Dance
The Royal Ballet (Covent Garden)
Up angst hill
Deirdre McMahon
In the retrospective of Kenneth MacMil- lan's work which has been been staged by the Royal Ballet over the past eight months, we have seen three of his so-called 'liturgical' ballets: Requiem, Gloria and now Song of the Earth, which was in many ways the precursor of the whole genre. Song of the Earth came immediately after Romeo and Juliet in 1965 but it was staged for the Stuttgart Ballet, not the Royal, because objections were raised to MacMil- lan's choice of Mahler's score. After its success in Stuttgart. it was taken into the Royal Ballet's repertory the following year. Exactly the same thing happened to Requiem ten years later: MacMillan's choice of the Faure Requiem was rejected, he staged it for Stuttgart and following its success the Royal subsequently took it into its repertory.
Gloria and Song of the Earth have recently been revived at Covent Garden after a few years' absence. Of the two, Song of the Earth holds up better than Gloria. It has more energy and it doesn't wallow in its own religiosity in the way that Requiem and Gloria do. It also had the benefit of an incisive debut by Bruce Sansom as the Messenger of Death. Still, what can MacMillan's choreography add to this music? He uses Mahler like aural 'Bad news, I'm afraid, Dr Ferguson. These listeria have got BSE.' wallpaper and for most of the time Mahler obligingly supports him until the last som- bre section, 'Der Abschied', where the dancers wander aimlessly around the stage, waiting for Godot.
The success of MacMillan's liturgical ballets has been due to luck and wily exploitation. Song of the Earth came just before Death in Venice started the popular Mahler boom. Mahler ballets proliferated thereafter. The American critic Arlene Croce once memorably summed up the Mahler ballet: 'Someone sings lugubriously from the side of the stage while dancers toil up angst hill and down weltschmerz dale for hours on end'. After Mahler MacMillan used more overtly religious music, the Faure Requiem in 1976 and the Poulenc Gloria in 1980. The latter capitalised on the enormous success of the BBC's drama- tisation of Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth. MacMillan's setting of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Requiem, which has not been seen in England, was inspired by the film The Killing Fields. The essential vacuousness of such works, which owe more to the latest arts reviews than to actual historical events, would be reason enough to reject the music as unsuitable for dancing, but where MacMillan led, other less gifted choreographers followed: Jiri Kylian's Glagolitic Mass and Sym- phony of Psalms, Glen Tetley's Dances of Albion to Britten's Serenade for tenor, horn and strings and the Sinfonia da Requiem, and last but by no means least, John Neumeier, who to date has choreog- raphed four of Mahler's symphonies and Bach's St Matthew Passion.
The liturgical ballet has had its day, for the moment at least. Musically, it was a perfect cop-out for giftless choreographers who could impose their own ponderous meanings and yet appear important. Ashley Page is poles apart from these, and the contrast was all too obvious when his ballet Pursuit was sandwiched between Gloria and Bintley's Galanteries. In Pursuit Page explores contemporary classicism, building on works like Ashton's Scenes de Ballet, but also responding with sophistica- tion to Colin Matthews's score, one of the most interesting in the ballet repertory In recent years. Bintley, on the other hand, churns out Mozart like a sausage machine. The question of music and dance comes to mind because this month is the 150th anniversary of Tchaikovsky's birth. This year is also the centenary of the first performance of The Sleeping Beauty, .3 ballet which played a pre-eminent role In British classical dance and especially in the history of the Royal Ballet, yet no per- formances have been scheduled this season (we have Swan Lake until it is coming out of our ears). It was one of Margot Fon- teyn's most lustrous roles, yet the Fontert_ gala tribute next week is a performance of MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet, not The Sleeping Beauty or even an Ashton prog- ramme.
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