Ballet
South Bank Revels
By CLIVE BARNES
LONDON'S Festival Ballet needs an enlightened millionaire, and the enlightenment would be as useful as the millions. For a commercial ballet company (so far as I know the only ballet company in the world that fundamentally is trying to make money rather than lose it) its standards are surprisingly high. Now a third of the way through its eight weeks' summer season at the Festival Hall, the company is obviously dancing better than usual, perhaps better than ever before. But the repertory is not original enough and as a result London's Festival Ballet has had rather less critical attention than it deserves.
The new ballet by Jack Carter at the opening of the season was admittedly unfortunate. Called Improvisations, and set to Aaron Copland's Salon Mexico and Danzon Cuban°, it was Jerome Robbins with a strong cockney accent. Boys wait under an archway in a mood of finger- clicking boredom; boys meet girls (nc" Ricans?) and have a ball. No one is raped or even knifed, and therein lies its most original aspect. It is a sort of tea-dance for delinquents. John Gilpin, in the unlikely guise of a teenage gang-leader, while clearly of the officer class and dancing like a rocket, for the most part looks somewhat askance at his subordinates. The whole company, particularly the men, dance fiat out to bring life to dance routines that are as dead as mutton.
Improvisations had as a motto printed on the programme: 'Where shall we go now what shall obliged, telling Anngtdhemindejeod many where of retothegoc riatoi cds
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precisely what to do. Yet inzprovisations had a certain professionalism. It was more a wrong-headed attempt to court popularity than anything else; bad, but not vicious beyond redemption. Although this got the company off on the wrong pirouette, it soon made up ground with the revival of Harald Lander 's Etudes. This. 15 ballet classroom set to music—Czerny music at that, freely adapted by Knudage Riisager, a couple of the' studies being given a twelve-tone treatment that causes the audience to cast sus" picious glances at the orchestra. Etudes is ri°t what the highest brows would call a great ballet' but it has dazzling moments where everything happens at once in- passages of dancing that seen' midway between a firework display and ,a cavalry charge. It was exuberantly and stylishlY 1, a ld danced, led either by Toni Lander, Gilpin Barry McGrath, or, as the alternative cast' Kirsten Petersen, Royes Fernandez and David Adams.
The rest of the season has so far been interest"
ing for a trimmed and improved version of last season's full-length Soviet ballet, The Sno: Maiden, a Bournonville divertissement andir, very variable batch of Fokine revivals, Pre° _f ably in death. of the twentieth anniversarY
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Bourmeister's Snow Maiden has been sub- jected to a snow plough and had some of the more repetitive drifts cleared away. The story of a.melting heroine is still more of a myth than a hit, yet the Russian national dances, given by the Company with surprising authority, win through, and the casting has been consistently better this season. The scenery has also been revised to its advantage, and although some of the lesser- known Tchaikovsky music deserves to be lesser known, the ballet as a whole is agreeable and even exhilarating. What has happened to Fokine's Petrushka Shouldn't have happened to a puppet, but Les SYlphides, Le Spectre de la Rose and Prince Igor are in a fair state of repair. Scheherazade has been most richly produced, with the Bakst scenery and costumes done up in a riot of oriental extrava- gance. Nowadays it seems impossible to remove a comic taste of harem scandals from the work.
Where Festival Ballet has been courageous is In clearing out the more obvious duds from its repertory. London Morning, Bonaparte a Nice and that kind of thing have gone. What is left is a bit solid, a bit unadventurous, yet for the most Part sound. And the company is dancing really Well, with a welcome show-biz vitality unknown elsewhere in British ballet. Short of acquiring its enlightened millionaire, it is difficult to see how things could be much better.
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