• ARTS • LETTERS • MONEY. LEISURE BALLET
Birthday remembrances
ROBIN YOUNG
Twenty-first birthdays still excuse senti- ment and self-indulgence. Accordingly the London Festival Ballet, celebrating the attainment of their (albeit outdated) majority at the Coliseum, have gone over- board for what they like—and do—best, the re-creation of past successes. Of three new productions for their current season, two (Massine's Le Beau Danube and Beriosoff's Petrouchka) are faithful copies of their first season's hits. The third is a Giselle (staple diet of all our ballet com- panies at the moment), which gets probably as close as anyone would wish to get to what Giselle looked like when first pre- sented in 1841.
That there are celebrations at all is, as they say, due entirely to the personal. and ever-effective, intervention of the ubiqui- tous Lord Goodman—wearing, of course. not his everyday solicitor's hat but his full • rig as chairman of the Arts Council. It was in 1965 that Goodman bounded to the rescue—after an ambitious and disastrous Swan Lake had toppled the company's precarious finances which had been thus far sustained by an ingenious and enterprising impresario. Dr Julian 13raunsweg. Any ballet company nowadays can use friends—and Festival has some in strategic places. It was, no doubt, Mrs Vere Harms- worth's presence as joint chairman of the Twenty-first Birthday Gala Committee Which inspired the Daily Mail to describe the gala—while giving full details of the programme and where to get tickets—as the ballet occasion of the year. (Poor Dickybuckle of the Sunday Times, Andy Warhol's close friend, had thought that he was organising that, to save a Titian this coming June). The Mail men, not concen- trating on the job as they ought, called the company the Royal Festival Ballet: an ambiguity which necessitated that the puff be re-run next day. Apart from such chance assistance, the company this year will be getting £250,000 from the CIA' and the Arts Council, and there is a further £26,250 in guarantees Which they may (and presumably will) col- lect. For the money we get a ballet com- PTV stuck firmly in the traditions of Diaghilev and the Ballets-Russes, with a repertoire built around nineteenth-century .classics' and the most popular Diaghilev items. Like Ballets-Russes, Festival has be- come so cosmopolitan it would give an enumerator a headache. Its principals are a,Russian from Canada, a Parisian of Rus- sian parentage, a Hungarian, an Ameri- can, a Monegasque, a Dane, an Egyptian- born.Frenchman, a South African, and an English (1 think her census form will con- firm) recruit from the Royal Ballet. There are another seven nationalities in the rest of the company. And they tour. After Wolverhampton, 1.:oventry etc, they go through France. ItalY. Greece and Cyprus. But the Git,c's return on investment is that they. are in London for at least a quarter of the year.
The Festival Ballet was founded by Dolin and Markova. It now has Beryl Grey as artistic director. It is a dancers' com- pany, the premise of whose policies seems to be that people who go to see ballet want to see dancing.
Nothing queer about that. Many people enjoy watching dancing, as the continuing popularity of Come Dancing, which is dancing at its most restricted and preten- tious, proves. Those fortunate enough to have seen John Cleese's `Ministry of Silly Walks' in Monty Python's Flying Circus will know that mere movement can have you in hysterics. Ballet is more easily en- joyable, in fact, than the cultists like us to assume. There is much that is balletic, after all, about a football match, a.circus, or a night club revue. (I was gratifyingly re- minded of this last in Paris at Easter, when I saw Claude Bessy of the Ballet de l'Opera dancing on a table-top to Ravel's Bolero— a go-go dancer in the Theatre des Champs Elysees.) Now Those who insist upon the finer points will object that there is more to bal- let than dancing—and they will certainly • miss much from Festival's productions. Drama, for instance. Giselle is one of the few ballets with any claim to dramatic force—but not everyone is capable of get- ting very worked up about the story of a • skittish village girl who goes out of her mind when a Count crosses her in love.
For many, then, it will not matter that Festival's production (by Mary Skeaping, a former ballet mistress at Covent Garden and director of the Royal Swedish Ballet, and an acknowledged expert) is dramatic- ally incoherent. Did Giselle stab herself with a sword or die of a broken heart? Did Hilarion die at all when he was un- ceremoniously booted to the back of the wings? And at the end, when Albrecht is left alone in the dawn, have we seen a miraculous escape and his final farewell to Giselle? Or is he likely to come back the following night and meet her and the Wills again, for another (exhausting) dance? In this presentation I could not tell. — Even so, I joined the audience in ap- plauding. For one thing, the dancing is much improved. Two people fell on open- ing night but, much more important. no one danced as if expecting to fall. Time was when all the girls seemed terrified that their efforts might fall flat—literally: and when all the men seemed inhibited by the consciousness that the higher they leapt the harder they would come down. Now, though patchy, the dancing is never less than pleasing.
And a second reason for applause. Miss Skeaping's forte is restoring to Giselle pieces that other people have cut out. /V: a result this Giselle runs longer than any other around. Even so it is not alone on the bill. It makes the Royal Ballet, at their prices, look very mingy indeed.
The supporting bill I saw was Le Beau Danube, restaged now by its creator, Leonide Massine, Diaghilev's chosen suc- cessor to Nijinsky. The triteness of ballet's contrived drama is well illustrated here- in which a father one moment angrily re- fuses his daughter's hand in marriage, and the very next graciously accedes at the pleading of her infant sister. You cannot let that sort of thing matter much. More im- portant. Le Beau Danube is a continuous swirl of movement to music by Strauss, and it was kept going pretty well. Like most of the audience. I did not have my enjoyment overshadowed by memories of greater dancers of the past. And so what if the Hussar was unmartial, and did not click his heels in all the right places? What do you expect from a Hussar who has his boots made in suede?
Like the rest of the repertoire they join. these productions will please many, and make their strongest appeal to children. Of all ages, of course.
Meanwhile at the Sadler's Wells Theatre. the Burmese National Dancers perform another week. They are Burma's equiva- lent to the Royal Ballet, and usually appear in open-air theatres and jungle clearings. It is the first time they have been outside Burma, a curiously isolationist and closed country. There are said to be thousands of aspects to their dancing. I do not pretend you would know it watching them—but there are bright and fanciful costumes. huge and unfamiliar musical instruments, and some pleasurably simple numbers. It should go down big with people who like travelogues.
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