BALLET
Phoenix dances
CLEMENT CRISP
Once again Japan runs away with the week's superlatives: .41 single performance at the Albert Hall of Gagakit—the Imperial Dancers and Musicians—revealed an art of immemorial sophistication and beauty. Gagaku means 'elegant music' and the musi- cians are as elegant as their music, appearing first in chestnut robes to ravish our eyes as much as our ears by the dignity of their ex- ecution upon harp and flute, lute and drum. with the harsh, reedy tone of the hiehiriki, a primitive oboe, cutting through the ensemble. Grave and lovely music like this has formerly been the private delight of the Imperial Household; this first venture into the world suggests that, like all palace treasures long locked away, Gagaku is beyond price.
So too is Dugan. the dance section of the programme; the style is measured, relined. with broad gestures and formal foot-patterns which have a quite extraordinary cumulative force. A phoenix flies down and wishes long life to a T'ang Emperor; what more natural than to show this as a dance for four men whose every movement is expressive of serenity and a kind of decorous joy? An in- vocational dance from a Shinto ceremony finds its performer in the white robes of the Imperial Guards of the ninth century. and across a thousand years the ritual still seems potent. A great Chinese Prince goes to war in forbidding demon-mask and we see him stamping and posing, tremendous in battle. exultant in victory; Korean boatmen are impersonated, their way of punting evoked. in a style which has made an abstract and a ritual of Many diverse elements and turned them into a dance manner at once archaic and vital.
Leo Delibes also wrote elegant music, for an age that knew the perfect elegance of Worth's confections for the Empress Eugenie and her court, and his score for Cappelia is still exquisitely pretty. On 25 May Cappelli' celebrated her hundredth birthday at Richmond, improbably enough. where Ballet for All rev ived a major part of the old Paris Opera version, which is so much to be preferred in its delicacy and charm to the rigid Petipa /Cecchetti pro- duction that the Royal Ballet maintains. The beautiful original costumes have been lov- ingly recreated (they make the Covent Gar- den dresses look like plastic lampshades) and the whole entertainment does an excellent job in putting Coppefia into its right artistic perspective. With NoeIle Christian from Paris as a light and winning Swanilda and Yvonne Cartier all femininity as the travesty Frantz, Coppelia in this French style looks good for another hundred years.
One cannot appiy the phrase 'elegant music' to the I ondon Contemporary Dance season currently at The Place. since too many Modern Dance scores serve only as background accompaniment of the most depressing kind But the company is lively and venturesome, dedicated to showing established contemporary works and to
creating a generation of native choreographers. The first prog,a—ri-e paid due tribu'e to the genius loci. Martha Graham, by opening with her El Penitente, where a naiveté of means exactly catches the penitential rites of Mexican Indians. It is a piece of considerable power; simple actions carry an extraordinary weight which hill's at older faiths and stranger rituals and, in the central role of the Penitent. William Louther is superbly expressive. Mr Louther's own new ballet, a frolic about the signs of the zodiac, left me cold, but the final scene of Robert Cohan's Cell is required viewing. A flickering light tricks our retinas into seeing movement as a sequence of frozen poses; Robert Powell is caught in a succession of agonised moments, white bricks hurtle in slow-motion down upon him and he tries to make them into a wall between himself and the light. It is nightmarish, and beautiful.
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