Ballet
Astronomer Royal
By CLIVE BARNES MR. ANION DOLIN is present- Mg an entertainment called 'International Stars of the Ballet.' It appeared last week at the Golders Green Hippo- drome which, as every student of the Concise Oxford Dic- tionary will know, was built as a course for antique chariot races. It could hardly ever have been put to better use.
Although, so far as the box office is con- cerned, Dolin's star-gazing seems to have been somewhat optimistic, the nine dancers he gathered together, himself making a tenth, are nearly all very considerable names in the microcosm of ballet. As the souvenir programme Was not backward in pointing out, their agreeing to appear together is doubtless 'a tribute to the genius of the Artistic Director.' But however big these fish may be in ballet's tiny pond, and one or two were whoppers. it remains to • be proved that dancers alone, without the advan- tage of proper ballets or the backing of a well- known company, can by themselves provide in England sufficient attraction to make such a ven- ture commercially profitable. For this is simply a dance recital of assorted solos and pas de deux, some of them obviously interesting to the specialist dance public, but with little to entice a wider audience.
As it is not my money behind the show, this Is perhaps not my business; but some of the appalling things that happened at Golders Green certainly are—for I must maintain, for example, that the sight of a half-naked man dressed in leather, prancing and grovelling around the stage to the tune of the Allegretto from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, is an offensive insult to ballet and Beethoven alike. Some of the other choreographic monstrosities in the first Programme included a pas de deux from Delibes's Sy/via, a tawdry dance duet by Lifar purporting to represent Lisa and Hermann in Pique Dame, and a one-man one-swan pas de deux immedi- ately followed by a one-man one-deer pas de deux, both of which appeared to deal with the, I believe, uncommon sin of bestiality.
In all conscience no evening could be com- pletely wasted that showed the Danish dancer Erik Bruhn, coldly exultant in the Don Quixote Pas de deux; and Nina Vyroubova charmed in the evening's most considerable offering, Dolin's own version of The Pas de Quatre. More than one of these 'international stars' had apparently reached a point where their continued appear- ances must be unkind to their past reputations (including one gallant old girl of fifty who was making her London debut!), but Sonia Arova pleased, as did Claire Sombert whenever the choreographic dice were not loaded heavily against her. The second programme was better than the first. Bruhn and Vyroubova again came off well, while Sombert and her partner Youly Algaroff actually had the chance to appear in a complete (though brief and admittedly bad) ballet, L'Emprise, a melodrama about a fugitive and a mad girl by Dirk Sanders.
If this kind of venture is to prosper in England —and the opportunity it offers to see rare foreign ballet stars is not one to be sniffed at—I feel it will have to establish itself with more entertaining programmes than were vouchsafed at Golders Green. It must also stop savaging dead composers who cannot fight back, and give up using choreography which suffers from the old French disease of imagining that the ex- pressive dance need be nothing more than an arbitrary selection of the more spectacular classroom steps.
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