D utch Treat
This is a company which has no neon-lit stars, is about twenty-four dancers strong, all of them well trained, with a clear, modest style and no mannerisms, impressive equally in their teamwork and versatility. The company's dis- tinctive character comes from its unusual blend- ing of classical ballet and modern dance. Previously attempts to do this have had the flavour and consistency of a singularly chalky cheese, but here, surprisingly, the mixture liquefied and occasionally proved as inflAm- rnable and bracing as a few nips of Holland's gin on a raw day.
Of the four choreographers shown three were American, refugees from that steamy New York dance jungle where there is currently so much more talent than their choreographic rat-race can permit to develop. But these three are no blind mice. The classicist among them is Benjamin Harkarvy, who is associate artistic director of the company together with the young Dutch choreographer Hans Van Manen. At his worst Harkarvy, who had three ballets in the repertory, showed a sort of bland competence going nowhere in particular but going there with a streaky stylishness. But in one work, Septet, to Saint-Sans music, he deployed with a rare choreographic sensibility a thinly traced odd- man-out theme of a solitary boy failing to find a girl to love him.
The other two Americans were both former Graham dancers. John Butler devised a superbly
sensuous ensemble piece to the belly-slapping, mediLeval gustiness• of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. Here some personal -extension of the Graham technique, excellently assimilated by the splendid digestive juices of the dancers, is used to sketch a cheerfully black ritual through which (forgive the anachronism) Dashwood monks and their doxies slide and slither with unmentionable beauty. The work for the soloists is superbly lean and lustrous, and if Butler's invention gets a bit more paunchily conventional in the main ensembles, Carmina Burana still suggests the presence of a major talent.
Perhaps Glen Tetley's conception of Schoen- berg's Pierrot Lunaire was even more worth while, certainly more daring. Crunching boldly, yet delicately, at one of the still trail-blazing 'scores of our grandfathers' time, Tetley has pro- vided a remarkable new commentary on the story of Pierrot. He draws a parallel, with judicious choreographic allusions, between Pier- rot and Petrushka. Brilliantly staged and per- formed, particularly by Tetley himself as the poetically aspiring Pierrot coming to terms with the sensual world that vilifies, him, Pierrot Lunaire provided a compelling experience. The fragmented polished dancing, Schoenberg's sprechstimme left unregarded by the choreo- graphy and sounding like the harsh, protesting voice of Pierrot himself, the strange physical violence and carnality misted over with an at- mosphere of art nouveau aestheticism, Schoen- berg's romanticism bursting out angrily into the open seas of free tonality, the suffering poet stripped of his identity by the cruelty he must learn to accept—the whole work shook together like a fantastically formal. black-and-white kaleidoscopic pattern.
CLIVE BARNES
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