Ballet
The Ram bert
Michael Church
Outside Sadler's Wells last Friday evening I noticed a familiar tiny figure holding a single tea rose and looking up with unalloyed delight at the friends who surrounded her. Inside the theatre, a few minutes later, the curtain rose on an adolescent girl in turn-ofthe-century clothes standing in a picture frame through which one saw a hint of gracious, pre-Revolutionary Russia. Demurely, deliberately, she put down her wide straw hat, laid aside her satchel, turned a cartWheel and began to dance. More girls came on, with more long-skirted cartwheels and arabesques: technical relaxation and emotional exuberance. Girl With Straw Hat, Christopher Bruce's tribute to Marie Rambert ('whose passion for dance has been my inspiration') is a piece of affectionate nostalgia which perfectly complements its sepia designs by Nadine Baylis and its ardent, tender score by Brahms.. So now, as virtually anyone who turns on his television set or opens his quality newsPaper must be aware, Ballet Rambert is fifty years old, and Dame Marie herself an incredibly sprightly eighty-eight. It would be superfluous here to give yet another potted history of the growth and development of her company, but since they themselves, like the Jews, are constantly trying to incorporate their own history, a few central Points should perhaps be borne in mind. Started on a shoestring, and having remained so ever since, the company gave birth to more or less the entire first generation of British choreographers—Frederick Ashton, Andree Howard, Anthony Tudor, Walter Gore. Its life has often been a tale of sudden success and phoenix-like resurgence from disaster—most notably when many of the dancers decided, at the end of a long Australian tour, to settle down under, more recently when Norman Morrice was given icence to transform a tatty classical enter
prise into a gleaming new contemporary one, and even more recently when the company, in financial straits, carried out some traumatic self-pruning and reduced its numbers to a viable level.
The American choreographer Glen Tetley has been perhaps the strongest external influence on Rambert in their current incarnation: they were due to perform his haunting Pierrot Lunaire the day this article went to press. I wish I could report that his new work in the repertoire was a comparable success, but Moveable Garden really is the kind of modern dance you can buy by the yard, good only for looking at while thinking of something else (or, in this case, listening to something else. Lukas Foss's Geod is an extraordinary muted mishmash of folk tunes and sound effects which seems to suggest that sounds are never lost but all still exist somewhere in the outer atmosphere). As the dancers wander in through Nadine Baylis's shining metal poles, aliens in a defleshed Manhattan, one can almost see them as students in a movement class at a teacher training college, obeying the instruction 'now imagine you're exploring a strange forest ...' The choreography, which is accomplished in its abstract way, tends constantly to dehumanise the dancers, so that, from afar, each becomes a pliant, graceful curve with even more pliant, graceful tips; while seen through binoculars each wears that Marble glance reminiscent of Edwardian pornography of the 'Fine Art' variety, where any kind of nudity was respectable provided the face preserved its unblinking dignity. Like one or two other works I have seen, this closes with a figure perched on one leg while the arms and the other leg wave quest ingly.
If the best that can be said of Moveable Garden is that it was well danced, no such qualification is needed for this same choreographer's perfect duet Ricercare, which is now being danced by the noblest pair I have yet seen attempt it, Lenny Westerdijk and Leigh Warren. This seems to me to be a quintessential Rambert work : intimate, yet with a mythical feel. Mordecai Seter's score is an exquisite, and in this case exquisitely played, quartet ; Rouben Ter-Arutunian's set consists of a simple white structure which is part boat, part unfurled seashell. It takes the form of a series of carefully delineated yet intensely emotional episodes; the choreography is all symmetry and reciprocity. Westerdijk's technical control is phenomenal : the drama is real, yet they seem at a fundamental level to be both of the same androgynous kind.
The other new works presented so far must both, sadly, be accounted failures. If I had to choose, however, I would rather re-see Christopher Bruce's Black Angels ('Departure', `Absence', `Return') than be subjected once more to Norman Morrice's The Sea Whisper'd Me ('Genesis', 'Magic', 'Destruction', 'Death'). The latter seems to concern a gigantic marine paving stone which has been levered up to reveal strange cavortings among the creatures who lurk beneath. If there was any significance in the gimmicky cacophony of encounters and bouts of self-expression, I fear it eluded me. Carlos Miranda's music is usually interesting, but the specially commissioned score to this work was itself either too complex or too cluttered to make sense on a first hearing.
Black Angels is a good deal less bland in its invocation of the great commonplaces. George Crumb's score 'was conceived as a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world .. . [it] portrays a voyage of the soul'. The opening has intense impact, with orange-lit smoke billowing round six dancers whirling about in rags to the musical equivalent of a blast furnace. Zoltan Imre, as the central character, evinces at times a curious, epileptic ecstasy; although the work as a whole has a synthetic, inorganic feel there are interesting echoes of Michelangelo, Grunewald, Ingres and others, and it is pervaded by a piquant mixture of eroticism and suffering. (Incidentally, Schubert's Death and the Maiden quartet surfaces in muted form: this particular musical conception seems to exert an uncanny power over the minds of modern choreographers.) But when new works of this questionable calibre are backed up by mediocre pieces like Wings and tutti-frutti one is forced to wonder anew why Rambert keep the wraps on their ,one immortal, authentic classicL'apres-nridi d'un .faune.
During the second world war, Marie Rambert's company did sterling work with lunchtime and afternoon performances in factories. Now they are in the forefront of the crusade to take dance into schools; some of them can hold large audiences captive, not only with gestures but with words. This too seems to be a central point, not to be forgotten when castigating the company, as one sometimes must, for callow naïveté or crippling 'good taste' in matters purely artistic.
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