Ballet
Stravinsky's Round
By A. V. COTON WITH every fresh season it be- comes more obvious that most new ballets are being made for d specialised audience. This in itself is not necessarily harmful. Other arts have gone through phases when experimental works were being made for a special market of gilt-edged con- sumers—perfectly admissible when the consumers were footing the bills. In the past the blue-chip boys were the ones who made ballet possible. Medicis, Bourbons, Dukes of Wurtemberg, Romanoffs—all took pleasure in subsidising ex- travagant choreographers and composers. Ballet acquired its global reputation at a time when rich backers were being obliterated by taxation or social change. And so today, ballet is either a State-supported mechanism (for prestige pur- poses) or an impresario's gamble (for bread-and- butter purposes). Both kinds, in most of the West, have come to depend heavily on the support not of a general theatre-going public but of a ballet- minded audience. Perhaps this is an inevitable phase in the history of an art which has always been a minor one. By, its nature ballet can never acquire the universal appeal of spoken drama, opera or orchestral music. Too much of appre- ciation has to be carefully cultivated on an ex- tensive technical understanding.
The danger is that too many of the creators, managers and impresarios can come to find their field of vision entirely blinkered by the orthodox ballet. They can no longer even see that there can be contemporary ideas and feelings such as leaven style and thinking in the other arts. While ballet still has the hope of being seen by a non- specialist audience, it should express points of view comprehensible to those who are not ballet- minded.
Just what is meant by Agon it is difficult to determine. The new Stravinsky ballet, with choreography by Kenneth Macmillan, was pre- sented last week at Covent Garden. The astringent but not acidulated score is a heayy challenge. Just discernibly it is related to the rhythmic forms of the medieval and Renaissance dances which give its sections their identifications. It demands a dance invention, whether subtle or boldly simple in texture, which compares either mathematically or tonally with the inventiveness of the music.
Instead, the dancers are dressed with a vexing complexity which gives away nothing of any im- plied symbolism. Chinese and mediaeval Italian- style headgear, peasant blouses, debs' ball dresses merge and blend into the background too often where they should accent the dance figures by contrasting with it. The set is dominated by a skeleton house, a gated garden wall and nine cut- outs which might vaguely represent nine stylised watching figures. But watching what?
The dancing—a basic classicism chopped into small, easily digested fragments and seasoned with a gritty jazz-like occasional syncopation—is, by turns, ingenious, ingenuous, exotic and (microscopically) erotic. Agon is too filled with echoes of earlier Macmillan ballets to be accept- able as some sort of comment on behaviour. Its oi,erlay of unexplained gesturing, embracing and classical-style ensembles put it out of considera- tion as a completely abstract ballet. It is not, for a change, actually painful or irritating to watch. Macmillan is always an interesting craftsman, even when he cuts out the same piece of fretwork over and over again. But the design of this par- ticular piece of fretwork is curlicue rather than bold baroque or rich rococo. Agon is a contest in which the composer-challenger Stravinsky wins in the first round with a straight knock-out. Perhaps here in Europe we just don't have the choreographers who can still stand up to Stravinsky as they could once upon a time?
Previous page
