Edelkitsch

TELEVISION STUART HOOD

I must begin by declaring my lick of interest. In ballet, to be precise, which has always seemed to me to come—the bulk of it—under

the heading of Ede!kitsch, that splendid Ger- man term for high-class rubbish, under which,

once you have got the hang of the word, you can lump various types of architecture, of painting and of jewellery, together with the glossy magazines that peddle them. I find the music of romantic ballet in general trivial to a degree; the sentiments wrung from it by the performers correspondingly saccharine. That middle-aged ladies should cluster round the stage door for a glimpse of Rudolf is a sad side effect of the menopause; their daughters, screaming over the Beatles, are on about something More vital.

It was with some foreboding, therefore, that I turned on BBC l's Ten Teleballets, particu-

larly since one of them was billed as

Albertine—the kind of name I connect with romantic slush. However, I have always been

interested in the technical problems of choreography for the box and decided to risk it. I was surprised and delighted by what I saw. The teleballets were short, witty and in-

ventive. They used a wide range of techniques from still frames to electronic devices of con-

siderable sophistication—superimposed images, reversed phase to give the effect of a photo- graphic negative and so on._ In the best of them only one fixed camera was used, the ballet being composed within the rectangle of the screen—a technique first used, I seem to remember, by Swedish television in a version

of Sleeping Beauty. There was no attempt— it is one of the difficulties of televising ballet

—to follow the movements of the dancers. They performed within a framework which, by circumscription, gave their patterns of dance point and impact.

If one of the first eight, or nine fell below the level of the rest it was an exercise in that

type of erotic realism which was carried off

brilliantly by Jean-Luc Godard in Une Femme mariee but which has now become a clichd

of hairy chests, toying hands and carefully dis- ordered sheets. But this was as nothing to the main offering of the programme, Kenneth

MacMillan's Albertine, which exceeded my wildest fears, being a torrid piece of adolescent eroticism tricked out with every emotional commonplace and phoney sentiment in the whole corpus of ballet.

A dashing young officer. A demure pro- vincial girl. Heavily comic parents. Touching hands. Footy-footy. The young man pines to the point of suicide. The virgin arrives in the nick of time. Her nocturnal visits become

habit. They overindulge. The lady dies—as far as I could see from excess of orgasm. There follows a hilarious scene when the hero, lum- bered with a corpse in an advanced state of undress (she is the only heroine I have ever known to keep her shoes on when actually havine sex), wanders through the house look- ing for somewhere to dump it. Finding none, he quite sensibly pushes off into the night, clutching his cloak over his deshabille. The whole thing was calculated to corrupt balleto- manic- virgins in their thousands 1 would-not like to have it on my conscience. Fortunately I have to put alongside this mawkish pastiche the memory, from earlier on the same evening, of Carl Ebert in the last of the present series of Master Classes, re- hearsing young professionals in `La ci darem' and 'Rani, batti.' Walter Todds, in directing the programme, kept his camera work simple and straightforward. He was eavesdropping and therefore unobtrusive. It was remarkable to watch an elderly gentleman explain, in a brand of German English which would be judged caricature on the stage, the very essence of Mozart, to see him—using a mixture of mime, song and exposition—coax out of talented young performers nuances of musical and dramatic interpretation. His was a completely spontaneous performance, unselfconscious, un- rehearsed—the act of creation taking place before one's eyes.

As a postscript I must mention Twenty-Four Hours on the same evening. It had three moments of high comedy. Pat Sloan of the British Soviet Friendship Society (or whatever) arguing that Daniel and Sinyavsky had been jailed for smuggling. Fyfe Robertson persuad- ing consenting adults to spring mousetraps by blowing on them. And a most improbable American negro gentleman, who is apparently engaged in an attempt to reconcile Tshombe and Mobutu, out-Sellersing Sellers. As Robert McKenzie darkly said when the camera cut to him at the end : The plot thickens.'