Ballet
The Classical Mr. Robbins
By CLIVE BARNES I say more like Swan Lake. Anyone who has seen N.Y. Export, Op. Jazz will perhaps take that with a pinch of salt, but my point is that Robbins is simply working in the medium of ballet. His genius lies in extending frontiers, not in wilfully crossing them. N.Y. Export, which ends his second programme at the Saville, is first a fascinating dance spectacle, owing every- thing except certain details of its colloquial dance vocabulary to classical ballet. It is, of course, also a picture of America's shook-up generation, and its neurotic, rat-racing pulse gives it a general relevance to our times. Any hack could make a moderately effective ballet using jazz- dancing and, given a cast such as Robbins has here assembled and Ben Shahn's vigorously evocative backdrops, it would have a certain obvious impact. Robbins has the vision, inven- tiveness and classical tradition to transform these elements into an original work of art In N.Y. Export, for all its classical structure, Robbins is using the newly emergent American character dancing (much as in Swan Lake you get Polish and Hungarian national dances), but his second programme opens with a pure classi- cal ballet, Interplay. Created in 1945, its music is a tepid but catchy swing score by Morton Gould. The serious use of such music was in its time an innovation, as were the stylised sweaters, smocks and tights devised by Irene Sharaff for costumes. Interplay set the pattern for dozens of imitations, all seizing on the superficially cute contrast between classical ballet and swing, and all missing the brilliant quality of Robbins's imagination that gave that contrast its savour. Interplay was also the first ballet to exploit the flip and zip of the American classical style, its informality, irreverent humour and casual beauty. It calls for eight virtuoso dancers, and London has seen it better performed than by Robbins's present company, although Susan Borree is a honey in the pas de deux.
The company as a whole is better suited to Robbins's second classical revival, The Cage, not seen here since New York City Ballet's visit in 1952, and now vividly given with a cast led by Veronika Mlakar, Glen Tetley and Jamie Bauer. The ballet itself remains as compulsively nasty as ever. Ostensibly it is a picture of sexual life in the insect world, concerned with 'the phe- nomenon of the female of the species consider- ing the male as prey'; but the obviously anthropomorphic sexual writhings underline the programme note's coy claim that such a phe- nomenon is not unknown 'even in our own mythology.' This reduction of the clean-limbed, all-American girl to a bloodsucking harpy may or may not be a valid comment on the amazonian American matriarchy. But it makes a nattily sensational ballet, and its cynical modernist twist to the second act of Giselle will give a shrewd frisson to all but the ultra-sophisticated, while the mixture of Fabre and Freud provides an ob- ject lesson of what happens to little boys who play around with big girls. What prevents it from sinking to the level of the more suggestive scenas of the Folies Bergere is Robbins's cunning use of Stravinsky's String Concerto in D, which might have been written for these insectile couplings, and his strident choreographic images. The basic image of the hungry, preying female —head back, open mouth squealing in triumph, arms thrown out with thumb pointing palm held downwards, and legs moving like a berserk drum-majorette—is terrifying, while the sinister love duet for the novice killer and her victim has a strange, black beauty; but the whole ballet loses much by over-emphasis and repetition.
Even in The Cage, however, the qualities of Robbins are apparent. His integrity, imagination, involvement and theatricality are not new to ballet, but together and in such abundance they have a new look. It would be only too easy to stamp him with explosive adjectives and then parcel him off to limbo as a man with no more relevance to modern ballet than, say, Menotti has to modern opera or Bernstein to modern music, both of whom have been associated with him. Robbins, the solid classicist, the square peg now causing a sensation by fitting into a round hole, is more durable, and has it in him to in- fluence the whole art.
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