Folksy
THERE is one trade gap which no government, Conservative, Labour or Liberal will close: the
0 balance of payments in ' the matter of theatricalised folk-dance, where our imports will, in the ab- sence of a home product, always outweigh our non- existent exports. Which party will offer to send Moscow a troupe of morris dancers or horn dancers from Abbots Bromley? We are being left behind. .Practically every emergent African State is forming an emergent folk-dance troupe, while in Europe to be without one will soon be like being without a football team. But I still cannot see it becoming an election issue.
When we see the National Folk Ensemble of Ruritania with skirts flying, zithers zinging and smiles outstretched in a gesture of friend- ship, we would do well to remember the Moiseyev Dancers in general, and its founder Igor Moiseyev in particular. For the folk dance troupe was Moiseyev's invention--at times, I suspect he even invented folk dance itself. Cer- tainly if the chef is as important to the omelette as the hen, Moiseyev's contribution can be hardly less than all the atavistic traditions handed down by the folk.
It was in 1937 that Moiseyev had his great idea. Asked to arrange a folk-dance.festival, he went on to form a troupe. Here was the first professional folk-dance ensemble, given full ballet training (Moiseyev himself was a ballet- master of the Bolshoi) and using proper choreo- graphy. The results were probably about as ethnically accurate as Massine's impression of Spanish dance in The Three-Cornered Hal. But frankly, who cares? The formula has now been repeated nearly everywhere. But never with quite Moiseyev's flair, or his dancers' virtuosity and skill.
Now at the Albert Hall, the Moiseyev Ensemble are paying their second visit to Britain, the first being nine years ago at the Empress Hall. The programme has not changed so enormously. The most effective numbers are still The Partisans and the Gopak. The Partisans opens and closes with an illusion of the dancers, in the guise of horsemen, gliding along as if they were on wheels. This glide, that recalls the Soviet Beryozka troupe which bases its entire style upon it, gives way to a passage of exuber- ant virtuosity as the partisans, now dismounted, attack their objective.
The' strength of The Partisans and the Gopak is partly the way they are danced—the high, wide and handsome leaps, the fast spins, the inso- lently brilliant variations of those down-on- haunches `cobblers" steps—but also, in part, the way they are choreographed. The Moiseyev Dancers enjoy two advantages over their inter- national rivals. One is the choreography of Moiseyev, which is more sophisticated and daring than most folklorist choreography, and the other is its single-minded concentration on the dance. With Moiseyev there are no brightly dressed ranks of apple-cheeked maidens singing lustily of village wooings, no drunken drinking songs, or tunes played on penny whistles and glass tumblers. This is an incalculable relief, And the dancers are so good that often I found myself irrationally wanting to see them in real ballets. How marvellous they would be in Fokine's
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