CONTEMPORARY ARTS
BALLET Mardi Gras. At Sadler's Wells.
Tins new ballet, with music by Leonard Salzedo, was given at Sadler's Wells on Tuesday. It is an interesting work—the experiences of a young girl's life and a vision of her death all fore- shadowed in a grotesque carnival-scene on a cathedral piazza. After Petrushka carnival is rather dangerous for ballet-writers, and it was therefore foolhardy to introduce a ballerina, a clown and a modern version of the Moor in the shape of a negro boxer. But these super- ficial resemblances were all. The music was always apt and often striking, though perhaps the composer worked a good idea—the use of the ground bass or persistent rhythmic figure—rather hard. The two human characters—the Girl and the Boy—were played with grace and considerable dramatic skill by two very young dancers, Anne Heaton and Donald Britton. Nadia Nerina's circus dancer was a good blonde bombshell, and John Cranko made a most realistic black boxer. (His fight with the Boy was excellent.) Some of the best dancing was by Joan Harris, Pamela Chrimes and Pauline Wadsworth, the Three Dancers in Blue, though their significance eluded me. The music for this scene contained one of the most successful ground patterns and sounded extremely well. The weak- ness of the work seemed to me to be in the choreography by Andthe Howard and Hugh Stevenson's clothes, both over-elaborate and emphasising the grotesque quite disproportionately. But the three undertakers were brilliant, straight from the most epileptic pages of M. C.
Dostoevsky.
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