STAGE AND SCREEN
BALLET
The Pictorial Ballet
NARRATIVE or story-telling has always played an important—some critics think it a disproportionate—part in English painting. So it is not surprising that English choreographers should have found in it an exceptionally direct source of inspiration. Miss Ninette de Valois, in particular, has specialised in the use of themes suggested by English painters. The most important, if not the first, essay in this manner was Yob, which recreated in terms of living movement the mystic ecstasy of William Blake. Then the vigour and satire of Hogarth were transferred to the stage in Rake's Progress. Miss de Valois's latest ballet, produced at Sadler's Wells last week, is inspired by Rowlandson, although on this occasion the theme is not directly derived from any particular drawings.
At first sight, then, The Prospect Before Us might seem to be on a different footing from the two other ballets mentioned. But the Rowlandson element goes deeper than the mere reproduction in the costumes and scenery, so skilfully executed by Mr. Furse, of the draughtsman's characteristic style and colours. I have sug- gested elsewhere that there is a close relationship between the artist's representation of movement in painting and the choreo- grapher's selection of movements for the creation of a ballet. In default of space to develop the argument here I may, perhaps, refer the interested reader to the article on Ballet in the new volume of Grove's Dictionary. The point to our present pur- pose is that if the Ballet stopped at the reproduction of a painter's costumes and background, it would have got no farther than the tableau vivant in which the Duchess of Wilpshire represents her famous predecessor as painted by Gainsborough. The choreo- grapher goes beyond that and recreates the artist's sense of move- ment in the motions of the dancers, eliminating, so far as is possible, every pose or gesture that is irrelevant or contradictory to his individual style.
In this very difficult task Miss de Valois has again been- suc- cessful. But I do not rate her new ballet as highly as Rake's Progress. Its dramatic theme, the rivalry of two impresarios and the changing allegiance of the dancers to one or the other, is as true to life today as it was in the eighteenth century. But a mimed ballet needs to have its theme more clearly brought out than is done here. Moreover, one of the scenes, designed to por- tray the coarser side of Rowlandson's art, is merely gross. It lacks the satirical bite of the brothel-scene in Rake's Progress, and it is not funny. That aspect of the fine colourist and draughts- man might well have been left out of account. There is also rather too much of the back-stage element and too little real dancing. But there is—and it redeems all faults—a magnificent part for Mr. Helpmann, who is a master. equally of the romantic and the grotesque. Here he presents a caricature that from an inconspicuous beginning gradually grows to a point in a drunken burlesque of a ballerina that made the whole house rock. The music, by William Boyce, arranged and scored by Constant Lam- bert, will also contribute towards keeping the ballet in the
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