Dance
The Royal Ballet (Covent Garden)
Balanchine act
Deirdre McMahon
Amonth ago the Birmingham Royal Ballet staged the company premiere of Balanchine's Symphony in Three Move- ments which was created for the legendary Stravinsky Festival in 1972. Now its sister company at Covent Garden has imported another Balanchine masterwork from the same festival, Stravinsky Violin Concerto. There has been a new Balanchine import during the last two seasons, Bugaku in 1988 and Rubies in 1989, but neither appears to have established much of a base in the repertory. When one remembers that staging a Balanchine work these days requires the services of a regisseur accre- dited to the Balanchine Trust, one wonders why Covent Garden goes to the trouble and expense in the first place. There are three points to be made about the Royal Ballet's attempts to establish a Balanchine core in its repertory. First, the company flicks through its Balanchine mail order catalogue without any sense of discri- mination as to the kind of ballet which will suit it. It shows a regrettable preference for the most difficult of all, what one might call the grittier, musically complex works like The Four Temperaments, Agon, Rubies and now Stravinsky Violin Concerto. The second point is that if the company persists in choosing these kinds of ballets and if the dancers are ever to feel comfortable in Balanchine choreography, there needs to be more consistent programming. In 1979 the company acquired Liebeslieder Walzer and Balanchine himself supervised the final rehearsals. It was the most beautiful of all the Royal's Balanchine works and the two casts surpassed themselves, but it was dropped after a few performances. Other Balanchine works such as Apollo, Serenade and Agon have been revived fitfully. The last revival of Ballet Imperial, the first Balanchine work the Royal ever staged, was a nightmare. The third point is that the Royal has of-ten greatly aggravated its problems with Balanchine's choreography by the choice of casting, and here Stravins- ky Violin Concerto is a good example of its modus operandi.
The Royal Ballet cherishes the simple notion that Balanchine choreography re- quires tall women and so I was not sur- prised to see Darcey Busse11 in the cast of Violin Concerto. There were certainly many tall girls in Balanchine's company but they were not recruited simply for their height. There were also the little matters of the technique, musical sensitivity and sheer physical energy demanded by Balanchine's choreography. Busse11 dances the role cre- ated for Karin von Aroldingen which is full of startling imagery in the pas de deux — the crablike backbends and the slow, sinuous cartwheel out of her partner's embrace. The pas de deux is intense, neurotic and self-absorbed. Busse11 is glas- sy and uncomprehending and her dancing is full of mannerisms such as her flapping hands, low sight-line and over- consciousness of the audience. She seems to put all her energy into stretching those long legs as far as possible. Perhaps she was trying to overcompensate for the deficiencies of her partner, Wayne Eagl- ing, whose crabbed, sloppy dancing is unwatchable. The second pas de deux, with Viviana Durante and Stuart Cassidy, was much better. When Durante performed Rubies last year, she looked a trifle distant and detached. In Violin Concerto her dancing was clear, unforced and musical, although rather underpowered in the first section.
Underpowered could also be the de- scription applied to the revival of Raymon- da Act Ill, Nureyev's sumptuous setting of Petipa's last great ballet. The variations in this ballet are, if anything, harder than those in The Sleeping Beauty and are full of exposed lines, multiple turns and tricky point work which test the soloists. This is where Petipa is so merciless with dancers. In the current revival the soloists were simply not up to scratch. All one saw were bobbing heads, wobbling turns and bumpy pointes. But at the heart of it was a radiant performance from the great Kirov star, Altynai Assylmuratova, the incarnation of style, beauty and wit. It is simply a privilege to see the way Assylmuratova illuminates the Petipa repertory, and audi- ences here are fortunate that she is now a regular guest of the Royal. I hope she doesn't get too pigeonholed in Petipa, however. It would have been fascinating to see her in Stravinsky Violin Concerto.
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