Dutch dans
BALLET CLEMENT CRISP
In matters of ballet the faults of the Dutch are non-existent, if this week's visit by the Neder- lands Dans Theater to Sadler's Wells is any- thing to go by. The NOT is just eight years old, entirely modern and forward-looking. Not that modernity is everything with a ballet com- pany—we have seen far too many 'modern' troupes that had a rootless, hectic air engen- dered by a desire to reject that past and seize to- morrow before it comes. But the NOT is seriously and soberly concerned with modern ballet; it is probably one of the advantages of forming a company in a country with little indigenous dance tradition that all those dear, dreary routines of the ballet blanc are avoided—no peasant roguishness, no swans.
The NOT refuses resolutely to look back, and its gaze if anything is turned towards America; one of its founders, Benjamin Harkavy, is American, and his ballets, together with works by several distinguished American Modern Dance creators—John Butler, Glen Tetley, Anna Sokolow, and Job Sanders, a principal with the company—form an important part of the repertory. The production schedule would make any other—any other—company gasp: a dozen new ballets are mounted each year and it is obvious from the first programme at Sadler's Wells, which included three works staged during the past fourteen months, that quality as well as quantity is maintained.
This first programme also demonstrates an essential feature of the company's policy: the dancers are as much at home in Modern Dance works as in the classical vocabulary, have in fact closed the gap far more effectively than any other troupe in my experience. The dancers move effortlessly from one style to another, and the company's creative ideal links them with none of the sore-thumb inconsistencies that so often mark endeavours in this vein. It is, in effect, the sort of company that we must hope the new Rambert will grow into: alert, enterprising, highly creative.
The breadth of the NUT'S dance range is best seen in the major piece of the first programme, John Butler's Carmina Baratta, a strongly shaped realisation of Orff's profane cantata in which the primitivism of the music is matched in a direct and purposely unelaborate dance manner. It is a bold achievement, and stresses the company's preference for dance rather than drama—but dance seen 8$ a means of study- ing and displaying the emotional richness of human movement.
This view is exemplified by the Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen in two of his ballets on show. His choreographic language is smooth, but he suddenly inserts moments to shock us out of leisurely enjoyment—in Meta- phors the jolt comes when he has two men dance an adagio together, calmly lifting and partnering each other, and we are suddenly forced into a realisation that, surprising as the passage may seem, there is no reason why it should not be so—indeed, the stylishness of the invention rather suggests there is every reason why it should. In the extended duet, Five Sketches, for Alexandra Radius and Hans Ebbelaar, van Manen again shows us dancers elegantly involved in pleasing choreography until towards the end Miss Radius suddenly leaves the stage; Mr Ebbelaar relaxes for a moment, whereupon Miss Radius returns and the action continues as before. But we have been jerked out of one reality into another, the ballet has been given a hard core of implication: are these Adam and Eve, and that brief exit The. Fall? Nothing has been stated, but the work has set up a sharp questioning.
The light relief in the programme comes with Job Sanders's Impressions, a series of jokes owing titular allegiance to Paul Klee (via Gunther Schuller's Seven Studies). In effect it is the opening and closing sections, which avoid jokiness, that seem most effective as dancing and as commentaries upon Klee's magical world; elsewhere fantasy has been given too, too solid flesh, though the St Vitus antics in 'The Twittering Machine' are vastly funny and there is also a splendidly macabre caprice involving mourners and a dead-but- she-won't-lie-down corpse.
Here, as throughout the evening, the dancing is excellent—the NOT boasts some exciting artists, notably the lyrical Miss Radius, and a fine ensemble. Despite its youth this is a com- pany that has much to teach us, and in this in- stance we don't even have to go into Europe to learn our lesson.
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