ARTS & AMUSEMENTS
Songs Without Words
By CLIVE BARNES
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Novel reviewers seldom worry about novels, drama critics appear pretty content about drama as such, even music critics rarely seems to go back to first principles. Is it insecurity that makes ballet critics so apt to fly tangentially at the horns of that bull-like dilemma—the basic nature of ballet? Insecurity, yes; yet more a genuine hope for advance. Of all the practising arts, ballet is the one that can really do with practice, the one that is fulfilling only a small part of its glorious potential. In one sense ballet is a branch of, dramatic literature. Our reactions to ballet, even plotless ballets, are to a large extent literary, even when such interpretations are purposefully avoided by choreographers. We watch choreo- graphy, filter it through our poor, literal minds, and the flame-like abstractions of poetry gutter down to our own labels of identification. Probably we are right. So every ballet, like every picture, tells a story. But the story ballets tell!
The most trite, the most stupid and the most trivial of stories can be 'transmuted by ballet. In one of the best books written about the dance, Paul Valery's Socratic dialogue Dance and the Soul, Valdry writes of the dancer: 'Elle traverse impunement l'absurde.' It is precisely this ability to ride roughshod over absurdity or indeed anything else, that makes dancing an awkward partner for literature. In the last couple of weeks or so I have seen here and there a number of ballets based on literature: Flemming Flindt's The Private Lesson (Ionesco) in Copenhagen and Cologne, John Cranko's Onegin (Pushkin) in Stuttgart, and Balanchine's Don Quixote (Cervantes) in New York.
The simplest and, as dramaturgy, the most suc- cessful, is Flindt's The Private Lesson. Flindt has taken lonesco's one-act La Lecon, made a few minimal changei to the story—the old mad pro- fessor who knifes his pupils becomes a dancing- master with a penchant for strangling—and found a perfect ballet plot, offering every excuse for dancing, and suffusing the whole with macabre atmosphere.
Flindt's ballet in fact works better than the play, for the deliberate facetiousness of Ionesco's dialogue (that crucial chatter about arithmetic and philology, the girl's insistence on her toothache) tends to outweigh the play's darker elements, making it seem too slickly outrageous. Flindt naturally omits the arithmetic and philology, and his ballet, helped by the blandly unobstrusive score of Georges Delerue, builds up to insanity with the ever-increasing intensity of its choreography which starts as classical and becomes more contorted as the ballet pro- ceeds.
As a choreographer John Cranko is, as yet, in a different class from Flemming Flindt, but the task he undertook for his remarkable Stuttgart company (which, incidentally, is nowa- days widely referred to as 'Germany's Ballet Miracle,' and has in four years become a major international troupe), of matching Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, proved in the final assessment not so much too much for ( ranko, as too much for ballet.
The ballet, at first sight, is an interesting failure. Fighting • understandably shy of using Tchaikovsky's opera music, Cranko with the assistance of Kurt-Heinz Stolze has taken a selection of lesser-known Tchaikovsky. With some of the music there is frankly no cause to wonder just why it is lesser-known, and through- out the result is a musical mish-mash. But the real difficulty is the story itself. Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is the prototype figure of a man un- able to adjust himself to society, who finally, and tragically too late, is regenerated by the recognition .of his love for the by then un- obtainable Tatiana. Here is one of the great characters of literature. Cranko, trying to pour Onegin into the ballet mould, has had to over- simplify the character, so that we are left with a sulky; priggish and even murderous boor.
Most of Cranko's choreography is created in a style that is very personal, even while markedly influenced by Balanchine and the Bolshoi, and some of it, especially in his pas de deux, has a lyric grandeur that can make the heart jump. But this remains a ballet for five people—Onegin, Tatiana, her sister Olga, Olga'S lover Lensky, and Gremin, whom Tatiana marries. In this close-knit structure the corps de ballet become an intrusion, and all too often Cranko puts a halt to the dramatic action to throw in a dance divertissement. In a ballet like The Sleeping Beauty such waywardness is even to be en- couraged, but in a coherent dcamatic structure it vitiates the plot. After all the credits and debits have been credited and debited, the impression remains that Cranko has failed to surpass or, more to the point, match the Tchaikovsky opera. And why, particularly in an opera house, do something indifferently that has, in a related medium, already been done supremely well? Yet it remains a strong attempt, and one which at least brought the European ballet world to Stuttgart's doorstep.
What can one do in ballet with a great literary figure? Perhaps Balanchine gives the answer in Don Quixote. In New York ballet circles at present this is a highly controversial subject. bisecting them, typically perhaps, into two camps. Apparently the first night was something of a disaster, with no one knowing what to expect. and most being aghast at what they were given. Certainly in ballet the name Don Quixote sug- gests that fluffy (and praiseworthy) Petipa ballet, all flounce and tutu, in which Don Quixote him- self is a minor character, the Minkus music blows tum-ti-tum, and the lights have not gone out all over St. Petersburg.
Balanchine's choice of score, commissioned from Nicholas Nabokov, is disconcerting. It is so. eclectic that on first hearing it sounds over- familiar. But Balanchine's treatment of Cervantes is even more sensational, and a great deal more successful. Cervantes's knight-errant is a vision- ary dreaming of pageantry, courtly love and Romance heroism. Superficially this is still per- haps true of Balanchine's ballet, but at heart Balanchine's hero is a variation on that typical nineteenth-century ballet hero, the man search- ing for the ideal woman. Here the story takes on an autumnal poetry since the man is on the brink of death, and indeed the final scene of the ballet (when Quixote dies and the girl places on his
body two sticks of wood in the shape of a cross) is, by some theatrical alchemy, almost unbear- ably moving.
So perhaps we have some hint of a lesson for ballet-makers. Flindt by shaping his lonesco into valid balletic terms succeeded, while Cranko, for all his greater choreographic skill, followed Pushkin, or Tchaikovsky, too care- fully and failed to illuminate his theme. Yet it is with Balanchine, who takes a literary symbol- Cervantes's solitary man of honour—and uses it in a way that is appropriate to ballet and mean- ingful in contemporary terms, that we really see how literature can be adapted into a balletic form. It is not enough to copy, one must trans- mute and add. And as we live in an age of adoption, that can apply to more things than ballet.
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