ARTS
Dance
Symphonic Variations Galanteries (Royal Opera House)
Power and personality
Julie Kavanagh ymphonic Variations is the ballet Frederick Ashton never lets out of his sight. There are requests for it from all over the world but he won't let it go. To anybody. Even the Royal Ballet has had to earn the right to perform it (it was last done in 1981); Ashton has been waiting for the ideal cast — a perfect sextet. And now that Symphonic has been restored to the rep, it's almost as if the master has con- ferred his blessing on the company, tacitly conceding that having weathered some bad times, the Royal Ballet is back on form again.
And is it? Certainly the two casts I saw had been impeccably drilled — thanks to the welcome return of Michael Somes and move in one body as they're intended to. So attuned were both pairs of side girls (Wendy Ellis and Karen Paisey; Fiona Chadwick and Ravenna Tucker) that their fleet backward diagonal duet had a touch of humour about it that you often get with movement in strict unison, like the dance of the Cygnets or of the two little girls in Les Biches. A couple of the boys were not yet up to the ballet's technical challenge: Mark Silver flagged towards the end hardly surprising considering he had just performed 'Oberon; and David Peden appeared to lose his nerve before the fiendish renversE pirouettes. But all in all the dancers pulled it off, though there was an edginess about them — like horses a-quiver at the starting line — that presum- ably will disappear with further perform- ances. It will be interesting to see whether lovely ebony-haired Cynthia Harvey, the company's imported star, will mellow into the Fonteyn role. Her execution of the choreography is almost faultless (almost, because she cheats a little on the terre terre steps by not putting her heels down, the American way) but so far she lacks the aura to breathe meaning into a slow port de bras or make a passage of stillness elo- quent.
Although Symphonic Variations is sup- posedly abstract, an inspired enactment of Cesar Franck's score, it nevertheless is charged with feeling. In fact it has the most emotive impact of any ballet I know, capable virtually of entrancing you with its powerful beatific atmosphere. It's temp- ting to attribute its effect to the mystical content submerged beneath the surface, except that hardly anything remains of Ashton's elaborate libretto' with its allu- sions to St John of the Cross and other texts. Aware that post-war ballet had become 'anti-God if you like', too remote from its classical origins and too literary, Ashton took it on himself to strip the dance down to its very essence. Now only ghosts of his ideas remain. His original opening in winter still makes itself felt by a sense of dormancy on stage: the three women screened purdah-like by their outstretched arms, only start to dance with the arrival of the man — like Eliot's dull roots stirred by spring rain.
Although also abstract, there is even something elusively Romantic about Sophie Fedorovitch's design. I read some- where that the geometric black lines were inspired by the outline of telegraph wires against her beloved Norfolk moors and that the fluorescent green wash of the backcloth reproduces the colour of a sunlit glade that she and Ashton saw together. So perhaps it's not too fanciful to imagine that a pantheistic glow infuses her work however subconsciously — in the way that the seasonal cycle and celebration of re- quited love subliminally illumines Ashton's choreography.
Because of its neo-classical, pure dance content, Symphonic Variations is consi- dered to he Ashton's most Balanchinean 'Poor Jeffrey has Parkinson's disease.' work (and for that reason has been given a coals to Newcastle cold-shouldering in America). In fact Ashton had not seen a Balanchine ballet when he made Sympho- nic and although working towards the same end — i.e. a glorification of dance for its own sake — each had a quite different outlook: Balanchine repudiated emotion whereas Ashton 'can't help it'. Symphonic is imprinted throughout with Ashton's signature — it couldn't be by anyone else, any more than Symphony in C could be anyone's but Balanchine's. Galanteries, on the other hand, David Bintley's new work, has an anonymity about it which ultimately lets it down. The ballet is cast in a similar mould, being a plotless realisation of a Mozart Divertimento and Serenade and acknowledges its debt to Balanchine and Ashton in several familiar motifs which Bintley absorbs into a kind of classical melting-pot. The result is certainly pleas- ing, with exquisitely crafted dances tailor- made for each performer, but would have been much more so if Bintley had allowed his own personality to shape the move- ment.
The most memorable sections of the ballet are the most individual. Bintley's particular gift is as a demi-character choreographer and this showed itself in a pas de trois which playfully hinted at courtly origins. There is also a splendidly quirky solo based on fast-changing croise positions which needed Bruce Sansom's clear Cecchetti delineation of the steps to bring out its wit. David Peden in the second cast, tended to smudge the effect, turning it into more of a hoppety-skip on spot. This solo also made the most interest- ing use of the music. Alfred Brendel has warned against reducing Mozart to Schu- mann's 'floating Greek gracefulness' or Wagner's 'genius of light and love' and Galanteries tends to take Mozart at face value rather than exploring latent possibili- ties in the score. The repetitions especially are taken too literally at times. Such a rigid account of the music demands flawless performances: when Gail Taphouse and Phillip Broomhead, through some tug-of- war partnering, failed to give the slow pas de deux the unbroken singing line that Deidre Eyden and Jonathan Cope had achieved on the first night, you saw the onus on the dancers to be instruments in perfect accord.
Bintley seems to intend his design to evoke sequestered depths in the music -- otherwise why else would Mozart's colour be belied by the monotone pencil-shading of Jan Blake's backdrop and uniform grey costumes? But the idea doesn't come off: the design is visually at odds with the upbeat mood of the dance — especially those puritanical dresses which induce a feeling of gloom, I think because they remind me of Anastasia's sanatorium cos- tume. A pity Bintley didn't take his cue from Busoni, who compared Mozart's melodiousness shimmering through his compositions to the outline of a woman `through the folds of a thin dress'.
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