms very unlike the formal displays of our native stagings. The result is that the dancing expands and has room to breathe, filling the stage area with movement that is strong and inherently rich in emotion.
To impose any external dramatics upon this style would be sacrilegious: the charac- terisation lies within the actual dance phrase, so that Kolpakova's Aurora is by turns radiantly young in Act 1, mysterious in Act 2 and regal in Act 3 because she shapes her dancing to these ends. Makarova's Giselle is a light, bright, delicate girl transformed into a protective wraith in the forest scene, with the dance qualities of the first act purged and made imponderably light to show us the Wili. Solo- viev's Prince in Cinderella has the glamour of glorious physical prowess, while his youth in Leningrad Symphony epitomises the Soviet ideal of a hero with a bolder use of the same steps.
But, if you seek acting in the Western fashion of ballet performance, the Kirov can do this too. Their principal mime, Vsevolod Uchov, is superb. I must admit that when I first saw him as Cinderella's father I quite misunderstood his brow-beaten, broken old man; I thought it dull. After two more performances, I began to see that this was the precise realisation of what the ballet calls for; then came his King in Sleeping Beauty, a portly, ponderous Bourbon down to those fingertips so graciously extended for kissing, and, finally, his tough, burly Cossack chief in Taras Bulba. Each interpretation is com- plete, beautifully worked into the performance, brilliantly judged. With Anatoly Gridin's diaboli- cal Carabosse, and his tense, sympathetic Hilarion, these are acting performances as ad- mirable as the company's dancing ones.
Finally, a brief mention of Festival Ballet, who, forsaking their evening-long exercises in old-time dancing, have come up with two pro- grammes of eminently pleasing short ballets, which they do remarkably well. Best of all, they have acquired Lifar's Suite en Blanc, with a ravishing Lalo score, beautiful costumes by Norman McDowell, and thrilling neo-classic in- ventions by Lifar which are well worth attention.
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