Malevolence
BALLET CLEMENT CRISP
The benevolence called for at the Royal Ballet's annual gala is intended for dancers who have fallen on hard times, though not the sort of hard times that Fonteyn and Nureyev fall on in Roland Petit's Paradise Lost, and this will, I hope, excuse my lack of benevolence towards a novelty that I find almost totally insupport- able. Paradise Lost is a marvelously packaged bore; under its cunning wrappings of pop decor and neon lights, its ticking, tinkling score, and the effulgent temperament of its stars, it is a shallow exercise in cleverness, unthinkable as anything but a piece d'occasion or—more prob- ably—as a vehicle in which Fonteyn and Nureyev will drive packed auditoriums into frenzies of delight on the forthcoming Ameri- can tour.
It looks expensive, glossy, and more than a little vulgar, but like all Petit's ballets it is effi- cient theatre. From his earliest creations for the Champs Elysees Company immediately after the war, Petit showed himself a master crafts- man and a consummate showman, in works more remarkable for style than choreographic content. Just so with Paradise Lost. which has all the trappings of today's—or possibly yester- day's—novelties; the designer, Martial Raysse, is all for having fun with neon, so Adam is born from a neon egg after a flashing count- down, and first seen as a glowing neon-lit shape at the back of the stage. Thereafter, the action —Adam in the world, Eve's birth, the tempta- tion and the Fall—is shown in those bright theatrical terms that substitute sensationalism for sensitivity, triviality for insight. Adam wears hipster tights and braces, Eve a PVC mini-tunic; Temptation is five boys who form a purple track-suited centipede, and the drama is seen as a series of gymnastic adagio acts more remarkable for the ingenious manhandling of the protagonists than for any persuasive de- velopment. It is not so much The Fall as a nasty tumble.
Yet the first half of the ballet, a lengthy pas de deux for Fonteyn and Nureyev, is in part redeemed by the interest that Petit has evidently found in exploring the possibilities of Nureyev's dance style; he has invented movement for Adam that has real power and excitement, which Nureyev displays superbly well. But with the introduction of a large corps de ballet after Nureyev has done one of his running circuits a the stage and dived through a gigantic female Mouth that forms part of the back-cloth (a lovely moment in art, this!), the higher bore- dom sets in. Petit has never, in my experience, shown much taste for crowd work, and here the corps de ballet grovel and couple and have a high old time rolling Nureyev over them like an animated escalator in routines that are just that. Throughout the evening Fonteyn dances cleanly but never seems as fully stretched, emo- tionally or technically, as Nureyev; at the end
she is found supporting the fallen Adam, his body plunged downward on her, looking at him as who should say 'and where do we go from here?'
The answer presumably is 'on the American tour.' As a skilful piece of showmanship Para- dise Lost is a success, but if these are the terms on which a repertory is built, then heaven help the Royal Ballet. This piece is so closely tailored to the requirements of its stars that alternative casting seems unlikely, and to aver, as its en- thusiasts do, that this particular brand of ephemeral modernity is needed at the Opera House is to mistake form for substance. Song of the Earth (happily back in the repertory later this month) is a great modern ballet which shows that dancing can express the noblest matters of human experience urgently and beautifully in contemporary terms. What Para-
dise Lost does is to cheapen dancing, com- pound it with every modish trick that a showman can devise, and leave little more behind than the memory of a neon flash.
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