THE BALLET More Polish Than Polish
A POLISH ballet is Covent Garden's contribution to Christmas entertainment. The company have come here with the honours
of the Paris Exhibition thick upon them ; so they ought to be at least as good as the Sadler's Wells Ballet, which was not awarded a similar prize. They have, too, as their artistic director and choreographer, Mme. Nijinska, whose ballets have in the past always shown an individual invention, usually in the direction of smartness and ingenuity, but also, in Danses Slaves et Tziganes and " The Three Ivans " in Aurora's Wedding, a robust vigour in the folk-dance style. Poland has also in the past supplied the Russian Ballet with some of its outstanding dancers. There was Nijinsky and his sister, and, among others, Leon Woizikovsky.
So to Covent Garden in the highest hopes of great things. And if The Legend of Cracow is not great, it is something fresh, vigorous and colourful. The artists who have provided the decor for these ballets have an eye for colours that are at once soft and rich. The skirts of the merchants' wives of Cracow are lovely in colour and moved well in the dance, and the back- cloth is an admirable piece of work in the manner of Benois and Roerich, but more gentle in tone. The dressing of the devils in the second scene—for this is the tale of a Polish Faust wh% goes to Hell but is redeemed by prayer—is less successful. But here Mine. Nijinska's choreography shows a feeling for large design and a real invention in the handling of a mass of dancers.
The Song of the Soil might be described as a presentation of the raw material of Stravinsky's Les Noces with the composer, Ramon Palester, undecided between folk-dance and sophistica- tion.. The result is a half-baked score, full of old Stravinskian wise-cracks, but with some vigorous rhythms which the dancers put to good use. Again, the costumes are delightful in colour and design. The interest of the action rests here upon Polish folk-customs, and the result is quaint and charming, even if it does not amount to very much. It is a little difficult to recap- ture one's first excitement at the spectacle of dancers in what we have learnt to call Russian boots squatting on their haunches and shooting out one leg after the other or leaping in the air and flinging their legs out sideways. But, at least, this ballet has an agreeable vitality.
It is when these dancers abandon their boots for ballet- shoes and the women essay movement on points, that the limitations 'of the company, never very precise in the folk- dances which are apt to be rough-and-tumble, are painfully apparent. Mme. Nijinska, dazzled by Massine's success (in balletomaniac opinion) with the Symphonies of Brahms, Berlioz and Tchaikovsky and undeterred by the failure of Fokine with Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, has had the unfor- tunate idea of balletifying Chopin's Concerto in E minor.
Whatever the merits of this work as music, it is certainly not very danceable. Without change of scene, costumes or lighting and with a company of dancers who seemed, most of them, to find even more difficulty in getting off their points than in getting on to them, the ballet proved incredibly boring, and one's only resource was to stop watching and listen to M. Turel's admirable performance on the pianoforte. This is the reductio ad absurdum of the symphonic ballet, and, if the excuse is made that the lack of variety in the choreography is due to the limitations of the dancers' technique, the answer is that, in the circumstances, the thing should never have been attempted. Of the principals only Mlle. Slawska showed any real command of the classical style and managed to put something like bravura into her movements. In hopes of better things I went on Monday evening to see Recall, a ballet with a patriotic theme, set in the eighteenth century and danced partly on points, partly in boots. Unfortunately the music was poor and the choreo- graphy aimless. Even the decor Was disappointing.
In The Legend of Cracow Mlle. Glinka proved that she has a definite stage personality, which reminded one of the gay vigour and charm of Mme. Sokolova, and, at any rate, sufficient technique for the folk-style. Her male partner was vigorous in a rather crude way, and his idea of mime consisted, for the most part, in obliging the audience with a beaming smile— though he said his prayers at the end well enough. In sum, what these dancers need, before they can meet their English and Russian rivals on their own ground, is more polish and a
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