BALLET

A Corps of Ballets

pICKING, one's way through the ballet thickets (on one memorable Sunday recently I calcu- late that more than 20,000 Londoners went to the ballet), what stands out? Certainly the sweet

promise of a couple of kids graduating in the Royal Ballet School performance and dancing

Ashton's Two Pigeons at Covent Garden. Leslie

Collier and Graham Powell are names that will obviously become well-worn in British ballet, par- ticularly that of the young, brash Powell, who at sixteen already possesses one of the two or three surest techniques in British ballet. And one 'imagined that Wales produced only singers!

Of Festival Ballet's lavish Swan Lake at the New Victoria Theatre, which is delighting its

fans, little need be said, except perhaps a word about the Hungarian, Zsuzsa Kun, whose finely dramatic dancing has shone out like a beacon.

Strangely enough, however, the two most im- portant events have both, to some extent, been failures—Norman Morrice's new ballet, and

Kazyan Goleizovsky's Scriabiniana for the dancers of the Bolshoi Ballet, still perched on their shelf at the Royal Festival Hall.

Morrice's The Realms of Choice is a puzzling work. It was intended as an experiment. The

experiment has been called 'aleatory,' linking it with the current musical fashion of 'composition by chance,' but, in fact, it was no such Thing.

It was much more sophisticated and much less in- teresting. The normal procedure for ballet-making falls into a fairly rigid pattern. Sometimes the company director, more often the choreographer, has an idea for a ballet. He either commissions a new score or chooses existing music. Finally a designer is commissioned to help realise the ballet on. stage. The Ballet Rambert has ques- tioned this procedure. Why, the idea runs, should the choreographer have it all his own way?

Therefore, in The Realms of Choice the first move came from the designer, Nadine Baylis,

who created scenery, costumes and props as the fancy took her. These were solemnly handed over to a composer, Leonard Salzedo, who was

asked to write a score inspired by these designs

(Are composers much affected by visual stimuli of this kind? Oh well, no matter, Mr. Salzedo complied), and the whole boiling'was passed on to the choreographer, Mr. Morrice, who then had, abracadabra, to make a ballet, Presumably this challenge might have so stimulated Morrice that a work of genius would have resulted— but I doubt it. The only advantage this way of making a ballet offers is that it administers a sharp, eleventh-hour shock to a choreographer, who then has to get on with it. But the dis- advantages are enormous. One could say to a novelist: look, I have 'this most attractive dust- cover, a very good, solid binding, 267 blank pages, do you mind running us up something to fit? A masterpiece could result. But why run a race in handcuffs?

Morrice's ballet is, perhaps understandably but not comprehensibly, obscure. It appears to make the point that we are all faced with various choices in our lives, and from the outcome of those choices might come our character. But it is also concerned with the fate of the non- conformist, a man who refuses to accept the choice, or role, society places before him. The theme is not a bad one, and the choreography has moments of real illumination. But style and content never merge, so that what Morrice is trying to do, and the way he is trying to do it, can both be watched, even admired, but diverge.

What, I wonder; would they make of The Realms of Choice in Russia? It certainly is not the most direct of works. The contrast between aesthetic experiments east and west was em- phasised by the production of Goleizovsky's Scriabiniana. Goleizovsky has for long occupied a curious niche in ballet history, for soon after the Soviet revolution he had a considerable in- fluence upon the young George Balanchine, before he came to the West. At that time Goleizovsky was the leading avant-garde choreo- grapher. Revolution was in the air—artistic as well as social—and Goleizovsky was obviously a child of that heady time. During the long, cold years of Stalin, he fell into disgrace, but now, as an old man in his seventies, his reputation has been rehabilitated and in 1962 he was in- vited to create a new ballet for the Bolshoi. He choreographed Scriabiniana.

When this series of plotless dance studies starts, and there are these two contrasted and opposed pas de deux weaving and threading around each other, it seems momentarily as though a •miracle has occurred, and Goleizovsky (the great martyr of Soviet choreography) is a neglected genius. The hope persists for some minutes, then the full banality of the ballet becomes more and more apparent. It was wonderfully danced—but this is the least we ex- pect from the Bolshoi.

The sentimental sadness of the failure of Scriabiniana needs to be disregarded, and its choreography assessed alongside Morriee's Realms of ,Choice, also a failure, but more per- haps of method than anything else, and a work of true originality in comparison with the Soviet ballet. It has for long been the wryly accurate gibe that we in the West have choreo- graphy as a substitute for dancers. But, looking at the rise of our western dancers (sixteen-year- old Graham Powell would look no slouch with the Bolshoi), one wonders when, or, in humility, if, the break-even point will eventually be passed —in our favour.

CLIVE BARNES