The Stuttgart Ballet (Birmingham Hippodrome) Royal Ballet (Covent Garden)
Forever adolescent
Sophie Constanti
When 'Germany's ballet miracle', as the Stuttgart Ballet used to be called, was a regular visitor to London back in the Sev- enties, balletomanes found their thrills in the Marcia Haydee and Richard Cragun partnership and via dancers such as Birgit Keil and Egon Madsen. At least, this is what people who saw the company in what was a more glorious phase — or perhaps haze — have told me. But New Yorker critic Arlene Croce, writing in 1969 on the occa- sion of the Stuttgart Ballet's first American season, described it as a 'modest little com- pany [which has now] got a great big head'. More than 20 years later, sobered by the death in 1973 of its founder, John Cranko, and obviously touched by that of MacMil- lan — whose Requiem and Song of the Earth made up the double bill performed during a brief visit to Birmingham's Hippo- drome — Stuttgart strikes one as a compa- ny which simply refuses to move on. Its dancers display all the worst mannerisms and clichés of that brand of European bal- let which favours wayward flexibility of the body over purity of line in motion and ir which mature men and women are ballet s forever-adolescent boys and girls. The exception is Cragun, now almost 50, who dances with the decent restraint and con- solidated expertise one might expect from a man his age. Stuttgart's younger dancers look blank. IY obedient, as if drilled to the point at which routine efficiency becomes more apparent than inspired response. This might explain why the performances of both ballets lacked any genuinely spiritual dimension. In Song of the Earth, which unfolds along- side Mahler's symphonic song arrangement of ancient poetry, only Benito Marcelino in the role of the Eternal and Annie Mayet, leading the Song of Farewell with partner Wolfgang Stollwitzer, managed to illumine MacMillan's choreographic tableaux.
While Marcelino, in particular, supplied a much-needed antidote to the airy insub- stantiality which infected the whole even- ing, Susanne Hanke embodied every irritating facet of the Stuttgart school: weight thrown back on the heels, a curious imbalance between the strength and mobil- ity of lower and upper body, and that facial expression of wide-eyed, soft-focus soppi- ness which seems to afflict so many balleri- nas and which we are expected to interpret as the sign of deep and meaningful artistic feeling. As for Haydee, her ill-advised appearance in Requiem's Pie Jesu solo — coy and ghoulish by turns — was an object lesson in how to shatter one's own sublime reputation in the space of a few minutes.
While Song of the Earth (1965) — often cited as one of MacMillan's masterworks — and Requiem — made on the Stuttgart Ballet in 1977 as a memorial to Cranko are undeniably important works, both are full of crass contortions and a flat but laboured register of emotions. However, MacMillan did move on to new ways of manipulating the body within a classical ballet format. What is less easy to ascertain Is whether the Stuttgart Ballet remains for- ever locked in that awful, inorganic, modern-dance-meets ballet hybrid which mixed Graham-style gestures with unrecon- structed pointe-work and floaty, broken- wristed armwork. Ninette de Valois often warned against the dilution of both modern dance and ballet fused together in this way. It sounded like stuffy conservatism, an irra- tional, xenophobic fear of the 'other'. Watching the Stuttgart Ballet you can't help but see her point.
And watching Checkmate, her 1937 ballet revived at Covent Garden, you understand the difference between that now horribly dated hybrid modernism and de Valois's vision of a modern identity for British bal- let. On the same triple bill as Checkmate is Balanchine's Prodigal Son (1929), another work in which the choreographer attempts to enlarge the possibilities of ballet from within rather than just tack on the new. Darcey Bussell as the Siren tempting Trek Mukhamedov in Prodigal Son and as the ruthless Black Queen in Checkmate, along With Adam Cooper as a Red Knight and David Bintley as the Red King murdered on the chessboard, enhanced the case for reviving these two works. As for the evening's centrepiece, Glen Tetley's La Ronde, made in 1987 and based on Arthur Schnitzler's cyclical tale of infi- delity and promiscuity in Vienna penned d. Imost a century before safe sex became an issue, I can think of no reason for keeping It alive. Not even Stuttgart deserves it.
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