BALLET
THE Ballet Workshop's present programme is its tenth and also its best to date. This is not surprising, for two of the four items are choreographed by Walter Gore and a third by Michael Charnley.
The fourth, with which the programme opened, was the only poor work of the evening. It is a masque, Venus and the Bridegroom, to a " book " by Ashley Dukes, and is a subject which, by virtue of achievement, the French may rightly consider their own particular property. In anyone else's hands the theme—a bridal night—easily becomes a clumsy and vulgar affair.'
Paula. Hinton and Walter Gore, excellently suited to the title roles, danced. the latter's Tancredi and Clorinda. Gore is one of our few first-class choreographers, but in this instance he set himself an insurmountable problem from the start by allowing the narration to set the tempo of the choreography. The result was inevitable —too much "filling-in," and the whole movement so slowed down that dramatic and balletic effects were halved. It would be nice to see this work rearranged and danced free of the narration, for Gore's composition is by far the best and most imaginative of those already produced on this theme by Tasso. Gore's second ballet, the gay and charming Hoops, was vividly danced by members of the London Theatre Ballet headed by Domini Callaghan and Michel • de Lutry. It is so decisively and compactly composed that the tiny stage appeared to afford adequate space to the dancers. Only the eighth movement seemed to drag a little. It would be an improve- ment if this could be shortened or even perhaps cut.
Michael Charnley was the sole performer in his new work, Trio for One. It is not as interesting as his No Lips of Comfort, but all the same it contains some original "pas" in the modern idiom. LILLIAN BROWSE.
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