STAGE AND SCREEN
THE BALLET
First Finale
THE first part of the Ballet's season at Covent Garden ends tomorrow night, after which there will be a pause for buckets and spades until the beginning of September. In the meantime Colonel de Basil's Company has begun to display once more and to a more serious degree signs of that fissiparousness to which the Ballet seems peculiarly liable. The departure of a leading choreographer, with or without other dancers and with or without his own ballets, is bound to affect the future of a company. It is all the more regrettable that the split should occur just when the company has regained and indeed improved upon its former high standard of accomplishment.
In the long run, however, these periodical disintegrations do more good than harm. For they serve, by facing the dancers with difficulties that have to be overcome if their art is to survive, to shake them out of the complacency that comes from lack of competition and an easy success with the public.
Last year Colonel de Basil's company gave an exhibition of the evil results of routine upon dancers whose audience is ready to applaud anything and everything they do. It is greatly to their credit that this year, whether in response to the prickings of their own consciences or to the adverse criticisms of a minority in the Press, they have been so obviously determined to put their best feet foremost. They may lack among their numbers the best dancers for this or that part, and they do, most of them, lack that definite personality which differentiates a great artist from an accomplished dancer and stamps everything he or she does with the mark of an unforgettable individuality. But they have this year given us the very best that is in them.
The most welcome feature of the season has been the careful revival of M. Fokine's ballets under their creator's supervision. Neither of the actual revivals—the charming but slender Papillons and Cleopatra, which was originally devised to provide a sensational miming part for Mme. Ida Rubinstein—proved of any great moment. But it was good to see Les Sylphides danced at the right, leisurely pace once more, without which it loses its dreamlike quality and sinks to the level of an ordinary classical divertissement. But one thing puzzled me. Why has M. Fokine omitted the final leap of the male dancer, flying back, as it were, into his original position at the opening of the ballet ? This, one would have sworn, was invented fdr Nijinsky, of whose dancing the wonderful power of elevation was the most remarkable attribute. It was also the perfect finish to the ballet, clinching the movement with a finality beside which the mere striding-back of the dancer to his place seemed feebly inconclusive. If the leap was some dancer's gloss upon M. Fokine's design, it was certainly inspired and -should have been retained.
L'Oiseau de Feu, which had become all mannerism and had lost the vitality of its ensembles because the corps de ballet went through their movements like so much drill without any meaning in a single kick, has wonderfully come to life again. Its naive grotesques may seem old-fashioned and crude in these days, but the spirit of a fairy-tale told with a child-like simplicity, which gave to the Russian Ballet when it really was Russian its charm and novelty, have been successfully recap- tured. Mme. Danilova is not, perhaps, able to portray all the elusiveness of the fluttering bird, but there is plenty of fire in her performance, and M. Massine suggests perfectly the rapt wonder of the enchanted Prince.
It is a pity that with such fine classical dancers as Mine. Danilova and, second to her, Mlle. Baronova in the company, Colonel de Basil has not seen fit to give us more of Tchaikovsky's ballets than the mere excerpts which constitute his abbreviated version of Le Lac des Cygnes and Le Mariage d'Aurore. If only in justice to his prima ballerina he ought to give us a complete Lac des Cygnes. I believe the response of the public, which has shown its appreciation of the performances at Sadler's Wells, would not disappoint him. Perhaps in a reversion to the old classics may lie the solution of his temporary diffi- culties, if he is to lose a large part of his repertory until a new choreographer comes along. He may be found in M. Lichine, whose Francesca da Rimini shows a promise that . was not
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